By George Teixeira, President & CEO, DataCore
Software
During the 80’s, the original Star Wars movies featured
amazing future technology and were all about “the power of the Force.” The
latest movie has now broken all box office records and got me thinking about
how much IT and computing technology has progressed over the years but yet,
there is still so much left untapped.
Yes, several of the envisioned gains have come true – many
of these driven by Moore’s Law and the growing force of the microprocessor
revolution. For example, server virtualization software such as VMware
radically redefined consolidation savings and productivity, CPU clock speeds
got faster and microprocessors became commodities used everywhere – powering
PCs, laptops, smart phones and intelligent devices of all types. But the full
force and promise of using many microprocessors in parallel, what is now called
‘multicores,’ still remains largely untapped and I/O continues to be the major
bottleneck holding back the IT industry from achieving the next revolution in
consolidation, performance and productivity.
Virtual computing is still bottlenecked by I/O. Just as city
drivers can only dream about flying vehicles as gridlock haunts their morning
commute, IT is left wondering if they will ever see the day when application
workloads will reach light speed.
How can it be that with multi-core processing, virtualized
apps, abundant RAM and large amounts of flash, you still have to deal with
I/O-starved virtual machines (VMs) while many processor cores remain idle? Yes,
you can run several independent workloads at once on the same server using
separate CPU and memory resources, but that’s where everything begins to break
down. The many workloads in operation generate concurrent I/O requests yet only
one core is charged with I/O processing. This architectural limitation
strangles the life out of application performance. Instead of one server doing
vast quantities of work, IT is forced to add more servers and racks to deal
with I/O bottlenecks – this sprawl goes against the ‘consolidation and
productivity savings’ which is the basic premise and driver of virtualization.
All it takes, then, is a few VMs running simultaneously on
multi-core processors churning out almost inconceivable volumes of work and you
quickly overwhelm the one processor tasked with serial I/O. Instead of a flood
of accomplished computing, a trickle of I/O emerges. IT is left feeling like
the kids who grew up watching Star Wars who ask – where are our flying
starships and when can we travel at light-speed?!
The good news is that all is not lost. DataCore has a number
of bright minds hard at work to bring a revolutionary breakthrough for I/O to
prime time, DataCore Parallel I/O technology lets virtualized traffic flow
through without slowdown. Its unique software-defined parallel I/O architecture
is needed to capitalize on today’s powerful multi-core/parallel processing
infrastructure. By enlisting software to drive I/O processing across many
different cores simultaneously, this eradicates I/O bottlenecks and drives a
higher level of consolidation savings and productivity. The better news is that
this technology is already on the market today.
Just like Star Wars has shattered the world record, check
out how DataCore recently set the new world record on price-performance and on
a hyperconverged system (on the Storage Performance Councils peer reviewed SPC1
benchmark). DataCore also reported the best performance per footprint and the
fastest response times ever and so while the numbers do not actually reach
light-speed, DataCore has lapped the field not once but multiple times. See for
yourself the latest benchmark results in this article that appeared in Forbes: The Rebirth of Parallel I/O.
How? DataCore’s software actively senses the I/O load being
generated by concurrent VMs. It adapts and responds dynamically by assigning the
appropriate number of cores to process the input and output traffic. As a
result, VM’s no longer sit idle waiting on a serial I/O thread to become
available. Should the I/O load lighten, however, CPU cores are freed to do more
computational work.
This not only solves the immediate performance problem
facing multi-core virtualized environments, it significantly increases the VM
density possible per physical server. It allows IT to do ‘far more with less.’
This means fewer servers or racks and less space, power and cooling are needed
to get the work done. In effect, it achieves remarkable cost reductions through
maximum utilization of CPU cores, memory and storage while fulfilling the
productivity promise of virtualization.
You can read more about this in DataCore’s white paper, “Waiting on I/O: The Straw that Broke Virtualization’s Back.”
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