In my current role I have the privilege of managing the Performance Lab in SAS R&D. Helping users work through performance challenges is a critical part of the Lab’s mission. This spring, my team has been actively testing new and enhanced storage arrays from EMC along with the Veritas clustered file system. We have documented our findings on the SAS Usage note 42197 “List of Useful Papers.”
The two different flash based storages we tested from EMC are the new DSSD D5 appliance and XtremIO array. The bottom line: both storages performed very nicely with a mixed analytics workload. For more details on the results of the testing along with the tuning guidelines for using SAS with this storage, please review these papers:
- Performance and Tuning Considerations of SAS on the EMC All-Flash XtremIO Array
- Performance and Tuning Considerations of SAS on the EMC DSSD D5 Storage
As with all storage, please validate that the storage can deliver all the “bells and whistles;” you will need to support your failover and high availability needs of your SAS applications.
In addition to the storage testing, we tested with the latest version of Veritas InfoScale clustered file system. We had great results in a distributed SAS environment with several SAS compute nodes all accessing data in this clustered file system. A lot of information was learned in this testing and captured in the following paper:
My team plans to continue testing of new storage and file system technologies throughout the remainder 2016. If there is a storage array or technology you would like to have tested, please let us know by sharing it in the comments section below or contacting me directly.
2 Comments
Hi Migrate,
In this article "Best Practices for Data Sharing in a Grid Distributed SAS® Environment" ( https://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/grid/Shared_FileSystem_GRID.pdf ) , it mentions that Solaris QFS was one of the shared file systems that SAS has reviewed. However the article does not give any evaluation of QFS. According to SAS experience, is QFS a recommended shared file system for SAS GRID compute servers which are installed in a Solaris environment ?
I appreciate your prompt reply,
There has been some interest in EMC ScaleIO and if it could support mixed workloads and moving to a commodity model is attractive for datacenters looking to move a service based model.