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1. Case Study
IBM Systems and Technology Group Education
Penn State slashes
backup time by
80 percent
RamSan delivers vastly better IOPS performance
than two hundred 15K disk drives
Overview
Business challenges
• RCC needed to speed up nightly
backups
Solution
• Use of Flash array instead of continuing
to increase the number traditional disk
spindles
Benefits
• Instant six times performance increase
in nightly backup
• Two 1U Flash arrays replaced 200
power-hungry 15K hard disks
• Reduced power consumption by
90 percent
• Flash storage system can scale to
10 TB
• Flash delivers affordable high speed
and reliability
• Requires less power to operate,
produces less heat and consumes less
rack space
The Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure (RCC) group at
Penn State University provides systems and services that are used
extensively in computational and data-driven research and teaching by
more than 5,000 faculty members and students.
The situation
Research initiatives slowed by HDD
To deliver on that mission, RCC operates computational clusters
composed of 1,000 servers with 10,000 CPU cores. RCC’s storage
infrastructure consists of a cluster of 14 servers running Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5. The servers are connected through 8 Gbps Fibre
Channel HBAs to 900 TB of disk storage on a Storage Area Network
(SAN) with that data served out over Ethernet to the computational
clusters.
The RCC storage cluster is built on General Parallel File System
(GPFS) of IBM®, a highly scalable clustered file system that leverages
file metadata to achieve policy-based active management of files for
backup, migration, archiving and index tagging of files. It also places an
extreme random I/O workload on the storage infrastructure by having
to process metadata for those files on an ongoing basis. The GPFS
metadata files are small—only 512 bytes—so capacity is not the issue.
Rather, the IOPS requirements to process millions of files on an
ongoing basis were overwhelming Penn State RCC’s SAN
infrastructure.

2. Case Study
IBM Systems and Technology Group Education
“With the RamSan we
literally just turned it on
and that’s all the
performance tuning we
did.It just worked out of
the box.”
—Michael Fenn
Systems Administrator
Penn State
“...it made sense to go with
a Flash media array
rather than continuing to
throw traditional disk
spindles at the problem.”
—Jason Holmes
Lead Systems Administrator
Penn State
The challenge
Speed up nightly backups
RCC had allocated two hundred 15K RPM hard disk drives to handle
the metadata processing that managed the nightly backup of user data.
The group had to overprovision capacity of the drives in an attempt to
generate acceptable IOPS to complete the backup operation in a brief
overnight window so as not to impact production processes.
Despite allocating a massive number of the disks to the operation, the
nightly incremental backup were still taking up to 6 hours and
degrading other system operations.
The solution
High-performance, reliable RamSan-810 flash storage
The team at RCC determined that a solid state storage solution was
needed to effectively handle the IOPS load and replace the HDDs,
which had been overprovisioned in an attempt to boost IOPS.
“We didn’t need the capacity but we did need the performance,” said
Vijay Agarwala, Sr. Director for Penn State’s RCC. ““There were
operations, such as nightly backups which have to check the status of all
the files in the system, that were being bottlenecked by the performance
of those disks. So it made sense to go with a Flash media array rather
than continuing to throw traditional disk spindles at the problem,” said
Jason Holmes, lead systems administrator at RCC.
The RCC team conducted an evaluation process with SSD products
from four vendors. It was not an easy process as RCC administrators
struggled with most of the SSD systems, tweaking and tuning them in
an attempt to wring out anything close to the promised performance.
Their experience with the RamSan-810 SSD from Texas Memory
Systems, an IBM Company was completely different.
The result
Instant six times performance boost
“With some of the other solutions we tested, we poked and pried at
them for weeks to get the performance where the vendors claimed it
should be,” said Michael Fenn, systems administrator at Penn State.
“With the RamSan we literally just turned it on and that’s all the
performance tuning we did. It just worked out of the box.”

3. Case Study
IBM Systems and Technology Group Education
Solution component
Hardware
• RamSan-810 Flash storage system
Penn State tested a pair of RamSan-810 1U flash storage systems in a
high-availability mirrored configuration that took advantage of the
replication functionality of GPFS. The RamSan units each contain
2 TB of solid state Flash storage and can be scaled up to 10 TB.
The RamSan-810 is the first Flash storage system from TMS to use
Enterprise Multi Level Cell (eMLC) Flash memory, a new technology
that features high speed and reliability paired with the affordability of
MLC. eMLC is perfect for read-intensive environments such as Penn
State’s. According to Holmes, the applications usage at RCC consists of
an 85/15 read-write ratio, so eMLC offered a better value than the
increased write performance—but higher cost—of a Single Level Cell
system, such as the RamSan-710.
The benefits for Penn State were immediate. After installing the
RamSan-810 systems, the nightly backup times improved by 6 times,
dropping from the previous 6 hours down to just 1 hour.
“GPFS allows us to move the metadata from the disk to the RamSan
online and once we did that the backups were reduced down to about
an hour. So that was a huge difference,” said Holmes. “TMS for this
application was the best solution largely because of its maturity and
performance. It seemed very stable and it just worked out of the box.

4. Another thing we’ve seen is increased responsiveness in the file system
with users, and commands like listing large directories run five times as
fast as they did previously. The IOPS capacity of the RamSan has
significantly speeded those up.”
Swapping 200 power-hungry 15K hard disks for two RamSan-810s
provided yet another benefit for RCC, reducing its power consumption
for metadata storage in the GPFS file systems by 90 percent, from
about 5000 watts down to just 500 watts. The power savings are just
part of the cascading cost savings that RamSan Flash storage creates.
RamSan Flash storage systems not only require less power to operate,
but also produce less heat and consumes less rack space, lowering data
center cooling and floor space costs.
Penn State is projecting that the current 2 TB capacity of the RamSan
will be sufficient for at least 2 - 3 years while retaining plenty of
expansion headroom of up to 10 TB for each RamSan-810. According
to Holmes, Penn State absolutely made the right decision in choosing
Texas Memory Systems.
“We’ve had zero problems with the RamSans. During the evaluation we
brought them in, plugged them in, zoned them into our Fibre Channel
SAN, created LUNs and they’ve just worked ever since then. They’re
very well made and a very mature product. Their support has been
exceptional.”
For more information
To learn more about Texas Memory Systems, an IBM Company please
contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner,
or visit the following website: ibm.com/storage/tms
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
IBM Corporation
Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
December 2012
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Texas Memory Systems,
RamSan-810 SSD and RamSan-710 are trademarks of
International Business Machines Corp., registered in many
jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names
might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current
list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at
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Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the
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This document is current as of the initial date of publication
and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are
available in every country in which IBM operates.
The performance data discussed herein is presented as derived
under specific operating conditions. Actual results may vary.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY
WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-
INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according
to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which
they are provided.
Actual available storage capacity may be reported for both
uncompressed and compressed data and will vary and may be
less than stated.
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