Performance Metrics
In this study, throughput in MB/s is the metric used to indicate the performance of sending and retrieving snapshots between the FlashArray and the Access Appliance. The average throughput is defined as the combined throughput for all the volumes sent and/or retrieved.
Snap To NFS
The throughput results for “Snap to NFS” are shown in Figure 11. The maximum throughput achieved was 232 MB/s where 4 volumes of size 40 GB each were sent from a FlashArray //M20 to the Access 3340 Appliance. The NFS target was configured with mount options of rsize=1MB, wsize=1MB and nfsvers=3 and was mapped to a single share mapped to a single file system, 1 virtual IP (1 network interface) and 1 node. Access exported the share with rw and sync options. The Access Appliance was minimally loaded in the sense of system resources and disk utilization. Thus, when sending volume snapshots from multiple FlashArray, the performance doubled to 457 MB/s. As previously discussed, when sending snapshots to two FlashArray and an Access Appliance configured to utilize 1 node, 2 file systems, and 2 network interfaces the combined throughput was 640 MB/s. The Access Appliance system resources utilization did go up however, they did not fully saturate.
Figure 12 - Snap to NFS Throughput Results
Snapshot Retrieval
Results of snapshot(s) retrieval are illustrated in Figure 12. As can be seen from the graph, the maximum observed throughput of 180 MB/s was when retrieving 5 volumes of 40 GB in size. The FlashArray //M20 and a single Access 3340 Appliance were utilized. Just like in the “Snap to NFS” scenario, the NFS target was configured with mount options of rsize=1048576, wsize=1048576 and nfsvers=3 and was mapped to a single share mapped to a single file system, 1 virtual IP (1 network interface), and 1 node. Access exported the share with rw and sync options.
Figure 13= Snapshot Retrieval Throughput Results
Mixed Workload
For the mixed workload where 50% send and 50% retrieves of FlashArray snapshots were performed to and from the Access Appliance, the maximum combined throughput observed was 305 MB/s (send was 202 MB/s and retrieve was 103 MB/s) where 3 volume snapshots sent and 3 different volumes snapshots were retrieved as shown in Figure 14. The FlashArray //M20 and single Access 3340 Appliance with the same configuration as in the previous tests was used for the mixed workload tests.
Figure 14 - Mixed Workload