GridIron SSD Appliance With Brocade 16Gb FC

GridIron Systems, Inc. announced record performance and substantial energy savings for a new reference architecture that combines its OneAppliance flashCube high bandwidth solid state storage appliances with Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.‘s 16Gbps FC SAN technologies in tests running a cloud-enabled MySQL clustered database application.

The new reference architecture overcomes the challenges many organizations face in scaling and enabling concurrent access to databases, while also reducing costs and data center hardware requirements. The architecture, which was validated by Demartek, an analyst firm, is a development for enterprises that depend on MySQL clusters for mission-critical business applications.

In Demartek’s tests, the Brocade-GridIron cloud reference architecture delivered performance in excess of 1 million IOPS to each of 40 instances of MySQL, concurrently addressing eight mirrored volumes on the GridIron flashCube appliance. Compared to traditional architectures, the reference architecture achieved a 10:1 improvement in density, as well as a 60% reduction in power and cooling costs. Overall, Demartek estimated capital and operating expenditure savings that are at least four times better than conventional architectures.

Large database clusters, such as those running MySQL, are commonly built with local disk storage and expensive system RAM dedicated to each server. This approach restricts the size of the database, as well as the number of users who can access it, and delivers limited performance and data availability. As a result, many database administrators struggle to maintain SLAs and contain costs, especially in massively parallel processing data warehouse, cloud and large software-as-a-service environments.

"In large-scale MySQL environments it’s not uncommon to see hundreds or even thousands of database servers," said Dennis Martin, president of Demartek. "The Brocade-GridIron reference architecture opens a new, more efficient architectural approach for serving increasing numbers of users and database queries per cabinet. It’s a compelling alternative that provides significant improvements in performance, cost, manageability, availability and footprint."

The Brocade-GridIron reference architecture is comprised of twenty six-core servers equipped with dual-port Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapters, connecting to two GridIron flashCube all-flash storage appliances via two 16Gbps Brocade 6510 switches. The flashCubes delivered 12G/s concurrent bandwidth and sub-millisecond latencies that improved database performance and concurrency. The architecture incorporates redundancy and data replication capabilities to support high level of database availability. The combination of 16 Gbps adapters and switches provided 6.4Gbps of raw bandwidth to the storage, allowing the flashCube appliances to support the higher bandwidth and IOPS requirements of the consolidated servers and eliminating the I/O bottleneck typically found in other storage architectures.

"Brocade SAN solutions, coupled with next-generation SSD storage arrays, are setting new standards for performance and reliability for evolving applications," said Jack Rondoni, senior director of product management, Data Center SAN, at Brocade. "Clustered database architectures are among the many mission-critical applications where FC networking solutions provide the resiliency, performance and lower overall costs that enterprises demand to achieve a competitive advantage."

"Concurrent, high performance access to data is essential in large MySQL clusters," said Som Sikdar, CTO at GridIron. "GridIron’s OneAppliance solutions are setting a new standard in performance and bandwidth that represents a huge enabling opportunity for clustered databases dealing with the demands of both cloud and Big Data applications."

GridIron’s OneAppliance solutions leverage the firm’s Set-Ranking analytics to optimize cost-effective MLC flash for high performance data-intensive environments. This means that enterprises can enjoy the highest performance levels historically available only from SLC flash memory without the associated extra expense and capacity limitations.

To read Demartek’s evaluation report