When using a cloud storage provider for Cloud Tier (CT) the DD relies on a third party cloud storage provider for timely and fast access to storage in the Cloud Tier. Access to storage is done through the now industry standard
Amazon S3 protocol, which is basically a dialect of the common HTTP protocol used for web access.
Considering the very diverse cloud storage providers and their respective quality and performance guarantees, not all of them may be as performant at all times. Many times DDs using CT experience cloud disconnections (CT) or errors if latency, performance or correctness of the service provided by the cloud provider is not sufficient.
While Data Domain does not mandate particular performance figures for these setups, it is clean the less responsive, and slower the cloud storage provider, the worse it is for performance for DD CT configurations. At times, cloud providers even return protocol errors to the DD (HTTP/50x errors) indicating things such as the cloud storage account being full, the cloud provider being unable to give a response, etc.
DDOS comes by default with the "cloud provider verify" CLI (and the associated link in the DD GUI) so that a customer can easily test access and that access to the cloud provider works at a very basic level :
- That the DD can reach to the cloud storage provider through the network, and (if applicable) establish a SSL / TLS connection fine
- That the credentials used are good and have permissions for accessing the cloud provider
- That the credentials allow the DD to create a temporary bucket, as this is what DDOS will need to do when later configuring CT
However, this command does not stress test the cloud storage provider for any kind or real workload, and hence, that the "cloud provider verify" passes, is no indication performance will be sufficient. This KB article explains an additional CLI which exists in some DDOS versions which does some basic benchmarking of a given cloud provider.
Note this article is not applicable to DDVE ATOS (Active Tier on Object Storage). While DDVEs using object storage for the Active Tier may be using object storage in the same public cloud as in the case for DD CT, the way this storage is accessed is different, and the commands described here do not apply. For performance testing DDVE ATOS you need to use the same commands and methods you would use when testing a regular DDVE or a physical DD for Active Tier performance, typically, by running controlled read / write workloads and measuring performance.
In the DDOS versions shown below, there exists a new command (cloud provider benchmark) that, taking as input the same information as "cloud provider verify", will create a temporary bucket and stress test it by running read (S3 GET), write (S3 PUT) and delete (S3 DELETE) operations against the cloud provider for latency, throughput and errors returned. DDOS releases which have this new CLI, which is only accessible through SE mode, are:
- DDOS 6.1.2.30 and later releases
- DDOS 6.2.0.30 and later releases
- DDOS 7.0.x and later releases
- DDOS 7.1.x and later releases
Hence, to get this tool run, first log in to the DD SE mode.
NOTE: SE commands have been deprecated in DDOS versions 7.7.5.25, 7.10.1.15, 7.13.0.15, 6.2.1.110 and above and are accessible only by Dell employees
## cloud provider benchmark start This operation will perform test data movement after creating a temporary profile and bucket. For accurate results, there should not be any other running processes utilizing the bandwidth at this time. Do you want to continue? (yes|no) [yes]: yes Enter provider name (alibabacloud|aws|azure|ecs|google|virtustream|s3_flexible): aws Enter the access key: Enter the secret key: Enter the storage class (STANDARD|STANDARD_IA|ONEZONE_IA) [STANDARD]: Enter the region (us-east-1|us-west-1|us-west-2|eu-west-1|ap-northeast-1| ap-southeast-1|ap-southeast-2|sa-east-1|ap-south-1| ap-northeast-2|eu-central-1|eu-west-2): eu-west-1 Do you want to enter proxy details? (yes|no) [no]: Cloud provider benchmark initiated. Run the watch command to check its status.
Depending on the relative performance of the DD, the network and the cloud storage provider, the tests may take a while to complete. Tests may be watched as they are run with :
## cloud provider benchmark watch
Once the test has completed, results for the same may be checked by using the command below (for which example output is shown). Note only the results for the last benchmark run may be consulted (although they are stored on disk) :
## cloud provider benchmark show Cloud provider benchmark status: Cloud provider: (Name): aws, (Region): eu-west-1, (Storage Class): STANDARD Started: 05/11/2020 16:04:34 Finished: 05/11/2020 16:05:39 Phase 1/6 - Creating test bucket: 100% done. Phase 2/6 - Performing sequential write, read and delete: 100% done. Operation Data Throughput Latency Errors Write 500 MiB 82.28 MiB/s 338.18 ms 0 Read 500 MiB 69.99 MiB/s 390.02 ms 0 Delete 500 MiB 497.02 MiB/s 714.50 ms 0 Phase 3/6 - Preparing benchmark for concurrent operations: 100% done. Phase 4/6 - Performing concurrent write, read and delete: 100% done. Operation Data Throughput Latency Errors Write 500 MiB 41.81 MiB/s 436.25 ms 0 Read 500 MiB 46.76 MiB/s 275.11 ms 0 Delete 500 MiB 496.52 MiB/s 856.70 ms 0 Phase 5/6 - Performing clean up: 100% done. Phase 6/6 - Deleting test bucket: 100% done. Done!
If a test is shown to take too long to complete, or you don't need it to complete (ie because watching the test you have already seen enough about performance, latency, errors, etc.), you may stop it as :
## cloud provider benchmark stop