Storage

Micron 7300 SSD Brings Value to the Performance NVMe™ Equation for Red Hat Ceph Storage™

By Tony Ansley - 2020-02-26

Red Hat® Ceph Storage™ is one of the most popular software-defined storage (SDS) solutions available in the data center and cloud market. Micron stays aligned by updating offerings and architectures within our own Accelerated Ceph Storage Solution, which leverages standard X86 servers with Red Hat Ceph Storage running on Red Hat Linux. Now that Red Hat is designating Ceph as the default solution to provide persistent storage services for its Red Hat OpenShift® Container Platform, it will be even more important to many enterprise, on-premises, and hybrid-cloud deployments.

Today we want to let you know about our latest Ceph Reference Architecture (RA) using Micron 7300 NVMe® SSDs. This mainstream solution creates a solid basis for a scalable storage solution suitable for almost any storage need, such as big-data, OLTP, data warehouse, or persistent storage for a container infrastructure. Even though we are using a value-priced NVMe SSD, this new edition of our Ceph cluster still generates three million IOPS with four storage nodes. Need more storage capacity or performance? Simply add storage and monitor nodes as needed to scale to the desired size.

The Micron 7300 mainstream NVMe SSD family offers capacities up to 8TB with up to 3GB per second of read throughput and 1.9GB per second of write throughput, making the Micron 7300 a great option for a lower-cost Ceph solution that still cranks out the performance. Using the latest version of Red Hat Ceph Storage, the Micron 7300 enables more businesses to gain access to all the performance of NVMe SSDs within a smaller budget.

Flexible Options in Micron’s Portfolio

In January we announced the release of our Ceph RA using our high-performance Micron 9300 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD). The introduction of our Micron 7300 Ceph RA offers more options to better fit your business goals. We continue to work with AMD and Red Hat to create new, and update our existing solutions, providing even more flexibility. Each RA consists of a four-node Red Hat Ceph Storage cluster. The latest versions use the latest AMD EPYC™ 7002 series processors.

The Configuration

For this go-round, we used 10x 7.68TB 7300 PRO SSDs in each of four Ceph data nodes, resulting in a raw capacity of 307TB in four rack units (RU) of space. We used servers from Penguin Computing™ to host the drives, along with a pair of AMD EPYC 7742 processors and 512GB of advanced Micron DDR4-3200 DRAM. 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.

How Red Hat Ceph Storage is built

The Results

Our test results continue to prove that all-flash Ceph can generate massive performance over 5X higher transactions/second and queries/second than that of mixed/hard disk drive media. Specifically, the Micron 7300 SSD generated over 43GiB of random 4MiB object read throughput, over 21GiB of object write throughput, or up to three million 4KiB block read IOPS!

As a proven lower-cost NVMe option, the Micron 7300 SSD enables customers to get the performance they need without breaking the bank.

Sequential and Random Read Write Graphic

More Info

To learn more about our many Ceph solution RAs, visit our Micron Accelerated Ceph solution page. To see how the Micron 7300 can improve your solution, visit the Micron 7300 product page.

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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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