How XtremIO Works

Jason Nash
www.jasonnash.com
@TheJasonNash
 Incoming I/O Flow

Broken in to Hashed using

Data from host
4KB chunks SHA-1

Data Update Yes

written to metadata Unique?
storage table

No

Update
metadata
table
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 Content Engine

 XtremIO has a content engine that makes it unique

 Uses this engine to spread data across the cluster

 Flash makes this type of system possible

 Heavy random I/O which is a problem on spinning disks

 Reduces hot spots on SSDs

 Which extends SSD life

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 Diagram of Content Engine

A39E293

59BCA12

A3921FE

121EF12

539DEF2

0CD239F

3E2932B
C97CD11
Hash Values
From SHA-1

02468ACE 13579BDF
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 Metadata Information

Metadata Table

Metadata Table RDMA / Infiniband Metadata Table

Metadata Table
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Infiniband Interconnect Host Data Requests

I/O
Request

Data

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 Efficient Space Utilization

 XtremIO is always thin provisioned

 Always get the best utilization

4KB
 But something to consider when provisioning

 Does so in 4KB blocks

 Same size as writes on SSDs

 No penalty for reclamation or fragmentation

Blocks
 SSD 0ms access time is nice!

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 Data Resiliency Using XDP

 XtremIO Data Protection (XDP) is a very efficient protection system

 Much more so than traditional RAID
 Only 8% overhead

 No RAID levels or stripe sizes to set

 No tuning at all required

 Very fast rebuild times in case of SSD failure

 Personally tested it at 14 minutes on a 10TB brick

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 Data Resiliency Using XDP

 Can fail up to 5 drives in a single DAE

 Two failures calculated in to overhead
 Additional failures depend on free capacity available

 As of XOS 2.4 you can fail one drive at a time

 Coming update will allow two failures at once (N+2)

 Performance is sustained even during failure situations

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 Garbage Collection

 Somewhat minor point, but often discussed

 Garbage collection is the reorganization of space on SSDs to create

more open cells

 XtremIO does “drive level” garbage collection

 Let’s the controller on the drive do the work

 Many others use “system level” garbage collection

 Controllers do it as a function
 Can cause overhead and inconsistent performance

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 Full VAAI Support for VMware

 VMware vSphere® Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI)

 Offloads work to the array instead of your vSphere hosts

 Perfect match for XtremIO’s deduplication with metadata

 A clone is just a metadata copy

 Much faster than actually cloning the data

 Even inside the array

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 Snapshots and Metadata

 Snapshots are simple metadata operations as well

 Can remove a snapshot between others very quickly

Original
Snapshot Snapshot Snapshot
Data

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 Summary

 How XtremIO handles incoming data

 Content engine and metadata

 I/O data path

 Efficient storage of data

 VMware VAAI support

 XDP for resiliency

 Snapshots are simple metadata operations

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