Cisco - UCS - Invicta - Architecture

1. Products Overview

The Cisco UCS Invicta™ Scaling System is a next-generation, modular NAND flash-memory system that delivers highly scalable I/O operations per second (IOPS) and system throughput with ultra-low latency. Now you can serve up application workloads from a multitenant architecture in which I/O-intensive applications coexist without compromising performance

• Key value proposition for Cisco UCS Invicta products:

• - Substantial scaling architectural differentiator for Cisco UCS Invicta

• - Scale up has performance limitations

• - Scale out has management challenges

• Invicta has both scale-up and scale-out concurrently
• Gives customers flexibility for different workloads:

• - All SSRs are active, you decide which SSRs handle which IO loads

• - Targeted scale out

• - Aggregated scale up

• - Mixture of both

2. Architecture

Single Control Plane

Challenge – scaling performance as capacity grows:

• • Increasing capacity with no intelligence.

• • Controllers must handle management functions across all storage devices.

Challenge – performance predictability with features such as  de-duplication:

• • CPU intensive functions (i.e. de-duplication) impact overall array performance.

• • Performance does not scale linearly.

Duplicated/Distributed Control Plane

Advantage:

• • Add capacity and performance:

• - Devices should be uniform in size and function

Disadvantage:

• • Remote replication is complex:

• - Data is replicated across nodes to insure data availability

• • Performance or data reduction becomes an issue with variation of function

3.UCS Invicta C3124SA Appliance ..

• • 2 RU System

• • Front loading drives – behind bezel

• • Power cables and KVM cable provided for initialization

• • Tool – less Rail kits for square holes are provided and should be used for rack mounting

• • Front to back airflow

• • Weighs approximately 60 pounds or 28 kg

LSI SAS

• Used in PCIe slot 4
• Provides High Performance Internal SAS HBA Storage Connections for 24 2.5’’ Flash Drives
• 8 lanes of 6Gbps SAS matched with x8 lanes of PCI Express® 3.0 (8GB/s)
• Can achieve over 650K IOPs
• Not used as a RAID controller:
- RAID calculation performed in software by UCS Invicta OS BTL

Flash Drive

 Micron M500 SSD – 20nm multilevel cell (MLC) NAND flash in 2.5’’ format
• 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities
• Invicta OS manages the drives for optimum performance and life:
- Meta data created by Invicta OS keeps track of drive wear
- Meta data stored on the drives with the written 4K pages

4. The UCS Invicta Scaling System

Compare

Physical

• 6 to 240 TB RAW
• Up to 1.3 million IOPs
• Bandwidth 2.5 to 12 GBps
• Latency 200 microseconds
• Dimensions 8RU base configuration; 24RU fully expanded + 2RU for switches
• Power consumption:
- 350W per node
- 1,400W base unit
- 4,200W fully expanded to 10 Nodes

Performance

RAID6

• If a drive fails then remove and replace using GUI
• Right click and select Remove
• Drive can be manually failed if necessary
• Replaced drive can be added back to the RAID Set (RS0)
• RAID build time will vary, set to lower priority than primary IO