More on the Flash Module for the P9500
Last week, I had a blog post and video I did of the Flash Module for the P9500 - something I learned about while at HP Discover. Things were just a wee bit busy for me and I didn't have time to learn much about the Flash Module while at Discover, but I called Ayman Abouelwafa. Ayman is a senior architect in our enterprise storage lab and my go-to engineering guy when I need to understand something about P9500. Ayman was in one of my first video blogs and was very helpful in doing a video we did talking about our collaboration with Hitachi Japan.
After talking to him, I realized there was a lot I didn't get from my 4 minute conversation at HP Discover - so here's a bit more of what I learned from Ayman. First he told me about some new firmware.
Performance Accelerator
- Ayman and his team worked with Hitachi Japan on Performance Accelerator, a new firmware-based program that significantly enhances the back-end random performance, targeting SSD and flash media.
- This significantly expands the P9500 frame-limit for random IOPs. Ayman told me the firmware enables around a million IOPs per P9500. Wow!
- There were 32 areas of microcode that were modified to create the Performance Accelerator Data Path
- These changes improve random reads by about 2.8x and random writes by ~ 1.6x. Sequential performance wasn't affected.
More on the Flash Module for P9500
I had Ayman help me better understand some slides he had sent me about the new Flash Module and 
- Each Flash Module Drive (FMD) is 1.6TB of capacity. The minimum configuration is 4 FMDs (6.4TB) and up to 48 FMDs (76.8TB) can be installed in one Flash Module Chassis
- Up to 2 Flash Module Chassis and 96 FMDs (153.6TB) can be installed in a 1 DKC system
- Up to 4 Flash Module Chassis and 192 FMDs (307.2TB) can be installed in a 2 DKC system
Finally, Ayman helped me understand some of the performance testing his lab has done. This was impressive stuff and really what I wanted to share with you. Ayman said conservatively he was able to see 1 million IOPs at SSD response times with FMD's in a P9500.
He also did some comparative testing of SSD and FMD's. Ayman tested 7D + 1P parity groups of FMDs and SSDs to get some relative performance differences between the two. Here's what he saw:
- As with any performance data, your results may vary but I think this relative performance that I'll talk about gives you a good idea on the difference between SSD and FMD performance with the P9500.
- For a single parity group, random read IOPs were 400% faster while random writes were a little less than 2X faster. Sequential reads were 300% faster (GB/sec) while sequential writes were the same.
- For 2 parity groups, random reads were about 300% faster and random writes were 200% faster.
- I asked Ayman when should a customer go with SSD vs. Flash Module Drives - his answer was that it is something you should discuss with your pre-sales storage architect but if your looking at more than 1 parity group (more than 8 drives) you should look at FMD.
Pretty impressive for P9500 customers! Check out the P9500 hp.com product page for more on the P9500: hp.com/go/P9000
