Storage space 2016 good read

[modder man]

I am looking to do a parity array with a mirrored flash tier. I am struggling to find much documentation as to what to expect and what type of performance I can get out of different arrays. Does anyone know of any thing out there worth the read?

 

[m4ntic0r]

there is not much out there to read.. often only old articles. best is to try it on your own an share the results. always use a program like iometer to test storage performance. many other tools makes no sense, because only sequential transfer rates are not important in most cases.

i dont know much about storage tiers but i would do seperate mirrors instead. mirror with flash, and mirror or parity with hdds. then put e.g. hyper v or vm os disks on flash and bulk storage and partitions on hdd.

 

[acquacow]

I recently put two ioDrives in an SSD tier on top of four 4TB HGST drives and didn't get any speeds faster than native disk with a test file.

The tiering really relies on manual file pinning with storage spaces. You have to physically tell it to take a specific file, and move it into the SSD tier... there doesn't seem to be a way to redirect all new incoming writes directly to the SSD tier and then age them off to HDD.

 

[acquacow]

For example, here's the perf of a 2-way mirror on 3 ioDives

Here's a two-way mirror with a 2-column stripe on 4 disks:

Here's 2 ioDrives as an SSD tier on top of 4 HDDs (striping not available)

This is how I built it:
$pd = (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $True | Where MediaType -NE UnSpecified)
New-StoragePool -PhysicalDisks $pd –StorageSubSystemFriendlyName “Windows Storage*” -FriendlyName “StoragePool”

$ssdTier = New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName "StoragePool" -FriendlyName SSDTier -MediaType SSD
$hddTier = New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName "StoragePool" -FriendlyName HDDTier -MediaType HDD

New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName "StoragePool" -FriendlyName TieredSpace -StorageTiers $ssdtier, $hddtier -StorageTierSizes 1090GB, 7260GB -ResiliencySettingName Mirror -WriteCacheSize 1GB

Get-VirtualDisk TieredSpace | Get-Disk | Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle GPT
Get-VirtualDisk TieredSpace | Get-Disk | New-Partition -DriveLetter “E” -UseMaximumSize
Initialize-Volume -DriveLetter “E” -FileSystem REFS -Confirm:$false

 

[cesmith9999]

You can only do the mirror fast with the parity capacity on Storage Spaces Direct - Volume resiliency and efficiency in Storage Spaces Direct

You can as @acquacow showed you do a different interleave count in the different tiers in Server 2016 standalone.

Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016

Chris

 

[Diavuno]

I was under the impression you could use a a mirror of Flash as kind of a buffer that would later write to a parity mechanical set up. But they were a couple requirements like using their refs file system. And individual files being written had to be smaller than 80% of the currently free Flash array. Great for daily growth, not great for initial ingestion.
There was also something about WHEN it migrated data (especially when used in conjunction with dedupe.)

Sent from my 0PJA2 using Tapatalk

 

[psannz]

Sers,

I'd like to direct you to a whitepaper by Fujitsu on Windows Storage Spaces 2012 R2 Performance:
https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publ...ndows-storage-spaces-r2-performance-ww-en.pdf

Those numbers are still valid for WS2016 with NTFS. ReFS is another story when it comes to copies and snapshots, quite some improvements there.

Grüße,
Philip

 

[DieHarke]

Hey,

I just want to get a question answered to be sure...

As I read it it is not possible to create with "normal" Storage Spaces 2016 an expandable tiered parity space, where I want to use two mirrored ssds for the faster tier and three hdds in parity mode for the slower tier?

The hdd parity tier should also be expandable to up to six hdds in the future.

 

[cesmith9999]

I think I already answered your question.

Chris

 

[DieHarke]

I think I already answered your question.

Chris

Yes thank you!

 

[Jetlag]

New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName SSDTier -MediaType SSD -ResiliencySettingName Mirror -NumberOfColumns 1
New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName HDDTier -MediaType HDD -ResiliencySettingName Parity -NumberOfColumns 3
New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName VM -FileSystem NTFS -StorageTierFriendlyName SSDTier, HDDTier -storagetiersizes 100GB, 10TB -AccessPath "E:"

Unless I am missing something, this seems to create a mirror tier and a parity tier.