Dolphin Express delivers significant improvements in DRBD transaction throughput and latency and provides the best possible combination of performance, scalability and application security through replication.
DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) is a distributed high availability storage system for Linux. Writes to local disk are synchronously and transparently written to a disk on another system through a fast and reliable network. DRBD is often used with MySQL but is not limited to this environment. It can be used with any application or system that need a synchronous replicated block device.
Figures (a) and (b) illustrate the performance, in terms of the DRBD bandwidth, for varying block sizes for different storage/interconnect configurations. For a low-performance storage subsystem using HDDs, the interconnect performance in terms of latency and bandwidth plays a minimal role. Indeed, a Gigabit Ethernet interconnect can achieve the same level of performance as a 10 Gigabit Ethernet or Dolphin Express. Here the HDD performance is the bottleneck.
However, when the storage bottleneck is addressed by removing the HDD and replacing it with StorExpress, the emphasis moves to the interconnect performance. As can be seen in figure (b), there is a significant performance improvement when moving from a Gigabit Ethernet to a 10 Gigabit Ethernet. This is result of the additional bandwidth afforded by the 10 Gigabit Ethernet over Gigabit Ethernet. At the same time, there is also a latency component involved in the DRBD solution. And low latency is not the forte of 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
The combination of Dolphin’s StorExpress and its low latency/high bandwidth communication model using Dolphin Express/SuperSockets software provides an ideal environment for supporting an extremely efficient replicated block storage mechanism. As a result, it shows up to 50% improvement in performance over a 10 Gigabit Ethernet solution for a wide ranging set of block sizes. Overall, Dolphin Express along with StorExpress based storage provides the best replication performance for DRBD.
MySQL speedup
One customer reports that MySQL runs up to 6 times faster (database inserts) with the combination of DRBD and SuperSockets. Details will be made available shortly.
DRBD version 8.2.7 and above comes with built in support for SuperSockets. First step is to install Dolphin Express according to the installation guide.
More details on installing DRBD can be found at www.drbd.org/users-guide/
Linbit is the leading provider of DRBD technology and solution. Please visit Linbits web for more information about how to most easily migrate to a reliable DRBD storage solution.
More information about DRBD can be found on http://www.drbd.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRBD