NetApp AFF A700s Performance Benchmark and Adaptive QoS

By | 2018-06-01

Some days after unboxing one of our NetApp AFF A700s, I’ve done some performance benchmark:

To utilize this controller, I needed:

  • 16x VMware VM and 16 different hypervisors, each VM:
  • 2 Cores, 4 GB RAM
  • Windows 7
  • 10 GbE Connection
  • IOmeter with 50 works, each 4k Blocksize, 100% Read, 100% Sequential

Without limitation, one A700s controller made about 382.000 IOPS. This means 764.000 IOPS for a 4U HA-System. Not bad! 😉

Workload            ID     IOPS       Throughput    Latency
--------------- ------ -------- ---------------- ---------- 
vol_test_data..   5500   382008       184.50MB/s   198.00us
vol_test_data..   5500   382400       184.70MB/s   196.00us
vol_test_data..   5500   381691       184.24MB/s   198.00us
vol_test_data..   5500   381314       184.08MB/s   197.00us
vol_test_data..   5500   382587       184.84MB/s   201.00us
vol_test_data..   5500   385484       185.99MB/s   198.00us
vol_test_data..   5500   380424       183.67MB/s   197.00us
vol_test_data..   5500   381304       184.05MB/s   194.00us

I couldn’t test the throughput, because the A700s has 4x 10 GbE uplink to the switches and the switches for the hole 10-Node Cluster have only 4x 10 GbE, too.

After testing unlimited, I wanted to test the new Adaptive QoS feature:

1 TB Volume, Adaptive QoS Performance (1000/TB, Peak 5000/TB):

Workload            ID     IOPS       Throughput    Latency
--------------- ------ -------- ---------------- ----------
vol_test_data..   5500     5007         2.59MB/s    76.73ms
vol_test_data..   5500     5012         3.01MB/s    68.74ms
vol_test_data..   5500     5014         2.72MB/s    73.09ms
vol_test_data..   5500     5009         2.90MB/s    72.57ms
vol_test_data..   5500     5012         2.90MB/s    73.69ms

5 TB Volume, Adaptive QoS Performance (1000/TB, Peak 5000/TB):

Workload            ID     IOPS       Throughput    Latency
--------------- ------ -------- ---------------- ----------
vol_test_data..   5500    25051        12.52MB/s    14.09ms
vol_test_data..   5500    25034        12.49MB/s    14.14ms
vol_test_data..   5500    25024        12.53MB/s    14.09ms
vol_test_data..   5500    25004        12.69MB/s    14.08ms
vol_test_data..   5500    25074        12.49MB/s    14.14ms

10 TB Volume, Adaptive QoS Performance (1000/TB, Peak 5000/TB):

Workload            ID     IOPS       Throughput    Latency
--------------- ------ -------- ---------------- ----------
vol_test_data..   5500    49856        24.62MB/s     6.88ms
vol_test_data..   5500    50011        24.72MB/s     6.86ms
vol_test_data..   5500    50012        24.76MB/s     6.88ms
vol_test_data..   5500    49908        24.68MB/s     6.88ms
vol_test_data..   5500    49883        24.74MB/s     6.88ms

1 TB Volume, Adaptive QoS Ultra (5000/TB, Peak 25000/TB):

Workload            ID     IOPS       Throughput    Latency 
--------------- ------ -------- ---------------- ---------- 
vol_test_data..   5500    24981        12.45MB/s    14.32ms 
vol_test_data..   5500    25011        12.50MB/s    14.18ms 
vol_test_data..   5500    25002        12.52MB/s    14.42ms 
vol_test_data..   5500    25014        12.54MB/s    14.32ms 
vol_test_data..   5500    24982        12.47MB/s    14.38ms 

5 TB Volume, Adaptive QoS Ultra (5000/TB, Peak 25000/TB):

Workload            ID     IOPS       Throughput    Latency 
--------------- ------ -------- ---------------- ---------- 
vol_test_data..   5500   125151        61.41MB/s     2.41ms 
vol_test_data..   5500   125123        61.35MB/s     2.37ms 
vol_test_data..   5500   125300        61.37MB/s     2.38ms 
vol_test_data..   5500   124780        61.24MB/s     2.42ms 
vol_test_data..   5500   124913        61.18MB/s     2.40ms 
vol_test_data..   5500   124956        61.28MB/s     2.38ms 
vol_test_data..   5500   124963        61.24MB/s     2.38ms 

10 TB Volume, Adaptive QoS Ultra (5000/TB, Peak 25000/TB):

Workload            ID     IOPS       Throughput    Latency
--------------- ------ -------- ---------------- ---------- 
vol_test_data..   5500   249716       121.83MB/s  1004.00us 
vol_test_data..   5500   249808       121.89MB/s   996.00us 
vol_test_data..   5500   249664       121.80MB/s  1021.00us 
vol_test_data..   5500   249774       121.83MB/s  1027.00us 
vol_test_data..   5500   249672       121.84MB/s  1012.00us 
vol_test_data..   5500   249682       121.76MB/s   997.00us 
vol_test_data..   5500   249806       121.80MB/s  1001.00us

Conclusion:

Adaptive QoS works like a charm, much better than the “normal” QoS.

For benchmarking I’ve used “allocated-space” as Peak IOPS Allocation, otherwise I had to create up to 10 TB of useless data in the volume(s). For later real usage, we better will use “used-space”, means the customer gets only the performance for the data he really uses and not performance for the size of the volume.

You maybe also want to define a Absolute Minimum IOPS, otherwise the customer gets minimal IOPS until he has consumed more data. For example, with the 1000IOPS/TB policy, he will only get 1 IOPS while consuming 1 GB of data. 50 oder 100 should be a good value for Minimum IOPS in my opinion.

2 thoughts on “NetApp AFF A700s Performance Benchmark and Adaptive QoS

    1. alex Post author

      9.3P4 – the newest 9.3 these days 🙂

      Reply

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