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Technical white paper

HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server

on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8

Server

Deploying open scalable software-defined storage

Table of contents

Executive summary ...................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Storage growth, innovation, and cost .................................................................................................................................. 2

Scale-out storage with HP and Red Hat............................................................................................................................... 3

Overview .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Large file and object store ...................................................................................................................................................... 5

Enterprise drop box or cloud storage for service providers ............................................................................................ 5

Near-line archival ...................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Solution components ................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Red Hat Storage Server ........................................................................................................................................................... 7

Two-node HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 server ...................................................................................................................... 8

Switches .................................................................................................................................................................................... 10

Capacity and sizing ...................................................................................................................................................................... 10

Workload description ............................................................................................................................................................. 10

Workload results ..................................................................................................................................................................... 13

Analysis and recommendations .......................................................................................................................................... 22

Configuration guidance .............................................................................................................................................................. 24

Red Hat Storage installation and configuration ............................................................................................................... 24

Red Hat Storage client software installation .................................................................................................................... 24

Red Hat Storage volume creation ....................................................................................................................................... 25

Mount RHS volumes on client nodes .................................................................................................................................. 26

Bill of materials ............................................................................................................................................................................ 27

Summary ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 28

Implementing a proof-of-concept .......................................................................................................................................... 28

For more information ................................................................................................................................................................. 29

Summary of content (29 pages)

PAGE 1
Technical white paper HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Deploying open scalable software-defined storage Table of contents Executive summary ...................................................................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................................................
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Executive summary Organizations of all kinds are struggling with the need to manage growing amounts of data in a cost-effective fashion, even as they focus on extracting more value from that data. Unstructured data in particular continues to grow rapidly in the typical enterprise, outpacing the abilities of conventional storage solutions.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server As a result of these trends, organizations are frequently forced into buying expensive solutions to meet their storage requirements. Every time organizations want to add more data, they have to purchase additional storage capacity. Every time they add more capacity, they have to sacrifice performance, as many storage solutions do not scale linearly.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Benefits of the joint Red Hat and HP solution include: • Flexible deployment. Flexible configurations of compute and storage can be tuned for diverse workloads. • Drastically lower cost. Massive scalability and density provided by HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 servers consolidate power and cooling and save on space. • Unstructured data scalability.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server • Lower complexity. Red Hat Storage Server running on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 servers provides vastly simplified homogeneous infrastructure over disparate JBOD systems, while a simplified global namespace helps eliminate architectural complexity. • Better user and customer satisfaction.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server The enterprise drop box or cloud storage workload can be characterized as initially comprising only writes, as end-users upload media files. Over time reads and writes become roughly equivalent as users access, view, and play those media files. File sizes range from a few megabytes (smart phone photos) to dozens of megabytes (HD videos taken using high-end digital SLR cameras).
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server As shown in Figure 4, multiple Red Hat Storage Server volumes can be deployed with one serving as near-line archival to the other. For example, a Red Hat Storage Server-based object store volume or a drop box volume could use another Red Hat Storage Server-based volume for near-line archival.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server • Unified global namespace. Red Hat Storage Server aggregates disk and memory resources into a single common pool. This flexible approach simplifies management of the storage environment and eliminates data silos. Global namespaces may be grown and shrunk dynamically, with no interruption to client access. • Rapid and random access.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server • Capacity area. The capacity area for each server includes space for 15, 25, or 60 LFF hard disk drives, depending on the model chosen. SATA and SAS 7.2K rpm drives are supported as well as SAS 15K rpm drives. Up to 4TB drives can be configured. Solid state devices (SSDs) are also available in an LFF carrier. HP ProLiant SL4540 servers were designed to be a part of enterprise-class solutions.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Switches Red Hat Storage Server clusters can be connected using 1Gb Ethernet or 10Gb Ethernet ports. In our testing, we used an HP 5920 series switch (Figure 6) to cluster nodes via 10Gb Ethernet for fast performance.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Red Hat Storage Server configuration For testing, two 2-node HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 servers were used to host Red Hat Storage Server. In this configuration, each HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 server contained two nodes, with each node controlling 25 disk drives for a total of four Red Hat Storage Server nodes in the storage cluster.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 8. Each node within the 2-node HP ProLiant SL4540 server was configured with two 18.2TB RAID 6 logical volumes. Red Hat Storage Server client configuration For testing, four HP servers were used as clients. Each client system ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 and had the Red Hat Storage Server client packages installed.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server • IOZONE_RECORDSZ was varied between 64KB and 4MB, considering record sizes that were powers of two. This range of record sizes was meant to characterize the effect of record/block size (in client file requests) on I/O performance. • TEST_THREADS specifies the number of threads or processes that are active during the measurement.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 10 illustrates the effect of scaling out the number of Red Hat Storage Server nodes and clients on sequential writes for distributed volumes. The test used record size of 1024KB. With 8 client threads, the sequential write throughput is almost the same in spite of increasing the number of storage nodes.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 11 illustrates the effect of scaling out the number of Red Hat Storage Server nodes and clients on sequential reads. The test used a record size of 1024KB. The sequential read throughput is almost the same in spite of increasing the number of storage nodes with 8 threads (1 client).
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 12 illustrates the effect of scaling out the number of Red Hat Storage Server nodes and clients on random reads. The test used record size of 1024KB. The random read throughput does not increase appreciably with an increased number of threads in a 2-node configuration.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 13 illustrates the effect of scaling out the number of Red Hat Storage Server nodes and clients on random writes. The test used record size of 1024KB. Increasing the number of client threads did not have an appreciable impact on the random write throughput in 2-node and 3-node configurations.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Test results—two-way replicated volumes Figure 14 illustrates the effect of request size variation (in kilobytes), as defined by the IOzone record size variable, on Red Hat Storage Server Distributed-Replicated volume throughput (MB/second). There are 4 clients with 8 threads each, totaling 32 client threads targeting a 4-node Red Hat Storage Server cluster in a distributed-replicate volume configuration.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 15 illustrates the effect of scaling out the number of Red Hat Storage Server nodes (in a distributed-replicated configuration) and clients on sequential writes. The test used a record size of 1024KB. The sequential write throughput shows a moderate increase from 8 to 16 client threads and then flat lines in the case of a 2-node replicated volume.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 16 illustrates the effect of scaling out the number of Red Hat Storage Server nodes (in a distributed-replicated configuration) and clients on sequential reads. The test used a record size of 1024KB. The sequential read throughput scales linearly as the Red Hat Storage Server nodes are added, albeit modestly. Sequential read throughput scales linearly as the number of client threads increases.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 17 illustrates the effect of scaling out both the number of Red Hat Storage Server nodes (in a distributed-replicated configuration) and clients on random reads. The test used a record size of 1024KB. The 4-node configuration showed more than double the random read throughput than a 2-node configuration.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Figure 18 illustrates the effect of scaling out both the number of Red Hat Storage Server nodes (in a distributed-replicated configuration) and clients on random writes. The test used a record size of 1024KB. The 4-node configuration shows double the random write throughput than a 2-node configuration.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server One-, two-, and three-node HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 servers HP understands that different applications and storage-related deployments require differing core-to-spindle ratios. The HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 server line offers different numbers of compute nodes, with different numbers of disk spindles supported by each compute node.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Configuration guidance Red Hat Storage installation and configuration All four nodes were installed with the RHS 2.1 ISO that is available at Red Hat Network (rhn.redhat.com), this release is based on RHEL 6.4 and GlusterFS 3.4. All the documentation for installing and configuring the Red Hat Storage Server can be found on the Red Hat website – https://access.redhat.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server 2. Subscribe to Red Hat Storage Native Client. You must subscribe the system to the Red Hat Storage Native Client channel using either the web interface to Red Hat Network or the command line rhn-channel command. A. Using the rhn-channel command. You can run the rhn-channel command to subscribe the system to the Red Hat Storage Native Client channel. If your client version is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Confirm that all the storage servers are in connected state using the peer status command: rhs01 # gluster peer status A.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Bill of materials The bill of materials found in Table 1 lists the major server and storage hardware components needed for the reference architecture, however, this is not an exhaustive listing of all the necessary components needed to build the complete solution. For complete configuration details, please contact your HP Reseller or HP Sales Representative.
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Technical white paper | HP RA for Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server Summary With the combination of Red Hat Storage Server and the HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 server, scale-out storage is now a viable solution for large amounts of structured and semi-structured data.
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For more information To read more about the HP/Red Hat Alliance and HP solutions for Red Hat, please see: hp.com/go/redhat For additional information on the HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server, please see: hp.com/go/proliant/bigdataserver Additional information about Red Hat Storage can be found at: redhat.com/storage. You can watch a Red Hat Storage Demo at redhat.com/promo/liberate/2222_RedHat_Storage.html, and be sure to engage Red Hat to begin a Proof Of Concept: https://engage.redhat.