Advanced Storage

Systems
Hossein Asadi
Department of Computer Engineering
Sharif University of Technology
asadi@sharif.edu

Lecture 3 1
 Today’s Topics
• Disk Drives
– Trend
– Amdahl Law
– Implications of I/O limitations

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 2

 Copyright Notice
• Some Parts of this Lecture Adapted from:
– COMP 7970, “Storage Systems”
• Dr. Xiao Qin, Auburn University
– CS 600.419, “Storage Systems”
• Dr. R. Burns, John Hopkins University
– Reference books
• Storage Networks Explained: Basics and Application of Fibre
Channel SAN, NAS, iSCSI,InfiniBand and FCoE, U. Troppens,
R. Erkens, W. Mueller-Friedt, and R. Wolafka, 2nd Edition,
John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2009.
• Storage Area Networks Essentials, R. Barker and P.
Massiglia, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2002.
• Storage Technologies and Systems, IBM Journal of Research
& Development, Special issue, Nov. 2008.
• Introduction to Storage Area Networks, J. Tate, F.
Lucchese, and R. Moore, IBM Redbooks, July 2006.
• Holy Grail of Data Storage Management, The. Jon William
Toigo, Prentice-Hall, 2000.
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 3
 Disk Trends: Density

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 4

 Disk Performance &
Latency
• Today:
– Processing power doubles every 18 months
– Memory size doubles every 18 months
• 4X / 3 yrs
• How about Disk Drives?
– Disk capacity doubles every 18 months
• 60% / year
– Disk bandwidth doubles every two years
• 40% / year
– Disk positioning rate (seek + rotate) doubles
every ten years!
• 4~6% / year
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 5
 Disk Performance &
Latency (cont.)
• Time to Read Whole Disk
Year Sequentially Randomly*
1990 4 min 6 hours
2000 12 min 1 week
2006: SCSI 56 min 3 weeks
2006: SATA 171 min 7 weeks
*Randomly: one sector per seek
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 6
 Disk Performance &
Latency (cont.)
• How to Close Gap in Performance
between Disks & CPUs?
– Replace large disks with array of small disks
• Capacity ↑ 
• I/O rate ↑? 
• Power consumption ↑ 
• Cost ↑ 
• MTTF ??? 
– Without redundancy
» 200Kh/1000 = 200h  ~ 1 failure per week
» too unreliable to be useful!
– With redundancy  increased reliability
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 7
 Amdahl’s Law
• Amdahl’s Law Says
– Speedup limited to fraction improved
• Obvious, but fundamental observation
• Obvious but Common Mistakes
– CPU upgraded from 1.5Ghz to 3Ghz
• But not seeing 100% improvement in performance
– Combinational upgrade 1
• CPU from 1.5Ghz to 3Ghz
• Memory from 1GB-90nm to 2GB-45nm
– Combinational upgrade 2
• CPU from 1.5Ghz to 3Ghz
• Memory from 1GB-90nm to 2GB-45nm
• L1 from 16KB to 32KB & L2 from 1MB to 2MB

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 8

 Amdahl’s Law (cont.)
• Why Not Seeing that Much Improvement?

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 9

 Trend in Technology:
Performance & Bandwidth

2000
times
50 in
times 2010

Year
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 10
 Disk Performance
Parameters
• Disk Service Time
– Time taken by a disk to complete an I/O
request
• Seek Time
• Rotational Latency
• Data Transfer Rate

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 11

 Disk Performance
Parameters (cont.)
• Seek Time (typically 3~15ms)
– Time taken to reposition and settle arm
and head over correct track
– Full Stroke, average, track-to-track
• Rotational Latency
– Time taken to rotate and position to
particular sector
– 5.4K  avg: 5.5ms
– 15K  avg: 2ms
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 12
 Disk Performance
Parameters (cont.)
• Seek Time depends on:
– Inertial power of arm actuator motor
– Distance between outer-disk recording radius
and inner-disk recording radius
• Depends on platter-size
• Components of a Seek:
– Speedup
• Arm accelerates
– Coast
• Arm moving at maximum velocity (long seeks)
– Slowdown
• Arm brought to rest near desired track
– Settle
• Head is adjusted to reach the access desired location
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 13
 Seeking
[Speedup, Coast, Slowdown, Settle]
• Very Short Seeks (2-4 cylinders)
– Settle-time dominates
• Short Seeks (200-400 cylinders)
– Speedup/Slowdown-time dominates
• Longer Seeks
– Coast-time dominates
• With smaller platter-sizes and higher
TPI
– Settle-time becoming more important
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 14
 Disk Performance
Parameters (cont.)
• Data Transfer Rate
– Average amount of data per unit time
that drive can deliver to HBA

IDR

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 Disk Drive Maximum
Sustained Data Rate

IBM, FAST 2010

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 Disk Drive Latency

IBM, FAST 2010

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 IBM Reports, FAST 2010
• Bandwidth
– Bandwidth problem getting much harder
to hide with parallelism
• Latency
– Access time problem is also not improving
with cache tricks

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 18

 Consequence: storage
performance dominates
• Example 1
– 50 sec CPU & 50 sec I/O
• 1997
– CPU improved by: N = 50/25 = 2
– Program performance improved by
• N = 100/75 = 1.33
• 1998
– CPU performance - factor of 2
– Program perf: N = 75/62.5=1.2
• 1999
– CPU performance - factor of 2
– Program perf: N = 62.5/56.25 = 1.11
• 2000
– CPU performance - factor of 2
– Program perf: N = 56.5/53.125 = 1.06

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 19

 Consequence: storage
performance dominates (cont.)
• Example 2: Assume CPU-dominated
workloads
• 1997:
– CPU improved by N = 90/45 = 2
– Program performance improved by
• N = 100/55 = 1.81
• 1998:
– CPU performance - factor of 2
– Program perf: N = 55/32.5 = 1.69
• 1999:
– CPU performance - factor of 2
– Program perf: N = 32.5 / 21.25 = 1.53
• 2000:
– CPU Performance - factor of 2
– Program perf: N = 21.25 / 15.6 = 1.36
• 2001: N = 1.22
• 2002: N = 1.12 (three years later)
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 20
 Pitfalls
• Would Context Switching Alleviate
I/O Bottleneck?
– When one process stops to wait, another
one can utilize now-available CPU cycles
• For this reason, some argue that I/O
performance is not such a big issue

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 21

 Pitfalls (cont.)
• Answer:
– If there are enough active processes in
system, it’s true but, each year, number
of processes need to grow
• 2  4  8  16  32  64
• Other Issues?
– With context switching time to finish of
one process wouldn’t reduced!

Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 22

 Pitfalls (cont.)
• Answer:
– If there are enough active processes in
system, it’s true but, each year, number
of processes need to grow
• 2  4  8  16  32  64
• Other Issues?
– Only works so long as problem is I/O
latency rather than I/O throughput
– Once I/O throughput becomes problem,
further processes generating requests
will just have to wait longer for service
Lecture 3 Sharif University of Technology, Fall 2020 23