Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series Improving Storage Performance

Abstract
The storage market is going through a shift with the adoption of hardware like NVMe storage devices that offer 2-3x greater performance. VMware’s recent announcement of vSAN 8 introduces an alternative architecture to store and process data in vSAN, known as Express Storage Architecture (ESA), that is designed to achieve new levels of efficiency, scalability, and performance.

Introduction
As modern applications demand for more resources, IT leaders need the ability to quickly scale up, scale out, or expand storage infrastructure independently and efficiently. The storage market is going through a shift in hardware adoption, with newer hardware emerging for highly optimized HCI deployments.

For example, NVMe devices are expected to grow to a substantial majority share while the SAS/SATA SSDs and HDDs are expected to decline rapidly. They offer 2-3x greater performance (based on VMware Internal Analysis, August 2022) than legacy SAS/SATA devices, while their price is steadily declining.

They are available in a variety of types across a range of performance, capacity points and support a spectrum of workloads to meet various business needs. NVMe technology is projected to become the standard and the most widespread deployed storage device in the enterprise.

Storage Architectures in vSAN 8
While HDDs and SAS/SATA SSDs are very common in enterprise data centers and will be in the foreseeable future, customers are upgrading to NVMe-based flash devices. With this adoption, VMware has introduced a new storage architecture within the vSAN 8 platform called Express Storage Architecture (ESA).

Differences between vSAN 8 ESA vs. Original Storage Architecture (OSA)

vSAN ESA provides customers with the flexibility to leverage all NVMe-based flash devices for performance, scalability, resilience, and simplicity.

The traditional architecture in vSAN 8, now called OSA is still available as an option designed for traditional hardware devices and allows customers to configure a 2-tier approach to managing their storage with enhanced efficiency.

ESA
vSAN ESA is an industry first, single-tier HCI storage solution designed to use compatible next-gen NVMe-based flash devices to reach a range of price and performance targets. A major pivot from VMware is the transition from disk groups to storage pools, which eliminates the need to configure a dedicated cache pool as one would in traditional disk groups. The benefit of this transition is the ability to use these previously dedicated cache devices as capacity creating a more resilient vSAN datastore and the scope of a drive failure is now limited to a single device failure rather than the entire disk group.

The new architecture showcases some ways of processing and storing data. vSAN 8 with ESA introduces structural changes like a new patented log-structured file system (vSAN LFS), a new write-optimized log-structured object manager, and a new object format. All these changes enable vSAN ESA achieve near device-level performance levels while storing data and metadata in an efficient way.

Minimum Requirements for vSAN 8 Express Storage

The benefits of vSAN 8 ESA include the following:

• Higher performance targets without trade-offs
  • Customers gain substantial performance improvements due to the new vSAN 8 ESA data path that leverages different tiers of storage devices to deliver a range of price/performance targets.
  • Improved erasure coding further reduces performance overhead and enables customers to achieve RAID-5/6 at the performance of RAID-1.
  • Intelligent I/O traffic management for vSAN network traffic during times of network contention to avoid congestion resulting in higher rate of I/O processing for enhanced efficiency.
• Space and resource efficiency with simplified storage provisioning
  The all-new policy-based compression method that occurs higher in the storage stack minimizes CPU costs and network payload. Enabled by default, customers can use a simple storage policy to toggle on a per-VM basis instead of a cluster-based service allowing for up to a 4x improvement in compression on each 4KB block, when compared with the OSA.
• Scalable, high-performance native snapshots
  vSAN ESA enables native snapshotting of point-in-time states of data in a fast and efficient way resulting in minimal impact on the VM’s performance, with consolidation times dramatically reduced.
• Security
  Cluster-based encryption has been included with vSAN ESA. It occurs at the top of the stack eliminating the need to encrypt and decrypt as data traverses the stack. This new functionality improves resource utilization when securing data.

ThinkAgile VX with vSAN ESA
Customers can take advantage of ThinkAgile VX Integrated Systems with VMware vSAN 8 ESA to run resource-intensive workloads including mission-critical applications, database workloads such as OLTP in retail, finance, and airline industries.

ThinkAgile VX with VMware vSAN 8 ESA plays an interesting role in space constrained deployments. IT admins can take advantage of vSAN ESA’s single tier of storage to fit more capacity into smaller footprints such as in ROBO and still support a variety of workloads

Micron SSDs Securely Accelerate ESA
NVMe SSDs improve storage performance in VMware vSAN ESA deployments, which are optimized for NVMe SSDs. They are the standard for modern low-latency HCI environments like VMware vSAN ESA, providing an optimal balance of storage performance, capacity, and low power to meet a variety of deployment requirements.

Micron NVMe SSDs deliver performance increases over SAS/SATA drives and with low latency – both imperatives to help improve workloads like transaction processing, real-time analytics, resource planning, virtualization, broad database deployments, video on demand and other similar performance and latency-sensitive workloads that can run on vSAN ESA.

Micron SSDs also offer a complement of proven security features built over generations, helping to address emerging security concerns in virtualized environments.

With low latency, wide ranging capacity options, and enhanced security features, these SSDs fit a variety of VMware vSAN ESA environments for the ThinkAgile VX Integrated Systems – helping to reduce complexity while improving storage performance.

For more information about Micron 7450 SSDs, see the following Lenovo press product guides:
ThinkSystem 7450 MAX Mixed Use NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs
ThinkSystem 7450 PRO Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs

How ThinkAgile VX Can Help
ThinkAgile VX Integrated System is an engineered solution with factory-integrated VMware virtualization software and pre-configured based on the reliable ThinkSystem servers. It provides virtualized compute and storage capabilities to run for a variety of workloads and applications powered by VMware software such as VMware vSAN, VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation. It is integrated with VMware vSphere Lifecycle Management (vLCM) for a single unified platform for firmware and software updates. In addition, it comes with ThinkAgile Advantage support, providing a single source of L1/L2 support for both hardware and software, which enables faster recovery.

ThinkAgile VX Series powers a range of HCI use cases with its flexibility to scale up or out and broad hardware options ranging from Edge and ROBO, VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface), email and collaboration, to business-critical and large databases like SAP HANA.

Additionally, customers can also leverage Lenovo’s TruScale Hybrid Cloud with VMware managed solution with a single, integrated billing, pay-as-you-grow model, which helps achieve TCO savings with specialized expertise to allow customers to accelerate their cloud transformation.

Product families related to this document:
ThinkAgile VX Series for VMware vSAN
VMware vSphere