The document discusses all-flash storage arrays and their advantages over traditional storage arrays. The agenda includes discussing all-flash storage array performance and uptime essentials, best practices, and the importance of threshold and alerting. Traditional storage arrays have bottlenecks due to long seek times for hard disks, while all-flash arrays optimize CPU usage through faster solid state drives. All-flash arrays also offer benefits like data reduction, non-disruptive operations, and intelligent alerting based on key performance indicators. The presentation aims to demonstrate how all-flash arrays can provide simplicity, speed and scalability for applications.

1. BEYOND THE IOPS:
FLASH STORAGE ESSENTIALS
FOR PERFORMANCE & UPTIME

2. SPEAKERS
2© 2016 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Kong Yang
• SolarWinds Head Geek™
• Focus on application behavior and performance
optimization in any given environment
• US Patent Holder
• VMware® vExpert and Cisco® Champion
• With SolarWinds since 2014
Andrew Levin
• Pure Storage Product Manager for 3rd party tools
integrations
• Focus on manageability of FlashArray across key areas of
provisioning, capacity, performance and alerting
• On the mission to rid the data centers of spinning rust
• With Pure Storage since 2015

3.  All-flash storage array performance & uptime essentials
 With great powers come great responsibility
 All-flash storage arrays best practices
 Threshold and Alerting are key
AGENDA
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4.  Capacity efficiency with consistent performance
 Ease of use through abstraction
 High velocity from implementation through application stack
 Scalability in solutions stack (reduce storage footprint & increase app)
POWER: SIMPLICITY, SPEED AND SCALABILITY
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5. TRADITIONAL VS AFA STORAGE
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#ofIOPs
AverageLatency(ms)
# of spindles # of Applications
Traditional AFA

6. LINES LINES EVERYWHERE

7. TRADITIONAL PROCESS EFFICIENCY
CREATED BOTTLENECK IN STORAGE
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Process efficiency on CPU = wait time / processing time = 200 μs / 5200 µs = 3.8%
Vaughn Stewart, Pure Storage, 2015, VMUG USERCON, http://www.slideshare.net/vmugit/presentazione-purestorage-vmugit-usercon-2015

8. ALL-FLASH ARRAY PROCESS EFFICIENCY
UN-CORKS THE BOTTLENECK LEADING TO DRAMATICALLY FASTER RESPONSE TIME
8© 2016 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Process efficiency on CPU = wait time / processing time = 200 μs / 800 µs = 25%
Vaughn Stewart, Pure Storage, 2015, VMUG USERCON, http://www.slideshare.net/vmugit/presentazione-purestorage-vmugit-usercon-2015

9.  All-flash storage optimizes CPU
Agility: allow more IOPs per host
Lean: reduce the # of hosts
THE CPU UTILIZATION EFFECT
9© 2016 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Vaughn Stewart, Pure Storage, 2015, VMUG USERCON, http://www.slideshare.net/vmugit/presentazione-purestorage-vmugit-usercon-2015

10. Source: ESG report on Pure Storage resilience with converged, virtualized workloads including VMware Horizon View, Oracle®,
Exchange™ and other VM workloads running simultaneously
ESG Lab Validation- Download Request. Web. 31 May 2016.
CONSOLIDATE IN A FLASH
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11. WHY DATA REDUCTION MATTERS
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Increased
Performance
Adaptive
IO balancing
Improved
Storage Cost
More Reduction =
More Effective
Capacity
Mixed
Workloads
Variable Workloads
require variable
data-reduction
Longer
Lasting Flash
Less Bytes =>
Less Writes =>
Less Wear

12. PURE STORAGE® FLASH ARRAYS NOT JUST “STORAGE ARRAYS”
HIGHLY-AVAILABLE, NON-DISRUPTIVE DATA-REDUCING
ALL-FLASH STORAGE ARRAYS
The characteristics of both the “dataset” and the “workloads” matter when looking at performance
Non-Disruptive
Capacity Expansion
Non-Disruptive
Performance Expansion
Non-Disruptive
Hardware Replacement
Non-Disruptive
Software Updates

13. WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY
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14. ALERTING: RAGE AGAINST THE WALLS
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15.  KPIs from performance metrics
 All about the drive-thru
INTELLIGENT THRESHOLDS
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16. SIMPLE MEETS SIMPLE: DEMO
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17. Q&A
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18. 18
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Get the Geek’s
Perspective on the latest
tech trends & topics:
bit.ly/GeekSpeakBlog
Join the
conversation on
SolarWinds’
Community:
THWACK.com
SolarWinds Lab:
Lab.SolarWinds.com
© 2016 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

19. THANK YOU!
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