Empirical Architectural Analysis on Performance Scalability of Petascale All-Flash Storage Systems

In this paper, we first analyze a real storage system consisting of 72 SSDs utilizing either Hardware RAID (HW-RAID) or Software RAID (SW-RAID), and show that SW-RAID is up to 7× faster. We then reveal that with an increasing number of SSDs, the limited I/O parallelism in SAS controllers and multi-enclosure handshaking overheads cause a significant performance drop, minimizing the total I/O Per Second (IOPS) of a 144-SSD system to less than a single SSD. Second, we disclose the most important architectural parameters that affect a large-scale storage system. Third, we propose a framework that models a large-scale storage system and estimates the system IOPS and system resource usage for various architectures. We verify our framework against a real system and show its high accuracy. Lastly, we analyze a use case of a 240-SSD system and reveal how our framework guides architects in storage system scaling.