Boosting Storage Performance and Resilience with the Dell PERC H755N NVMe RAID Controller
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Summary
Hardware RAID technology adds an extra level of resilience to a server’s storage capability. RAID levels like 1, 5, and 6 allow seamless recovery from drive failures. With the Dell PERC H755N, Next Gen Dell PowerEdge servers now support hardware RAID with NVMe drives. This adds an extra level of resilience to the fantastic performance of NVMe.
Introduction
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) has been around for many years. It allows for increased resilience and reliability for critical storage applications. RAID levels of 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 offer different levels of redundancy. Depending on the application requirements and business limitations, a specific RAID level could be chosen.
With the advent of NVMe SSDs, storage performance got a tremendous boost. Hardware RAID solutions of the time were not capable of keeping up with the NVMe interface. Software RAID was a potential solution, but it lacked some key HW RAID advantages like low CPU overhead and battery backup for data in flight.
The new Dell PERC H755N changes that limitation. Sitting in a x8 PCIe Gen4 slot, each H755N RAID Controller supports up to 8 NVMe drives, connected with a x2 PCIe Gen4 interface. This ensures that the RAID Controller can keep up with the sheer bandwidth supported by NVMe drives.
The TPCx-V Benchmark
The TPCx-V Benchmark measures the performance of a virtualized server platform under a demanding database workload. It stresses CPU and memory hardware, storage, networking, hypervisor, and the guest operating system. The workload is database-centric and models many properties of cloud services, such as multiple VMs running at different load demand levels1.
This benchmark is a great real-world benchmark for a very common customer use case. It runs a variety of database workloads, and even varies the workload depending on the size of the virtual machine. One of the requirements of TPCx-V is to ensure redundancy in the system under test. This means that the system should be able to recover from hardware failures of field replaceable items including drives and/or storage controllers.
TPCx-V and the Dell PowerEdge R7525
The Dell PowerEdge R7525 is a very versatile server that can be used for a variety of applications. It can be configured with up to 2 redundant H755N NVMe RAID Controllers, and 2 of the AMD Epyc 3rd Generation of processors. The AMD Epyc 3rd Generation of processors offers up to 64 cores per socket, for a total of up to 128 cores. They also support 8 channels of DDR3200 memory per socket with up to two DIMMs per channel. This totals up to 4TB of RAM if 128GB DIMMs are used. It also features up to 160 lanes of PCie Gen4 connectivity for maximum versatility.
All of the above means that the Dell PowerEdge R7525 is a strong candidate for the TPCx-V benchmark. The number of cores and the support for high speed memory is very suited for virtualization use cases. The AMD Epyc 3rd Generation of processors has also been found to be great for database kind of workloads. The available redundant NVMe RAID Controllers ensures that the storage would be able to withstand failures while also providing exceptional NVMe type performance.
Results
The TPCx-V benchmark was run on a Dell PowerEdge R7525 with dual H755N RAID Controllers, and the AMD Epyc 7713 processors. This is 64 core processor from the AMD Epyc 3rd generation of CPUs. The system was configured with 6 NVMe drives per controller.
The output was a benchmark score of 2800 TpsV, which is 22.8% higher than the previous world record score. The previous world record was run on a platform with 2 64 core AMD Epyc 2nd generation of processors and 10 SATA SSDs per controller. The ability of the configuration to achieve the much higher score with almost half the number of drives highlights the performance advantages of the NVMe RAID Controller over a configuration with SATA SSDs
Conclusion
The Dell PowerEdge R7525 running AMD Epyc 3rd Generation of processors and leveraging the Dell PERC H755N NVMe RAID Controllers is shown to be a leading performer for database kind of workloads running in virtualized environments.