SSD SAN FLASH ARRAY

“Growing performance in an era of shrinking budgets”

Affirmed Systems | 150 West 80th Street | New York, NY 10024

www.affirmedsystems.com

About Affirmed Systems:Started in 2006 - As traditional IT consulting firm specializing in network systems architecture for financial exchanges and trading firms. First customers - NYBOT and CERBERUS CAPITAL MANAGEMENT.

Created CLOUD ASSURE ™ - High performance SSD based cloud hosting at Equinix datacenters. Providing minimum 10k IOPS per virtual machine.

Created TICKwatch™ & TICKtrace™ – End to end multicast market data feed reporting tools using nano-second granularity. Gives traders accuracy that market data applications often miss. Currently in BETA 2Q2013.

Current customers include - HFT, Prop trading firms and market makers on NYSE, NASDAQ, BATS, DIRECT EDGE, CME, ICE, EUREX, SGX, TSX, TSE.

Requirements of a storage area network in a trading firm? Centralized TickDB - Firms need enough data that can be RAPIDLY

accessed for back testing strategies, logging market data at high speeds, storing and replaying exchange data feeds to test algo’s or confirm trades.

Lower Entry Point - Many small groups, each with own P & L, Lack of centralized firm wide “buy in”. FX may want one technology, while options market making group wants another.

Mechanical drives are now out of the question - Even a raid-10 of 15k SAS drives on a high performance RoC (raid on chip) controller with 1GB nvram will not help – doesn’t help the “big data set” or unique query problem.

Extreme random read/write skew - changes dramatically as market conditions change. Some events cause more reads – some more writes. Lack of predictable IO.

The traditional Storage Area Network Appliance…

Lots of spinning disks…

Heavily invested in “Tiered Storage” solutions… with most expensive SLC SSD drives sold for Tier 1… ($10+ per GB)

Traditional SAN’s are designed and built for a different era in data storage…

Use Case:“Frequently accessed records can be kept on Tier 1 storage !”

Use Case:“If I can just CACHE SQL indexes on Tier 1 SSD Storage, I can serve slower huge tables out of Tier 2 !”

Who will buy SAN’s when companies…

No longer buy or deploy MS Exchange for email…

Move databases to free NoSQL to avoid costly “per core” licensing running the whole thing in cheap ram and using ultra fast/cheap ssd for crash persistence…

Why “tiered storage” will not work for the applications the world is moving to……

What data can be in “Tier 1” if EVERY query or structure update is unique?

•Key based and “memory to disk” based structures access data randomly with little use for sequential updates, changes, adds or deletes…

•These were designed to run in RAM but have now outgrown RAM and require crash persistence on really fast disk.

Storage Area Network 100% SSD with $25,000 entry point…

Server with Intel X520-T2 10Gbe nics (iscsi ToE)

10Gbe switch with iscsi capable “deep asics”

24 disk SAN with high performance MLC Disks, multiple 10Gbe Controllers.

100 % SSD ADVANTAGE: “Last byte is as fast as first...”

More details…

Server has multiple 10Gbps paths to LUNS shared out on different SAN Controllers

4 x 10Gbps links from SAN to Switch fabric

Luns 10, 20, 30 shared out CONTROLLER ALuns 40, 50, 60 shared out CONTROLLER BDiverse 10Gbps paths (1.25GBps per path)

Affirmed Systems SSD Deployment study

No 2 SSD’s are created equally…

Gen 1: Intel X25

Gen 2: OCZ Vertex 3/4

Gen 3: Samsung 840 Pro

Intel controller Indilinx Everest IIcontroller

Samsung MDXcontroller

Affirmed Systems SSD Deployment study

SSD Use case #1 – SAN based Storage Array

+

Raid-6 Disk Array in SAN

•Raid-10 not necessary to max controllers (2GB+ Random R/W @ 88K IOPS (tested)

•Less susceptible to multiple disk failure scenarios

Affirmed Systems SSD Deployment study

SSD Rebuild time for failed disk replacement

+X XRaid-6 2 disk failures – NO DATA LOSS

•Disks replaced on the fly during production (hot swap)

•5 TB Raid-6 rebuilt parity in under 60 Minutes (SAS 15k takes 12+ Hours)

Affordable does not mean SLOW!

Does your current Storage Area Network provide 2.5GByte/s and 80k to 200k IOPS?

If so what did it cost you?

Affirmed Systems | 150 West 80th Street | New York, NY 10024

www.affirmedsystems.com