I ran rhel_iotest.sh on an i3.16xlarge.   8 Ephemeral Drives Striped using LVM as /saswork   RESULTS ------- INVOCATION: rhel_iotest -t /saswork TARGET DETAILS directory: /saswork df -k: /dev/mapper/saswork-root 14841653248 33840 14841619408 1% /saswork mount point: /dev/mapper/saswork-root on /saswork type xfs (rw,relatime,seclabel,attr2,inode64,logbsize=256k,sunit=512,swidth=4096,noquota) filesize: 390.08 gigabytes STATISTICS read throughput rate: 384.15 megabytes/second per physical core write throughput rate: 138.46 megabytes/second per physical core ----------------------------- ********* ALL ERRORS & WARNINGS ********* <<WARNING>> insufficient free space in [/saswork] for FULL test. <<WARNING>> - smaller stack size and # of blocks will be used. *****************************************     **Note: Not sure why there is an Error message about space, the /saswork drive started the test with 14TB of space free. Perhaps the amount of freespace overflowed some sort of integer value in the script.   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   3 X 12.5TB Drives in LVM Stripe for /users   RESULTS ------- INVOCATION: rhel_iotest -t /users TARGET DETAILS directory: /users df -k: /dev/mapper/users-root 40263219200 34032 40263185168 1% /users mount point: /dev/mapper/users-root on /users type xfs (rw,relatime,seclabel,attr2,inode64,logbsize=256k,sunit=512,swidth=1536,noquota) filesize: 480.09 gigabytes STATISTICS read throughput rate: 39.68 megabytes/second per physical core write throughput rate: 49.73 megabytes/second per physical core ... View more

Update on my comparisons between an i2.8xlarge and an i3.16xlarge.   Price: $25.55 a month more for the i3.16xlarge. Linux Reserved on 1 year agreement. Total Capacity:  i2.8xlarge = 5.82TB   i3.16xlarge = 13.82 TB   Took both box types, put the 8 instance disks into a LVM Striped Configuration formatted with XFS.   Used bonnie++ to benchmark them.   i2.8xlarge Sequential Read: 1936.4 MB / sec Sequential Write: 1153.6 MB / sec Sequential ReWrite: 816.2 MB /sec   i3.16xlarge Sequential Read: 2578.9 MB / sec  (33% improvement) Sequential Write: 1166.5 MB / sec  (1% improvement) Sequential ReWrite: 978.1 MB /sec (20% improvment)     ... View more

Margaret, Thanks for the prompt reply. Just want to double check that you still feel that the Instance (Ephemeral) storage in a RAID0 configuration is best for SASWORK. I'm going to do some testing with an i3.16xlarge today. It seems the closest to the i2.8xlarge in terms of available bandwidth in Instance storage. Thanks! ... View more

We've been running our SAS install on AWS for about a year.   i2.8xlarge.  We striped the 8 ephemeral disks as RAID 0 for SAWORK.   We are currently using Provisioned IOPS (io1) for our user data, single drive not striped.   A couple of questions based on the very helpful post (wish we had it 1 year ago)!!! 🙂 It seems you are recommending we move to a set of 4 (or even 😎 st1 drives for user data.  Is the performance stronger?  Any concerns about lack of IOPS?  What kind of stripe configuration do you recommend?   Do you recommend running fstrim on the Ephemeral disks on any interval to mitigate any concerns there?   What is the downside to not using the "AWS-specific SETINT"?  What exactly is the "AWS-specific SETINT"?   Appreciate your thoughts and consideration.   Brian Conneen brian@marlettefunding.com     ... View more