Optane DC Persistent Memory – Proven, industrial strength or full of hype – Detail, part 3

In this final of a three part series, we will explore the two other major “benefits” of Optane DIMMs: fast restart and TCO.

Fast restart

HANA, as an in-memory database, must be loaded into memory to perform well.  Intel, for years and, apparently up to current times, has suffered with a major bottleneck in its I/O subsystem.  As a result, loading a single terabyte of data into memory could take 10 to 20 minutes in a best-case scenario.  Anecdotally, some customers have remarked that placing superfast, all flash subsystems, such as IBM’s FlashSystem 9100, behind an Intel HANA system resulted in little improvement in load times compared to mid-range SSD subsystems.  For customers attempting to bring up a 10TB storage/20TB memory HANA system, this could result in load times measured in hours.  As a result, a faster way of getting a HANA system up and running was sorely needed.

This did not appear to be a problem for customers using IBM’s Power Systems.  Not only has Power delivered roughly twice the I/O bandwidth of Intel systems for years, but with POWER9, IBM introduced PCIe Gen4, further extending their leadership in this area.  The bottleneck is actually in the storage subsystem and number of paths that it can drive, not in the processor.  To prove this, IBM ran a test with 10 NVMe cards in PCIe slots and was able to drive load speeds into HANA of almost 1TB/min.[I].  In other words, to improve restart times, Power Systems customers need only move to faster subsystems and/or add more or faster paths.

This suggests that Intel’s motivation for NVDIMMs may be to solve a problem of their own making.  But this also raises a question of their understanding of HANA.  If a customer is running a transactional workload such as Suite on HANA, S/4 or C/4, and is using HANA System Replication, wouldn’t at least one of the pair of nodes be available at all times?  SAP supports near zero upgrades[ii], so systems, firmware, OS or even HANA itself may be updated on one of the pair of nodes while the other continues to operate, followed by a synchronization of changed data and a controlled failover so that the first node might be updated.  In this way, cold restarts of HANA, where a fast restart option might make a big difference, may be driven down into a very rare occurrence.  In other words, wouldn’t this be a better option than causing poor performance to everything due to radically slower DIMMs compared to DRAM as has been discussed in gory detail on the previous two posts of this series?

HANA also offers a quick restart option whereby HANA can be started and the database made available within minutes even though all of the columns have not yet been loaded into memory. Yes, performance will be pretty bad until all columns are loaded into memory, but for non-production systems and non-mission critical systems, this might be an acceptable option.  Lastly, with HANA 2.0 SPS04, SAP now supports fast restart with conventional memory.[iii]  This only works when the OS stays up and running, i.e. can’t be used when the system, firmware or OS is being updated, but this can be used for the vast majority of required restarts, e.g. HANA upgrades, patches and restarts when a bounce of the HANA environment is needed.  Though this is not mentioned in the help documentation, it may even be possible to patch the Linux kernel while using the fast restart option if SUSE SLES is used with their “Live Patching” function.[iv]

TCO

Optane DIMMs are less expensive than DRAM DIMMs.  List prices appears to be about 40% cheaper when comparing same size DIMMs.  Effective prices, however, may have a much smaller delta since there exists competition for DRAM meaning discounts may be much deeper than for the NVDIMMs from Intel, currently the only source.  This assumes full utilization of those NVDIMMs which may prove to be a drastically bad assumption.  Sizing guidance from SAP[v]shows that the ratio of DRAM vs. PMEM (their term for NVDIMMs) capacity can be anything from 2:1 to 1:4, but it provides no guidance as to where a given workload might fall or what sort of performance impact might result.  This means that a customer might purchase NVDIMMs with a capacity ratio of 1:2, e.g. 1TB DRAM:2TB PMEM, but might end up only being able to utilize only 512GB or 1TB PMEM due to negative performance results.  In that case, the cost of effective NVDIMMs would have instantly doubled or quadrupled and would, effectively, be more expensive than DRAM DIMMs.

But let us assume the best rather than the worst.  Even if only a 2:1 ratio works relatively well, the cost of the NVDIMMs, if sized for that ratio, would be somewhat lower than the equivalent cost of DRAM DIMMs. The problem is that memory, while a significant portion of the cost of systems, is but one element in the overall TCO of a HANA landscape.  If reducing TCO is the goal, shouldn’t all options be considered?

Virtualization has been in heavy use by most customers for years helping to drive up system utilization resulting in the need for fewer systems, decreasing network and SAN ports, reducing floor space and power/cooling and, perhaps most importantly, reducing the cost of IT management.  Unfortunately, few high end customers, other than those using IBM Power Systems can take advantage of this technology in the HANA world due to the many reasons identified in the latest of many previous posts.[vi]  Put another way, if a customer utilizes an industrial strength and proven virtualization solution for HANA, i.e. IBM PowerVM, they may be able to reduce TCO considerably[vii]and potentially much more than the relatively small improvement due to NVDIMMs.

But if driving down memory costs is the only goal, there are a couple of ideas that are less radical than using NVDIMMs worth investigating.  Depending on RTO requirements, some workloads might need an HA option, but might not require it to be ready in minutes.  If this is the case, then a cold standby server running other workloads which could be killed in the event of a system outage could be utilized, e.g. QA, Dev, Test, Sandbox, Hadoop.  Since no incremental memory would be required, memory costs would be substantially lower than that required for System Replication, even if NVDIMMs are used. IBM offers a tool called VM Recovery Manager which can instrument and automate such a configuration.

Another option worth considering, only for non-production workloads, is a feature of IBM PowerVM called Memory Deduplication.  After different VMs are started using “a shared memory pool”, the hypervisor builds a logical memory map.  It then scans the pages of each VM looking for identical memory pages at which time it uses the logical memory map to point each VM to the same real memory page thereby freeing up the redundant memory pages for use by other workloads.  If a page is subsequently changed by one of the VMs, the hypervisor simply recreates a unique real memory page for that VM. The upshot of this feature is that the total quantity of DRAM memory may be reduced substantially for workloads that are relatively static and have large amounts of duplication between them. The reason that this should not be used for production is because when the VMs start, the hypervisor has not yet had the chance to deduplicate the memory pages and, if the sum of logical memory of all VMs is larger than the total memory, paging will occur.  This will subside over time and may be of little consequence to non-production workloads, but the risk to performance for production might be considered unacceptable and, besides, “Memory over-commitment must not be used” for production HANA according to SAP.

Summary

Faster restarts than may be possible with traditional Intel systems may be achieved by using near zero HANA upgrades with System Replication, HANA fast restart or by switching to a system with a radically faster I/O subsystem, e.g. IBM Power Systems. TCO may be reduced with tried and proven virtualization technologies as provided with IBM PowerVM, cold standby systems or memory deduplication rather than experimenting with version 1.0 of a new technology with no track record, unknown reliability, poor guidance on sizing and potentially huge impacts to performance.

 

[i]https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/WQDZWBYJ

[ii]https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/1984882

[iii]https://help.sap.com/viewer/6b94445c94ae495c83a19646e7c3fd56/2.0.04/en-US/ce158d28135147f099b761f8b1ee43fc.html

[iv]https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/1984787

[v]https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2786237

[vi]https://saponpower.wordpress.com/2018/09/26/vmware-pushes-past-4tb-sap-hana-limit/

[vii]https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/M7X2YXZD