Cisco MDS 9000 and EMC XtremIO Flash Arrays

Mark Allen September 2015

Building Best-of-Breed Storage Solutions

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Evolution: A process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state*

•  * Merriam-Webster definition

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Spinning disk has been the standard for Data Center storage for decades

•  Performance and speed have increased while cost has decreased

The introduction of Flash storage is revolutionizing Data Center storage •  Dramatic increases in performance over spinning disk •  Reduced cost of ownership makes flash a more competitive storage choice •  Increased functionality to meet Enterprise needs

Evolution of Storage

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Why Flash Storage?

•  Application Responsiveness

•  Increased Virtualization

•  Reducing Performance Gap

•  Flash Storage increases performance for random and sequential data access

•  Data Deduplication uses storage more efficiently

•  Flash Storage provides consistent performance as well as benefits in power and space

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•  Scale Out Architectures •  High Availability and Reliability •  Multi-tenancy support •  Simplicity of Management

Cisco Storage Networking and EMC XtremIO Flash Arrays Synergy of Solutions

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5-120TB Based on 10 & 20 TB X-Bricks

150K MIXED IOPS 250K READ IOPS <1MS LATENCY

900K MIXED IOPS 1.5M READ IOPS <1MS LATENCY

•  Designed for Scalable growth for new or existing deployments

•  Linear performance growth

•  Consistent latency

XtremIO Scale Out Architecture

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Non-oversubscribed Line Rate 16 Gbps Ports

MDS 9148S

MDS 9396S

MDS 9706 MDS 9710

12 - 48

48 - 384 •  Scalable Solutions for different sized deployments

•  Line rate performance with no over-subscription

•  Consistent, Predictable performance

Cisco MDS Scale Out Architecture

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Crossbar Switch with Central Arbitration

Ingress

Egress

Crossbar

Control and Scheduling

Cisco MDS Architecture

•  Crossbar establishes a temporary connection between input and output port for duration of the frame exchange

•  Frames are not transmitted unless there is an available path

•  Scheduler uses arbiter grants to provide traffic fairness and QoS

•  Virtual Output Queues used to eliminate HOL blocking

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Fabric

Crossbar Switch Fabric

Fabric

Crossbar Switch Fabric

Fabric

Crossbar Switch Fabric

•  Frames always follow same logic – ingress to egress (consistent switching latency)

•  Newer generation line cards use fewer components compared to first generation line cards, however, the frame forwarding logic is the same

Sup Central Arbiter

Egress Access Control and QoS Forwarding and Load balancing

Inter VSAN Routing

Sup Central Arbiter

Cisco MDS Frame Flow

MAC Port Type / Modes: •  F_Port •  Loop port (FL_Port) •  ISL (E_Port) •  EISL (TE_Port) •  SPAN Port (SD_Port)

PHY / MAC Forwarding

Queuing

PHY Optical to Electrical interface: •  SFP+ (2/4/8/10/16 Gbps)

Error Checking Timestamp

VSAN Header

Linecard

Access Control Forwarding and Load balancing

Inter VSAN Routing Interface Statistics

Buffering and Virtual Output Queues QoS

Arbitration Requests

Redundant Arbiters

Transmit, loopback or Expire frame Remove VSAN header (end device) or prepend

EISL header (EISL to Cisco switch) Redundant crossbar fabrics

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FC, FCoE Modules

Cisco MDS 9700 - Designed for Scale 1

2

3

4

5

6

Host Ports

Number of Fabric Cards FC Bandwidth per Slot FCoE Bandwidth per Slot

1 256 Gbps 220 Gbps

2 512 Gbps 440 Gbps

3 768 Gbps 660 Gbps

4 1024 Gbps 880 Gbps

5 1280 Gbps 1100 Gbps

6 1536 Gbps 1320 Gbps

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•  Disk Array Enclosure (DAE): •  13 or 25 eMLC SSDs •  Two redundant power supply units (PSUs) •  Two redundant SAS interconnect modules

•  One Battery Backup Unit

•  Two 1U Storage Controllers: •  Two redundant Power Supply Units

(PSUs) •  Two 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) ports •  Two 10GbE iSCSI ports •  Two 40Gb/s InfiniBand ports

EMC XtremIO X-Brick High Availability

Disk Array Enclosure (DAE)

Storage Controller

Storage Controller

Battery Backup Unit

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•  Grid Redundant Power Supplies •  Two (MDS 9148S, MDS 9396S) •  Four (MDS 9706) •  Eight (MDS 9710)

•  Redundant Fan Modules •  Two (MDS 9148S, MDS 9396S) •  Three multi-fan (MDS 9706, MDS 9710)

•  Redundant Supervisors (MDS 9706, MDS 9710)

Cisco MDS High Availability MDS 9148S

MDS 9396S

MDS 9706

MDS 9710

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High Availability extended beyond the physical switch

• MDS Port Channels reduce failure domains by allowing ISLs to be spread over:

•  Different Line Cards •  Different ASICs •  Different Port-groups

• Scalable - Up to 16 ISL per Port Channel, up to 16 Port Channels between switches

• Flexible – add ports and/or Port Channels as needed

MDS PortChannels

Cisco MDS 9000 Port Channels – Fabric High Availability

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•  Low data protection capacity overhead of 8%

•  Automatic rebuild in case of drive failure

•  Incoming Data Protection Robustness

•  Administrative ease through fail-in-place support

EMC XtremIO Data Protection (XDP)

Capacity Utilization

Superior Protection

High Performance

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Cisco MDS 9000 Fabric Protection CRC Detection and 16 Gbps FC Forward Error Correction (FEC)

Ingress CRC

checking

Internal CRC

checking

Forward Error

Correction

Drop frame

Drop frame

•  Faulty equipment, loose SFPs, dirty or damaged cables, can result in packets getting corrupted

•  CRC Checking drops corrupted frames from end devices or internally corrupted frames

•  FEC corrects frames corrupted in-flight to preserve frames

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Snapshots can be used to allow simultaneous Development and Operations (DevOps)

•  Leverages content-aware capabilities of the system (Inline Data Reduction)

•  Unique metadata tree structure directs I/O to the right timestamp of the data

•  Metadata shared between all snapshot blocks that have not been changed from the snapshot's original ancestor

EMC XtremIO Multi-tenancy

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Option to use QoS within SAN for multi-tenancy •  User defined QoS values •  Allows different application to have different priority

(ie Development/Test vs. Production)

Cisco MDS QoS - Multi-tenancy within the SAN

B A

C C C C B A C C C C C A C B

ARB

Input port

Output Port

Output Port

Output Port

DWRR Weight Priority Absolute

Queue 2 60 Queue 3 10 Queue 4 30

Application “A”

Application “B”

Application “C”

DWRR Weight Priority Absolute

Queue 2 70 Queue 3 20 Queue 4 10

DWRR Weight Priority Absolute

Queue 2 55 Queue 3 30 Queue 4 15

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Virtualization for SANs •  SAN islands virtualized onto common physical SAN •  Ports allocated within a physical fabric to create

virtual fabrics •  Fabric disruption is limited to VSAN

VSANs provide •  Dynamic provisioning and resizing •  Improved port utilization •  Non-disruptive reassignment •  Shared ISL bandwidth

Cisco MDS VSANs for Virtualization

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VSAN 30 VSAN 31

VSAN 20 VSAN 21

VSAN 10 VSAN 11

Using VSANs to Provide Multi-tenancy

Application “A”

Application “B”

Application “C”

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XtremIO Provisioning removes steps from the typical process

•  Minimum planning No RAID configuration Minimal sizing effort for cloning/snapshots

•  No tiering Single tier, all-flash array

•  No performance tuning Independent of I/O access pattern, cache hit rates, tiering decisions, etc.

EMC XtremIO Ease of Management

Step 1: Create

Volumes

Step 2: Map

Volumes

Step 3: Create Initator Groups

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Create fewer zones at an application level or physical/cluster level

Cisco MDS 9000 Ease of Management - Smart Zoning

Smart Zoning: •  Simplicity of multi-member zones •  Internal efficiency of one-to-one

12 x I 2 x T

I

I

I I

I

I

I

I

I

T

T

I I

I Multi-member zones: •  What you want •  What you get

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Smart Zoning: Configuration Example Smart Zoning: Requires only 1 zone with 12 hosts and 2 X-Brick pwwns. Zoneset name Smart-VDI vsan 200

zone name x-brick1 vsan 200 pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:01 initiator pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:02 initiator pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:03 initiator pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:04 initiator . . pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:12 initiator pwwn 25:20:20:20:20:20:20:01 target pwwn 25:20:20:20:20:20:20:02 target

Adding another VDI cluster would require adding the new X-Brick ports and new hosts to the existing zone or adding the 2 new X-Brick pwwns to the first zone and creating one additional zone with all 4 X-Brick ports together with the new hosts..

Traditional Zoning: (Requires 24 two-member zones) Zoneset name VDI vsan 100

zone name host1-x-brick1a vsan 100 pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:01 pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:01

zone name host1-x-brick1b vsan 100 pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:01 pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:02

zone name host2-x-brick1a vsan 100 pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:02 pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:01

zone name host2-x-brick1b vsan 100 pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:02 pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:02

. . zone name host12-x-brick1a vsan 100

pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:12 pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:01

zone name host12-x-brick1b vsan 100 pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:12 pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:02

Adding another VDI cluster would require an additional 72 zones to be configured per fabric.

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EMC XtremIO Flash Arrays and Cisco MDS Switches and Directors •  Industry leading technologies and features

•  Combined provides a greater solution (1 + 1 = 3)

•  Fully Qualified by both EMC and Cisco

Summary

Thank you.