Deduplication on Primary Storage Test Drive IV
As part of our ongoing test drive of the BitWackr primary storage deduplication solution, we began creating a baseline performance test environment as we described in our last update in this series.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Part of that baseline testing included the creation of a new BitWackr volume and a non-deduplicated volume of equal size on an equal performing target. We used our Data Robotics DroboElite as the iSCSI target for this testing, creating a volume for each state on it.
The creation of the deduplicated volume was straight forward but is worthy of a video to show the simplicity of the process. It is important to note that, in many cases, you will probably not create something like this on your own. More than likely, the deduplication feature will be built into the storage that you purchase as they will OEM the BitWackr solution from Exar. However some storage companies that integrate the BitWackr card may provide users with the ability to choose whether to deduplicate or not so knowing the process has value.
There are a couple of important parts to the creation of the new volume. First you want the metadata about what data is redundant and what is not, stored locally and on a very fast volume. A small SSD drive is ideal for this. As a side note, our test unit makes for a fascinating work station; small SSD drive to boot, hold swap files and the deduplication meta data, then use a hard drive to store all the actual data. The performance test configuration also provides some interesting use of the Data Robotics DroboElite. Leverage SSD local for metadata and OS swap files, keep traffic off the iSCSI network, then when you need to use the iSCSI network, only send deduplicated and compressed (and optionally encrypted) data to maximize the 1GbE bandwidth.
As the video shows, the second part of configuration information is that neither the volume assigned to the BitWackr card or BitWackr’s metadata partitions shall be allocated or formatted with NTFS. From there the BitWackr GUI walks you through the rest of the process and is very straight forward. While the interface of the BitWackr software is a little utilitarian, it does get the job done. I'm sure that Exar expects that most manufacturers will customize the current interface or integrate most of this functionality into their own interfaces.
Lab Report
George Crump, Senior Analyst
Creating a Deduplicated Volume - BitWackr Extended Test Drive
Exar Corporation is a client of Storage Switzerland
The next step is to do a live recording of the testing. Look for those to come out in the next several entries.
Step one in the recreation of our performance testing environment is now complete as was done quite easily. As you can see in the next video we also did some testing of the deduplication engine itself to show again how powerful the deduplication capabilities of the Bitwackr product are. As you can see below:
