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Accelerate Application Performance with the Cisco UCS Invicta Series

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© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2

Contents

What You Will Learn ......................................................................................... 3

Introduction ..................................................................................................... 3

Transforming the Business with Cisco UCS Invicta Series ................................ 4

Flash-Memory Technology and SSDs .............................................................. 5

Addressing the Widening Performance Gap ......................................................... 5Compelling Advantages of SSDs and Cisco UCS Invicta Series ........................... 6Accelerating Critical Workloads............................................................................. 7

Cisco UCS Invicta Series ................................................................................. 8

Cisco UCS Invicta OS ........................................................................................... 8Solid-State Memory as a Unified and Pooled Resource ....................................... 9Bringing Data Acceleration to the Computing Domain .......................................... 10High-Performance, Multiworkload, and Multitenant Capabilities ........................... 10

Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 12

Learn More ...................................................................................................... 12

Accelerate Application Performance with the Cisco UCS Invicta SeriesJanuary 2014


White PaperApril 2014

Accelerate Application Performance with the Cisco UCS Invicta Series

What You Will LearnCisco UCS Invicta™ Series Solid-State Systems provide dramatic application acceleration for a variety of demanding workloads. Delivering solid-state memory as a unified and pooled resource, these systems bring flexible acceleration to the computing domain, helping transform the business and create competitive advantage.

IntroductionModern data centers are undergoing rapid transformation, propelled by the need to deliver more real-time capabilities to their customers, support cloud-based business models, and reduce time to value for the business with increasingly reduced resources. In addition, the dramatic growth in the volume of digital content and the Internet of Everything (IoE) is propelling the proliferation of big data and real-time analytics beyond all expectations. Organizations must respond by transacting, processing, and analyzing more quickly—requiring applications to have faster response times and creating demands that often outpace the capabilities of traditional server and storage architecture.

Flash-memory technology in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs) has been seen by many as a compelling and promising advancement that can help accelerate both storage and computing architecture. Unfortunately, the considerable promise of SSDs is often not achieved because they are deployed within traditional architecture that limits their effectiveness across the data center as a whole. The time has come to move beyond adding SSDs to hard-disk-drive (HDD)–based storage systems, or even to individual computing platforms, and instead to deploy flash-memory technology as a fundamental component of a unified data center fabric.

To bridge the gap between the increased application performance demands of servers and the performance that traditional storage systems can deliver requires solid-state memory systems placed closer to the application. With the acquisition of WHIPTAIL, Cisco is now able to enhance the successful Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) platform by moving solid-state memory into the computing



domain. In addition to addressing demanding workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), databases, and analytics, solid-state memory promises to extract even faster answers from big data deployments—all while saving money and precious data center space, power, and cooling resources. With Cisco’s unified systems-based approach, application performance can move to a new, higher level, increasing efficiency and return on investment (ROI) and transforming business operations.

Transforming the Business with Cisco UCS Invicta SeriesWhat could you do with faster applications or faster answers to critical questions? These questions are important in an economic environment in which getting faster answers and making better and faster business decisions are crucial to success and survival. Increasingly, workload performance determines the speed of business, and for many organizations, better application performance can have diverse and potentially profound implications, including the capability to:

• Simplify management and save costs by consolidating servers and databases

• Run more virtual desktops without provisioning additional resources by optimizing VDI deployments

• Consolidate high-performance applications by running big data applications alongside relational databases without requiring multiple platforms

• Transform time-consuming batch processes into real-time, reducing time to value and improving decision making

With a unique approach interconnected by a unified fabric, Cisco UCS has been successfully delivering real results in exactly these areas. Cisco UCS combines computing, networking, management, and virtualization in a high-performance, scale-out solution that delivers leading application performance, improved economics, and real IT innovation. As application demands increase, both computing and I/O operating performance become more critical, creating a need for solid-state memory that is integrated directly into the fabric of the computing domain.

The Cisco UCS Invicta Series brings dramatically faster I/O into the computing domain, closer to the application. The resulting integrated system delivers real-time responsiveness for I/O-intensive applications and allows organizations to simplify data center environments to transact, process, and analyze more data into business intelligence in less time, leading to significant operational and strategic advantages, including:

• Workload acceleration through faster I/O, higher bandwidth, and lower latency

• Data reduction through elimination of redundant data and more efficient storage utilization

• Greater data center efficiency through reduced consumption of energy, floor space, and management resources compared to performance-optimized HDD technology

More than incremental improvements, Cisco UCS Invicta Series offers the ability to quickly define and redefine infrastructure to support real-time decision making,



empowering organizations to capitalize on opportunities that can move their business forward faster and create competitive advantage.

Flash-Memory Technology and SSDsSolid-state memory and SSDs offer the unique capability to transform data center infrastructure and the businesses and organizations that rely on it.

Addressing the Widening Performance GapIn 1965, Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors per square inch on a microprocessor chip had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore further predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 18 months, a time interval he later revised to every two years. Although Moore’s Law has remained generally accurate, the curve has not been linear. The formerly marginal rate of advances in CPU and RAM speeds has increased dramatically over the past decades (Figure 1).

As the figure illustrates, HDD speed advancements have not followed the same exponential growth curve as CPUs and RAM. In fact, the gap created because CPU and RAM performance has exponentially outpaced HDD I/O and performance has become one of the data center’s greatest operational constraints. As processor manufacturers continue to make new advancements in CPU technology, servers today are becoming increasingly starved for data. As a result, enterprises experience the effects of disk contention and latency, resulting in large deficiencies in application workload performance, which slows overall business performance.

To compensate for these performance shortcomings, organizations have been forced to buy (and overbuy) expensive storage resources, artificially multiplying the number of disk spindles and even servers to achieve a sufficient number of I/O operations per second. Unfortunately, this overprovisioning yields only incremental Increases in performance, with gains typically measured in single-digit percentages. The costs from deployment of more servers, from the use of more space and more

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Figure 1. HDD Speed Improvements Have Lagged Dramatically Behind Those of Other Technologies



energy and cooling resources, and from more complex management challenges have become impossible to ignore.

Compelling Advantages of SSDs and Cisco UCS Invicta SeriesSSDs are high-performance “plug-and-play,” or immediately available, storage devices that use the same interfaces and form factors as HDDs, but contain no moving parts. Instead of employing mechanical components like traditional HDDs, most SSDs today are based on NAND flash-memory chips, a microprocessor-based controller, and software that incorporates these components into a peripheral storage system. These differences bring considerable advantages over traditional physical media.

More Consistent Access TimesAn HDD consists of a spinning aluminum disk and an actuator that controls a set of read-write heads. The laws of physics associated with these mechanical components fundamentally limit the rotational speed at which the actuator can move. Because of stability problems, power limits, and edge heating, HDDs are constrained to about 15,000 rotations per minute (rpm). Rotational latency thus ranges from 2 to 10 milliseconds, reflecting the time between when a HDD receives a request and when it starts processing the request.

In contrast, SSDs retrieve information from a NAND cell in about the same time it takes a server to retrieve data from RAM: typically 0.1 millisecond. The only performance restrictions placed on SSDs are limitations imposed by quantum mechanics at the chip level. Because the physical location of data is irrelevant to SSDs, they do not have to rely on a read-write interface head to synchronize with a rotating disk, thereby making read performance more consistent than with HDDs. With no platters to spin or heads to move, SSDs offer dramatically faster boot and application launch times.

Better Performance and Lower Operating CostsIn essentially all areas, SSDs provide much better performance than HDDs, including:

• Latency in microseconds (rather than milliseconds as with HDDs)

• Transfer rates in the hundreds of megabytes per second (rather than tens of megabytes per second as with HDDs)

• Thousands of read-write operations per second (rather than hundreds of read-write operations per second as with HDDs)

As a result, SSD-based RAID easily outperforms an equivalent number of traditional HDDs in the same configuration. In tests comparing the read performance for random data sets, at least four times the number of HDDs may be required to match the performance of an equivalent SSD configuration. This vast reduction in the number of drives lets organizations reduce the number of high-performance drives required to meet given performance levels, resulting in significant cost savings. These savings come not only from the decreased number of drives needed, but also the dramatic reduction in power, cooling, retail rack space, and overall maintenance resources required.



Reduced Power Consumption and Heat DissipationWith no platters to spin or heads to move, SSDs are completely silent and consume about a third of the power of HDDs. Along with lower power consumption, SSDs dissipate considerably less heat than HDDs due to the absence of heat generated from rotating or movable media.

Superior Longevity and ReliabilityEven in an ideal data center environment, the mechanical components of HDDs deteriorate over time. Wear occurs on the moving recording mechanisms each time they are turned on and each time the disk is read from or written to. The frequency of drive failure and lost data is well documented, and extensive data protection mechanisms must be in place to compensate for these problems.

With no moving mechanical parts, SSDs offer better reliability and provide the ruggedness required in demanding environments. SSDs can withstand extreme shock and vibration with data integrity and deliver reliable performance in extreme conditions. Cisco UCS Invicta OS software helps ensure effective management of all SSDs to protect and evenly distribute data across all storage resources during write operations.

Accelerating Critical WorkloadsSSD technology in the Cisco UCS Invicta Series provides an excellent solution for alleviating I/O bottlenecks, particularly those caused by the high access times of traditional HDDs. SSDs are most effective for server applications and systems in which I/O response time is crucial. Data stored on SSDs should include anything that benefits from faster access times, such as databases, swap files, library and index files, and authorization and login information. Examples of applications well suited for SSDs include:

• VDI

• Server virtualization

• Relational databases

• Enterprise messaging

• Metadata indexing and logs

• Data warehousing applications

• Online transaction processing (OLTP)

• High-speed data acquisition

• Multitasking systems using high-speed swap files

The sections that follow detail a number of workloads for which SSDs can make a critical difference.

• Analytics and intelligence: Organizations that analyze data and perform multivariate testing or data mining to find new patterns and relationships in their data can benefit from SSD technology. These organizations can often reduce risk through increased use of predictive modeling and analysis. SSD technology can help them process results as much 10 times faster than with traditional approaches.



• Batch processing: Many organizations employ batch processes for jobs that require more resources than are available during the business day. The introduction of SSD accelerated computing technology can increase performance to make sure that batch processes complete within their allotted windows, and it can even convert some batch processes to real time in the Cisco UCS Invicta Series, allowing organizations to get answers hours faster than in the past, allowing them to make better decisions.

• Email systems: Email is a critical Internet infrastructure component both for communications among internal employees and for delivery of marketing and other communications to customers and partners in a timely fashion. SSD technology can accelerate overburdened email systems to make sure that boot delays are reduced, employee productivity is not compromised, and marketing campaigns and other communications are delivered in a timely fashion.

• Virtual desktops: Virtual desktops can demand an overwhelming infrastructure to support the significant number of I/O operations per second (IOPS) required for a smooth interactive experience, often impeding adoption of this effective technology for those without the adequate infrastructure. Properly applied SSD technology from Cisco provides an industry-changing cost per I/O operation of just pennies, allowing much broader deployment of this critical technology.

• Databases: With steady improvements in processor and memory technology, many databases have become starved for data, creating new challenges for traditional spinning-disk systems and very lopsided storage budgets for organizations. The Cisco UCS Invicta Series is specifically tuned for low-latency, high-I/O environments, giving databases fast access to data without prohibitively high costs.

Cisco UCS Invicta SeriesCisco UCS Invicta Series delivers a next-generation modular NAND flash-memory system that provides highly scalable IOPS and system throughput along with ultra-low latency. With the Cisco UCS Invicta Scaling System, customers can deploy application workloads in a multitenant architecture that enables I/O-intensive applications to coexist without compromising performance.

Cisco UCS Invicta OSCisco UCS Invicta OS is industry-leading operating software explicitly designed for NAND flash memory. Cisco UCS Invicta OS sustains high throughput, a high rate of IOPS, and ultra-low latency while overcoming the write performance and longevity challenges typically associated with multilevel-cell (MLC) flash memory. Cisco UCS Invicta OS accelerates the delivery of enterprise data by a factor of 10, while using flash memory to reduce energy costs in a platform that consumes less data center floor space than performance-optimized HDDs.

The software is designed to enable organizations to scale from a single device to many devices and to organize devices to meet performance, capacity, and operational objectives. Because of the unique scale-up and scale-out design of the Cisco UCS Invicta Scaling System, customers can combine a variety of workloads without concern that performance may be degraded.



Solid-State Memory as a Unified and Pooled ResourceAs shown in Figure 2, SSDs have been used for years to accelerate applications, yet all these approaches have constrained the benefits of SSDs in one of several ways:

• Hybrid and tiered architectures represent older designs that provide little benefit in today’s highly complex environments.

• PCI Express (PCIe) flash-memory cards can be effective for stand-alone applications, but they can quickly result in stranded pools of solid-state memory that don’t benefit the data center infrastructure overall and cannot be easily reassigned.

• Flash-memory shelves provide a higher-level approach, but they generally lack a global name space, offer too many management points, and lack effective high availability and data protection schemes.

• All-flash-memory arrays can remove tiering complexity, but they still place SSDs into an older architecture that is not particularly scalable.

In contrast, the Cisco UCS Invicta Series takes solid-state computing systems and their applications to a new level by integrating flash memory as yet another pooled resource available to applications running within the Cisco UCS architecture. This approach provides scalable and protected performance across the entire computing infrastructure and also introduces:

• Joint, per-policy provisioning

• Flexibility to address any workload

• Cost effectiveness through sharing and broad utilization of resources

• Extensibility and massive scalability

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Figure 2. Cisco UCS Invicta Series Offers Improvements over Previous Approaches



Bringing Data Acceleration to the Computing DomainSolid-state storage has long been employed in the storage domain, where SSDs and PCIe flash-memory cards have been used effectively as caches in front of slower HDDs and mass-storage resources. Although this role for SSDs is important and successful for many applications, Cisco sees a new opportunity for innovation by bringing the data acceleration capabilities of solid-state memory into the computing domain (Figure 3). The two domains have similar but contrasting requirements:

• The storage domain is principally focused on data protection, but has performance requirements

• The computing domain is principally focused on performance, but has data protection requirements

By moving solid-state memory into the computing domain, the Cisco UCS Invicta Series brings solid-state acceleration closer to the application, managed as a subsystem within the Cisco UCS fabric computing domain. With this approach, solid-state memory becomes simply another resource that can be allocated with Cisco UCS, allowing greater performance for growing workloads. Solid-state memory becomes easily consumable and assignable through Cisco UCS Director and other tools.

High-Performance, Multiworkload, and Multitenant CapabilitiesCisco sees this transition of solid-state memory into the computing domain as a natural evolution of fabric computing. For example, Cisco UCS already implements stateless servers and virtualized adapters, connected in a networked environment through Cisco® fabric interconnects. Solid-state memory in the form of the Cisco

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Figure 3. Cisco UCS Invicta Series Complements Traditional Storage Systems by Bringing Solid-State Memory into the Cisco UCS Computing Fabric.



UCS Invicta Scaling System is really no different, connecting to Cisco UCS fabric Interconnects to complement traditional storage systems and become just another resource managed by Cisco UCS Director.

Cisco UCS Director automates IT processes by providing a single point from which organizations can automate and orchestrate IT infrastructure, including computing, networking, and storage, with physical and virtual resources treated equally. This holistic management makes processes consistent. Cisco UCS Director supports multitenancy, helping organizations keep internal clients separate for better security and for resource management and tracking.

Cisco UCS Director helps organizations deliver IT infrastructure through a single interface with point-and-click simplicity. A self-service portal lets administrators and trusted clients quickly request and receive the infrastructure they need, whether it is physical or virtual. It supports heterogeneous environments, so Cisco UCS Director can automate a range of different technology stacks.

The combination (Figure 4) results in a flexible, modular, and highly scalable environment based on switched fabrics, yielding:

• Performance with data persistence and high availability

• Multitenant and multiworkload capabilities: for instance, allowing big data relational databases and virtual desktops to coexist on the same platform

• The capability to allocate and reallocate pooled resources rapidly to the place they are needed most for real-time decision making.

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Figure 4. Cisco UCS Invicta Scaling System Integrates Directly Into Cisco UCS to Create a Multitenant, Multiworkload Environment Accelerated by Solid-State Memory

Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R) LE-43304-02 04/14

Americas Headquarters Cisco Systems, Inc. San Jose, CA

Asia Pacific Headquarters Cisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd. Singapore

Europe Headquarters Cisco Systems International BV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ConclusionThe Cisco UCS Invicta Series represents a bold new adaptation of solid-state memory technology. By moving solid-state memory into the computing domain and integrating this innovative technology directly into Cisco UCS, organizations benefit from a scalable and modular architecture that can accelerate multiple applications simultaneously. Integration with Cisco UCS Director means that solid-state memory can be allocated and reallocated on demand, allowing pools of SSD resources to serve the most important applications with efficient utilization of flash-memory capacity. The integration of the entire Cisco UCS Invicta Series Solid-State System means that deployments remain energy efficient and conserve expensive data center space. Together, these technology innovations help eliminate performance bottlenecks while accelerating applications with few changes. This integrated approach fundamentally redefines the capabilities of unified computing infrastructure in the data center, benefiting both the business and those who support it.

Learn More• For more information about the Cisco UCS Invicta Series, please visit http://www.

cisco.com/go/ucsinvicta.

• For more information about Cisco UCS, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucs.

• For more information about Cisco UCS Director, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsdirector.


http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks

http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsinvicta

http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsinvicta

http://www.cisco.com/go/ucs

http://www.cisco.com/go/ucs

http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsdirector

http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsdirector

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