Cloud applications help enterprises to build and run scalable applications in modern and dynamic multi-cloud environments. The PowerFlex family reduces operational complexities to deliver better performance and serve the basic needs of cloud technologies, for example, Cloud native Kubernetes stateful applications. Essential requirements of Cloud native Kubernetes Stateful Applications are Optimized storage platform for cloud native applications that demand low latency and high throughput, also linear scaling of container platform with consistent response times create, control, and manage volumes in your storage platform for Kubernetes stateful applications.
The PowerFlex family is optimized for Kubernetes for the following reasons:
Persistent storage
Persistent Storage is supported through PowerFlex utilizing a Container Storage Interface plugin (This CSI plugin is an interface between the logical volumes in the Kubernetes environment called persistent volumes and the storage volumes or LUNs) for Kubernetes, supporting features for block storage integration which includes dynamic provisioning.
PowerFlex support for storage volumes using the CSI driver
CSI, container storage interface, is a standard for exposing file and block storage to containerized workloads on Kubernetes, OpenShift. It helps third-party storage providers such as PowerFlex to write plugins for OpenShift to consume storage from backends as persistent storage.
Performance
SAS SSDs and Non-Volatile Memory Express aka NVMe address the Stateful application performance and scaling challenges, so that storage is no longer the restriction. PowerFlex can aggregate storage resources and distribute data uniformly across hundreds of nodes, busting an IO bottleneck and providing abundant throughput and scalability.
Cloud Evolutions tested and verified that the PowerFlex platform is a high-performance solution both resilient and highly scalable. The objective of the testing conducted by Cloud Evolutions was to bench-mark performance of the PowerFlex Software Defined Storage platform with KIOXIA PM5 Series SAS SSDs, with Kubernetes orchestrating stateful applications on its platform.
The test platform consists of 8 nodes, each with an instance of Kubernetes and CassandraDB PODs, in order to assess Input/output (i.e. IO), using the FIO tool to benchmark the platform with Dell EMC PowerFlex and Kubernetes PODS, capturing IOPS and latency. And Platform performance, using the Cassandra Stress tool when CassandraDB is deployed in containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. Operations/sec and median latency are considered to measure the performance of Cassandra deployed on the PowerFlex family.
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The results of performance benchmarking executed on Kubernetes PODS on PowerFlex proved exceptional. i.e. 1.39 million IOPS with sub-millisecond latency on this PowerFlex family with KIOXIA PM5 Series SAS SSDs optimized for Kubernetes.
The charts depict (shown below) results of a variety of read, write and mixed read and write workloads. With reads and writes fairly distributed on each node in the cluster, the results showed that the PowerFlex family achieved:
Total data populated within 32 Cassandra pods: 18 Billion records (~4.5 TB).
Total records read: 320 Million records.
Over 302,000 operations per second (ops/sec) for 100% reads.
Over 271,000 ops/sec for 100% writes.
Over 260,000 ops/sec for mixed workloads of 50 percent reads and 50 percent writes, with median latency of 1.2 milliseconds at 150 threads.
Consistent linear scaling of ops/sec as more CassandraDB PODS were added to the cluster, from 8 to 32 PODS, without impacting latency.
All the results show that PowerFlex family offers superior performance, scalability, and reliability in an 8-node, multiple Cassandra POD configuration. Testing also supports the idea that if your real-time data is growing exponentially, this optimized platform “Dell EMC PowerFlex family”, KIOXIA SSDs, Kubernetes, and CassandraDB is the preferred and most robust solution. Testing highlighted that CassandraDB’s performance on the PowerFlex family, orchestrated by Kubernetes, can offer new levels of reliability, flexibility, and performance.
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