Storage

Micron and AMD: Red Hat Ceph Storage Will Power Your Applications Better Than Ever

By Tony Ansley - 2020-01-20

Micron has done it again!

Working with AMD and Red Hat®, we have updated our previous 4-node Red Hat Ceph Storage™ solution that uses our 9300 MAX NVMe® SSDs — using the latest AMD EPYC™ 7002 family of processors — to create the fastest Ceph software-defined storage solutions. Offering over three million I/O operations per second (IOPS) in four rack units (RUs), this solution is faster than our previous implementation by a million IOPS, thanks to the advanced high performance offered by the second-generation AMD EPYC processor.

The Micron 9300 enterprise NVMe SSD family offers capacities up to 15TB with “no compromise” symmetric read and write throughput1 (rated at 3500MB/s each way1), making the 9300 a great option for your Ceph needs. Using the latest version of Red Hat Ceph Storage, we have a more cost-effective2, high-performance Ceph solution than our previous 9300-based offering that used Intel Xeon MP.

The Configuration

For this go-round, we once again used 10x 12.8TB 9300 MAX SSDs in each of four Ceph data nodes, resulting in a raw capacity of 512TB in four RUs of space. We used servers from Penguin Computing™ to host the drives, along with a pair of AMD 7742 processors and 512GB of advanced Micron DDR4 DRAM in each server. On each node, we installed version 7.7 of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® to host Red Hat Ceph Storage, using the BlueStore storage engine for optimal performance on SSDs.

Red Hat

As always, we build our RAs with the understanding that our component choices may not fit your needs. Ceph is an amazingly flexible storage platform that excels with the AMD EPYC platforms we used, so feel free to select the right CPU for your needs. (But keep in mind that other platforms may show different results.)

The Results

Our test results proved that all-flash Ceph can generate massive performance. They demonstrated that we could generate more than 43GiB of random 4MiB object read throughput, more than 19GiB of object write throughput, or more than 3.1 million 4KiB block read IOPS! Performance like this will drive your applications to even higher levels than before.

Red Hat

We believe that advanced flash in the data center is now the norm rather than the exception. As we move to faster interfaces such as PCIe and NVMe and continue to store more and more data on a single device, costs continue to drop without any compromise to the great performance that we expect from flash. Pairing commodity servers with high-performance flash and advanced software-based storage functionality, you get all the performance that NVMe has been designed to provide — think 3500MB/s read AND write throughput1 and up to 850,000 read IOPS per SSD — at a much more attractive price point than in the past.

Download the full reference architecture PDF here: Micron 9300 MAX NVMe SSDs and Red Hat Ceph Storage for 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Processor  

To learn more about all our Ceph solution RAs, visit our Micron Accelerated Ceph Storage Solution page. To see how the Micron 9300 can improve your solution, visit our Micron 9300 product page.


1Available on 9300 PRO 7.68TB and 15.36TB and on 9300 MAX 6.4TB and 12.8TB offerings.

2Actual pricing may vary.

 

Amit Gattani

Tony Ansley

Tony is a 34-year technology leader in server architectures and storage technologies and their application in meeting customer’s business and technology requirements. He enjoys fast cars, travel, and spending time with family — not necessarily in that order.

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