QLogic 10000 Series Mt. Rainier Technology Accelerates the Enterprise - Manual (Page 2)

SSG-WP12004C SN0430914-00 rev. C 11/12 2
White PaPer
Introduction
increased server performance, higher virtual machine density, advances in
network bandwidth, and more demanding business application workloads
create a critical i/O performance imbalance between servers, networks,
and storage subsystems. Storage i/O is the primary performance bottleneck
for most virtualized and data-intensive applications. While processor and
memory performance have grown in step with Moore’s Law (getting faster
and smaller), storage performance has lagged far behind, as shown in
Figure 1. this performance gap is further widened by the rapid growth in
data volumes that most organizations are experiencing today. For example,
iDC predicts that the amount of data volume in the digital universe will
increase by a factor of 44 over the next 10 years.
Figure 1. Growing Disparity Between CPU and Disk-Based Storage Performance
Following industry best practices, storage has been consolidated,
centralized, and located on storage networks (for example, Fibre Channel,
Fibre Channel over ethernet [FCoe], and iSCSi) to enhance efficiency,
compliance policies, and data protection. however, network storage design
introduces many new points where latency can be introduced. Latency
increases response times, reduces application access to information, and
decreases overall performance. Simply put, any port in a network that is
over-subscribed can become a point of congestion, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Sources of Latency on Storage Networks
as application workloads and virtual machine densities increase, so does
the pressure on these potential hotspots and the time required to access
critical application information. Slower storage response times result in
lower application performance, lost productivity, more frequent service
disruptions, reduced customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, a loss of
competitive advantage.
Over the past decade, it organizations and suppliers have employed
several approaches to address congested storage networks and avoid the
risks and costly consequences of reduced access to information and the
resulting underperforming applications.
The Traditional Approach: Refresh Storage Infrastructure
the traditional approach to meeting increased demands on enterprise
storage infrastructure is to periodically replace or “refresh” the storage
arrays with newer products. these infrastructure upgrades tend to focus on
higher-performance storage array controllers and disk drives that spread
data wider across a larger number of storage channels, increase the number
of array front- and back-end storage ports available, and increase network
bandwidth. implementing a well-designed infrastructure refresh delivers
With Mt. rainier technology, QLogic delivers a set of unique solutions
optimized to address the growing performance gap between what
the processor can compute and what the storage i/O subsystem
can deliver. With a very simple deployment model, this approach
seamlessly combines enterprise server i/O connectivity with shared,
server-based i/O caching. Mt. rainier delivers dramatic and— perhaps most importantly—smoothly scalable application performance
improvements to the widest range of enterprise applications. in
combination with the QLogic Cache Optimization Protocol™ (QCOP),
these performance benefits are transparently extended to today’s most
demanding active-active clustered environments. this white paper
provides a high-level introduction to the QLogic Mt. rainier technology.
Executive Summary