Development and performance-testing of Multi-Path I/O algorithms on V-Series systems

Abstract

As data growth continues to accelerate, so must performance and efficiency of large scale storage systems. This project will present the implementation and performance analysis of Multi-Path I/O within Data ONTAP. The goal of this feature is to take advantage of redundant paths that were previously utilized only in failure situations. The paper will address the core mechanisms that comprise the MPIO handling within the system. Furthermore it will present the difficulties of testing such a feature in a shared lab environment. The initial expectation that MPIO would provide a small performance gain, in addition to better failure handling properties, was affirmed in the results. Under heavy I/O loads, MPIO systems showed an average of 5% throughput improvement over the older single-path implementation.