The document discusses five key problems in business-critical NFS deployments, including metadata bottlenecks, rogue clients, server latency, poor write performance, and cluster node bottlenecks. It highlights the importance of real-time monitoring and optimization strategies to enhance NFS performance and prevent issues before they affect users. Additionally, it introduces Virtual Instruments' NAS performance probe as a solution for understanding and analyzing NFS performance metrics.

1. The Five Problems Facing Business-Critical NFS
Deployments
In this webinar you will learn how to detect
and overcome:
● Metadata Bottlenecks
● Rogue Clients & Noisy Neighbor issues
● Server/VM Latency issues
● Poor Write Performance
● Cluster Node Bottlenecks
On Demand
Webinar
For audio playback and Q&A go to:
http://bit.ly/5NFSProblems

2. ● Analyst firm focused on storage, cloud
and virtualization
● Knowledge of these markets is gained
through product testing and interaction
with end users and suppliers
● The results of this research can be
found in the articles, videos, webinars,
product analysis and case studies on
our web site:
http://storageswiss.com
Who Is Storage Switzerland?

3. Our Speakers
George Crump is the founder of Storage
Switzerland, the leading storage analyst focused on
the subjects of big data, solid state storage,
virtualization, cloud computing and data protection.
He is widely recognized for his articles, white papers,
and videos on such current approaches as all-flash
arrays, deduplication, SSDs, software-defined
storage, backup appliances, and storage networking.
He has over 25 years of experience designing
storage solutions for data centers across the US.

4. Our Speakers
CTO John Gentry is responsible for being the
voice of the customer and understanding the
key IT infrastructure industry trends that affect
product strategy and strategic alliances. With
Virtual Instruments since 2009, John brings
over 20 years of IT industry experience and
has held a number of senior level sales, sales
engineering and product marketing positions
at industry leaders such as Qlogic, Borland,
McData, and CNT. John earned his BS degree
from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

5. Who Is Virtual Instruments?
Global Leader in Infrastructure Performance Analytics
• Founded in 2008
• HQ in San Jose, CA
• Global 2000 Customers
• Every Major Vertical
• 45 of the Fortune 100
• Merged with Load DynamiX in April 2016
Change
Impact
Analysis
Technology
Evaluation
Product
Evaluation
Infrastructure
Optimization
Production
Performance
And Availability
Management

6. Mission Critical NFS Use Cases
• Databases on NFS
• Virtualization on NFS
• NFS as a Front End to
Object/Cloud Storage
• NFS for Performance
Sensitive Unstructured
Data

7. Polling Question
What % of Your Workloads are Running on
NFS?

8. The Advantages Of Mission Critical
NFS
• Simple to Manage
• More Granular control over
Data (file vs. volume)
• In many cases
performance neutral

9. Metadata Bottlenecks
• Metadata operations are at least 50% of
NFS traffic, often 80-90%
• Several NFS solutions have the ability to
move metadata traffic to flash, but this is
often still insufficient
• Identifying a metadata performance issue is
very difficult
• Typical workarounds

10. Scale
• As NFS inherits more workloads,
workload variability becomes a
problem, especially with
virtualization
• More workloads means greater
capacity consumption and more
metadata
• Typical workaround is scale-out NAS

11. Scale-Out NAS Challenges
• Scale-out NAS is an interconnected set of
servers called storage nodes
• The file system is typically striped across
those nodes
• Most metadata handling is performed by
one node in the cluster (bottleneck)
• The nodes must stay in sync - Extra
network I/O

12. Rogue Clients & Noisy Neighbor
Issues
• Rogue Clients/Noisy Neighbors
can starve other resources
• Particularly difficult to identify IP
based rogue clients/noisy
neighbors
• Compounded by virtualization
• Typical workarounds

13. • Need real-time monitoring to
assess latency issues
• Ability to measure SLA
adherence is practically non-
existent
Server/VM Latency Issues & SLA
Adherence

14. • Large sequential files xfer rate a
challenge
• One fix is to use ‘async’ at cost of
potential data loss
• Another is to go from RAID 5 or 6
to RAID 10
• Or play with datasync and
writesync, and transfer settings
Poor Write Performance

15. ●Most IP Infrastructures Are not Optimized for Mission
Critical NAS
○ Storage Traffic is Different
○ Typical Workarounds
■ Buy more hardware
■ Faster Network
■ Faster or Scale-Out NAS
■ Flash, Flash and more Flash
●Infrastructure Optimization Should Happen First!
Summary

16. MAXIMIZE
AVAILABILITY
Identify & resolve problems before
users are affected
Prevent & eliminate unplanned
outages and slowdowns
OPTIMIZE COST
Match purchasing & deployment
decisions to your application
workload I/O profiles
Maximize utilization of existing IT
assets
GUARANTEE
PERFORMANCE
Monitor and optimize infrastructure
& workload performance
Accelerate & de-risk IT
infrastructure changes and
transformations
The 3 Pillars of Virtual Instruments Value for IT
Making Applications & Infrastructure
Perform Better Together

17. The VI Solution Architecture
Production storage Lab storage
SAN and NAS
Performance
Probes
Virtual Server
Probe
NTAP Storage
Software
Probe
Network
Switch Probe
Workload Generation Appliance
Workload
Data Importer
TAP
Switch
Servers and VMs
VirtualWisdom
Management Platform
Workload
Sensor

18. 17
VirtualWisdom Entity Centric Model
Intelligent
Topology
Case-based
Alarms
Live
Reports
Applied
Analytics
Entity Centric view of
Application Infrastructure

19. The New Virtual Wisdom NAS Performance Probe
• Full 10G line rate monitoring of NAS protocols for 16 concurrent ports in a single 2U
device
• Initial support for NFSv3; software upgradability to SMBv3 and NFSv4 in 2017
• Workload and response time metrics captured for every read and write operation
• Provides performance, capacity and health info for every attached client and server
• Out-of-band, vendor-agnostic on the wire approach
• Enables unprecedented visibility to incoming requests by client to identify rogue clients
• Compatible with existing optical TAP / TAP Patch Panels

20. Metrics Analyzed by VW NAS Performance Probe
• Link metrics
• Health, Utilization, SFP Diagnostics
• Flow Metrics for Commands
• Procedure rates/counts, pending
procedures
• Response times, Avg payload, sum of
payload, …
• RPC Statistics
• RPC counts, NLM counts, …
• Hot file metrics
• Reported for top X files per interval
• File size/path attributes, …

21. New NAS Performance Probe
• Released with
VirtualWisdom 5.0
• New wide-screen
dashboard with
improved
navigation and
dark background
• Extremely
customizable
dashboard – here
showing addition
of VM probe
metrics

22. ProbeNAS NFSv3 Performance & Flow Analysis
The VW NAS Probe
allows you to
understand NFS
overall performance

23. ProbeNAS NFSv3 Performance & Flow Analysis
and by Client/Server
flows.

24. Using VirtualWisdom Applied Analytics to find
Root Causes
Balance Finder Trend Matcher
Event Advisor
Balance Finder automatically determines if the environment
is balanced or imbalanced, and tracks indicators of any
change in the balance of an environment
Trend Matcher enables you to identify the
probable source of a recognized event and the
other entities that might also be affected
Event Advisor lets you quickly determine if there
are any trends or events that should be
investigated or noted across the entire environment
Data-informed prediction of resource needs. Learns
from “seasonal” business patterns—whether a season
is hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.
Seasonal Trend Advisor

25. Using VirtualWisdom Applied Analytics to
Suggest Changes
Queue Solver
Queue Solver examines actual historical host configuration
settings (HBA queue depths) and performance data to
provide recommendations to optimize the system-wide
performance
VM Coordinator
VM Coordinator allows you to see the optimal placement of
your virtual machines across your cluster to eliminate over-
provisioning and unnecessary re-balancing
VM Deployment Advisor
Identifies the optimal cluster and host to deploy a
VM, based on available capacity and expected VM
workload across CPU, Memory, I/O and Network.

26. ProbeNAS Advanced Analytics Example
Event Advisor:
Lets you quickly determine if
there are any trends or
events that should be
investigated or noted across
the entire environment
Trend Matcher:
Automatically correlates
events across entire set of
relevant metrics to quickly
determine root cause.

27. Customer Case Study: NAS Performance
Probe (Financial Services Beta user)
Challenge NAS Performance Probe Solution
1. On-going performance
problems for months that
were not resolved even
after a storage upgrade.
With VirtualWisdom, in a few hours, customer discovered the issue was a
single rogue client issuing ~30,000 requests/sec, doing file based
replication and scanning the file system. The VW Trend Matcher analytics
found the client issuing the thousands of GetAttr procedures. Change in
scheduling and frequency solved the problem
2. New users could not
access the NFS storage
once a max number of
client sessions were
reached.
The NFS storage would not accept additional client sessions once it
reached its maximum. The customer used VirtualWisdom metric
‘Maximum Concurrent Total NFS Procedures’ with a time-based
comparison; set up an alarm threshold for proactive notification at 80% of
limit to avoid the problem.
3. Customer did not have a
consistent way of
resolving NFS issues.
With VirtualWisdom, customer was able to develop a report that any admin
could use to investigate when a user complains. Type in IP address and
see which mount point they’re having problems with.

28. Summary:
The industry’s 1st real-time NAS Monitoring Solution
• VI expanding into new markets
• Enhanced GUI for VirtualWisdom5
• Meeting the performance needs of NAS users
• Leveraging our SAN monitoring expertise
• Part of our comprehensive IPA platform

29. Thank you!
Storage Switzerland
http://www.storageswiss.com
georgeacrump@storageswiss.com
StorageSwiss on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/storageswiss
StorageSwiss on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/storageswiss
Virtual Instruments
http://www.virtualinstruments.com
Virtual Instruments on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/Virtual_Inst
Virtual Instruments on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/sos4sans
Virtual Instruments on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/virtualinstruments

30. The Five Problems Facing Business-Critical NFS
Deployments
For complete Audio and Q&A please register for the On Demand Version at:
http://bit.ly/5NFSProblems