Qtier™ Technology
Constant optimization of data across storage tiers.
Jérôme Jaussaud, Senior Product Manager
Agenda
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What is Qtier™ - Auto-tiering
Demo environment
How easy is to create a storage pool with auto-tiering
Quick VDI test environment
Quick VDI test results : how many desktops with Qtier ?
Some recommendations
Today, without Qtier™
SATA
SSD
SSD
SATA
SSD
SATA
Full of SATA/NL-SAS disk
Full of SSD
Both SATA and SSD
• High Capacity
• Very Fast !!
• Very Fast
• Large Capacity
• …but not very fast
• …but very Expensive
• And not that big capacity
• …but it need to separate
manually data between
both
• Not convenient
Qtier™ : multi-tier storage
• Qtier™, is a multi-tier storage management system.
• Maintain most active data to the high-performance
drives
• 3 Levels of tiered storage
– Tier 1 : SSD (SAS/SATA)
– Tier 2 : SAS hard drives
– Tier 3 : SATA or NL-SAS drives
• Lighten the burden on administrators
Example:
 Copy one big database (3 TB file as
example) in one volume/LUN, Qtier will
keep hot blocks on the SSD.
 Avoid wasting SSD space !
Qtier™ : multi-tier storage
• Based on access frequency
• Background & online data movement
• Scheduled data movement
• Adjustable optimization options
• Choose which tier to use first
• Supports 2 Tiers or 3 Tiers*
* Only SAS models support 3 tiers
How easy to create an auto-tiered storage pool!
– TVS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP
with Qtier™ enabled
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6x SAS-SSD
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9x SATA drives : SEAGATE NAS-HDD 2TB (SATA)
: SEAGATE 1200.2 SSD 200GB (SAS)
- RAID5
- RAID6
Total capacity : 14 TB
– Client server is a server with Windows 2012 R2, only 8 GB RAM to avoid
memory cache-hit  demo real NAS performance, not the cache speed
– Test software : IOmeter
How easy to create an auto-tiered storage pool!
• On the TS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP:
– Create the Qtier storage pool
– Create an iSCSI LUN
• On the Windows server:
– Connect the server to the iSCSI Target / LUN
– Format the LUN
– Start the IOmeter test
How easy to create an auto-tiered storage pool!
• TS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP
– 6x Seagate SAS-SSD
– 9x Seagate SATA NAS HDD
• 4K , 100% random read IO
• ~130,000 IOPS with average latency lower than 0.5ms!
Quick VDI test results:
How many desktop with Qtier?
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Test Software : Login VSI to create real workloads using real user behaviors and applications.
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Virtualization Environment :
• Cluster of 6 servers with a total of 750 GB RAM and 20 Cores
• VMware ESXi 6.0 + Horizon View with 200 VMs running Windows 8.1, with applications used
in office environments (to read/create doc, xls, pdf, zip...)
• TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP , QTS 4.2.0 with Qtier™
– 8x SEAGATE 1200 SAS-SSD
- RAID6 ( SSD Tier – Ultra High Speed )
– 4x SEAGATE 15K SAS drives - RAID5 ( SAS Tier – High Speed )
– 4x SEAGATE NL-SAS drives
• Total capacity : 24 TB
- RAID5 ( NL-SAS Tier – Capacity )
Login VSI using QNAP NAS with Qtier
After auto-tiering, this VDI test environment can run
smoothly up to 195 desktops, with 8 SAS-SSD.
195 VMs
Login VSI using QNAP NAS with Qtier
From vSphere Client, we can see that we need more servers to test more VMs.
The VMware cluster used for the test reached its maximum capacity.
Qtier or SSD read/write cache?
It’s a case by case, depending on the applications workloads...
However, as general answer:
• SSD read/write cache for small configurations.
• 4~6 SDD read/write cache makes a huge difference.
• SSD cache requires more memory than Qtier.
• Qtier for large needs in SSD.
• SSD read/write cache is more responsive for non predictive scenarios.
• Qtier needs to wait the next tiering schedule to move hot data to the SSD.
• Data need to be re-cached after the NAS restart, slowing down the performance between
reboots.
• With Qtier, “hot data” in SSD remains in SSD, even if the NAS is shutdown or rebooted.
https://www.qnap.com/solution/qtier-auto-tiering/en/
https://www.qnap.com/solution/qtier-auto-tiering/en/