so i've got a problem when it comes to building a storage server there are two
main options for your drives you can either go with ssds which are compact
and have amazing performance or you can go with traditional mechanical storage
which has the benefit of lower prices and outstanding capacity with the
drawback of being an order of magnitude
or more slower especially in highly
random workloads like if they were loaded up with a bunch of virtual
machines or in our case if they're pulling network storage duty for a whole
bunch of heavy users who are all trying to edit 8k videos at the same time if
only there were some way to
merge the benefits of both
with the drawbacks of neither
well there is it's called the apple fusion drive
and this episode is brought to you by ifixit the marlin screwdriver set from
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forward slash Linus at the link below
the concept of tiered storage is nothing new it's been commonplace in the data
center for many years and has even made its way down to the consumer level in
the form of Intel's rapid storage technology or rst which uses a small
fast SSD to accelerate a larger slower
mechanical drive and more recently Intel's octane memory technology which
does pretty much the exact same thing but with even faster optane rather than
nand ssds the problem that i'm running
into here is that most of the tiering solutions out there have one of two
problems they are either inordinately complicated to set up requiring
extensive knowledge of not just Linux but even broader storage architecture or
they are expensive because you are paying the folks who have the
aforementioned knowledge to create a turnkey solution for you
there are some exceptions to this however and i would like to explore a
couple of them so the popular freebsd based freenas software from ix systems
uses your system's RAM and its ssds to cache frequently used
data that's stored on your mechanical hard drives but the issue is that zfs's
particular implementation is geared more towards accelerating performance of
large databases and doesn't look like it's going to be great for our workload
because the file sizes that we want cached that we're storing on our hard
drives are so large like these are 8k
red video files and there are practical
limits to how much level 2 arc that
would be the SSD tier i mean there's also practical limits to how much RAM
you can put in a given system
so then the one we're gonna try today is the
built-in tiering mode for storage spaces
in Windows server and what better way to test this out than to set up a tiered
storage space on the network so i'm going to use this test server right here
and then have our team of editors just switch over to it and see what happens
and it's at this point then that we wondered whether or not optane would
make a difference for some of the heavy tasks that we deal with around the
office no no it does not now our regular editing
server uses 31 1.2 terabyte NVMe drives
and it was really expensive for us to build and they've been complaining that
there's not enough space on it because we've only got about 24 terabytes of
usable space after all the lost space to
redundancy on it and they were like oh well you could just upgrade it i went yeah okay
technically i do have another 17 bays that i could
fill up but that's going to cost me like seven grand eight grand even if i buy
used drives on ebay so i was
looking for another way so our test server here the config is
pretty straightforward i've got four 10
terabyte drives then because i want to see exactly how much
cash you need this is what really got me thinking about it
Intel uses just 32 gigs of cash
for large multi-terabyte hard drives and we've
seen real world huge increases in performance so i went okay let's try
this so i took two of their 900 series
optane pci express drives and then i've got a total of 40 terabytes of
mechanical storage and i want to see if for a fraction of the price
we can get good enough performance that
the editors aren't gonna run into a bottleneck
so you can see i've got my four mechanical drives i've got my two ssds
uh allocation is all gonna be automatic so i go ahead and i try to create a pool
okay i've created a pool now i try to
create a virtual disk create storage tiers on this virtual disk it should
automatically detect which ones are your fast drives and which ones are your
capacity drives so we're going to use mirroring because
that way we're protected from a drive failure we're going to use fixed
provisioning and now we get to specify the size of our faster and our standard
tier we're going to go ahead and select the maximum sizes failed to create
virtual disks not supported so the issue is that the gui version of storage
spaces doesn't have some very important
options like selecting how many columns you want
so when you only have two drives and the
default is three columns it spits out this stupid error how did
nobody at microsoft notice this for
years anyway doesn't matter
i called in a lifeline led eater over on the forum as a guru when it comes to
this stuff so i'm just going to pull up his dm over there and follow his
instructions to hopefully do this in powershell so this will be fun you guys
are going to be learning right along with me i haven't done this before the
video so i can still use the gui to create my storage pool apparently
i'm going to go ahead and do that then i need to fire up powershell and
change the default number of columns
okay well i don't know what i just did
but i'm going to change it to mirror
number of columns default one i think i think we did that let's
find out so i think the command i just entered
changed the mirror layout default
to one column it did not
okay uh so i'm using powershell ise now
and this seems to be working better
mirror number of columns default one
come on so mad right now
i just i just want to change a stupid
setting it's definitely called
mirror it's definitely called storage pool one like i create
these commands using their own thing
we'll figure this out at some point the good news is there's a backup plan
i swear i had this working at one point
what is this oh okay oops actually yeah
oops all right
here we go so right now we've only got a 10 gig link i can put a faster card in
here if it ends up being a networking bottleneck but for now what we need to
do is grab a bunch of
just like video projects that are actually current and copy them to our
tiered storage drive here the idea is that i want to bring over more than
would comfortably fit in the cache and then i want the editors during our test
to open up first a whole set of completely different projects from each
other then close those open up a new set
go back open the other ones and evaluate the performance for themselves
so we're back and we settled into a steady transfer speed of anywhere from
200 to 300 plus megabytes a second
and all of our projects are over on here so
i guess all that's left for me to do then is go interrupt the editing team
no no no so i just need to know if you guys all
hit this and try to edit 8k footage at the same time
will you notice slow downs because i know some people are
sensitive to slow downs so here's the idea
i don't even know what a network share is this is the network share but i don't
know what that is uh so everyone kind of pick a project and
open it and start doing video editor things whatever those are work the way
you would normally work because full is going to be affected by like your system
as well so the idea
is that once it arrives it gets cached in the fast tier so i
just wanted to get a feel for what this is like ed are you opening a project oh
you're coding wait you're encoding it oh uh exporting probably isn't a very
stressful test okay what are you doing taren i uh
i don't know can you try doing some more editory things like pretend to edit this
i'm moving stuff around i you know keep pretending pretend to do your job
yes can you go back and play that sequence again
and see if it's any better how fast would you expect it to be
like is this normal or it's a little bit faster
it's not that way okay just hold on a second i haven't i
haven't given up on saving money yet so the thing i want to find out now is
if you guys keep doing stuff will it get any better
so i'm starting to come around to the realization that
maybe tiered storage solutions
aren't grab and go because in every environment you'd want
your tiers to behave in a completely different manner
like if there was some programmability in storage spaces where i could say okay
take all the newest files that come in and assume they are important
until such time as they do not get accessed for
a very long period or until such time as something new comes in and
bumps it out then it would be less likely for those
guys to open up a project and have it chug until
storage spaces goes oh this is important and can promote it from the slow
mechanical tier so it's possible that if i had a much much larger fast NVMe tier
we wouldn't run into this issue because this is really a very heavy load for
four hard drives and two ssds but the problem is that that would
require me to basically build that entire server without even knowing that
it would work so you are dropping i'm dropping 90 of
my frames can you rate your editing experience out of 10 for me here there's
like little moments of seven out of ten
but then overall it's more like a three out of ten sorry you're saying this is
better than waning a little bit maybe all right everyone just go back to wanik
unmap the drive throw it all in the garbage
so that's pretty much it i am
coming to the the the acceptance stage
in the in the stages of grief here um
where i'm realizing that if we want
more capacity of our high performance network storage
i'm just going to have to pull out the wallet and make it happen
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