I’m frequently getting asked about Nutanix data reduction capabilities such as Deduplication, Erasure Coding and Compression and one of the most common questions (especially in a competitive situation) is:

“What is the performance impact and the overhead of Inline Compression on Nutanix?”

The short answer is, the pros outweigh the cons and this has been true for as long as I can remember with the Nutanix platform.

I have been testing of various applications, node types, cluster sizes and configurations and thought I would share some data on the overheads and performance impact of in-line compression which is what Nutanix (and I) recommend for most deployments including for business critical applications such as Oracle, MS SQL and MS Exchange.

In this case I was testing storage performance for MS Exchange using Jetstress.

Now without going into the exact configuration of the environment (to avoid competitors FUD), the test was simple. I created a Windows 2012 VM and configured Jetstress. I then performed 3 x 15min runs each of which completed a database checksum at the completion.

Following the 3 runs, I enabled In-line compression and repeated the same 3 tests.

The below chart is a screenshot from the Nutanix PRISM HTML 5 UI showing the Cluster wide IOPS, latency and throughput along with the Controller VM CPU utilisation.

As we can see, the 6 performance runs are very similar across all metrics including the CVM CPU utilisation. The below table shows each run including database read latency and log write latency which are the two key performance metrics for MS Exchange Jetstress testing.

Note: The performance numbers above are not the peak or best performance Nutanix can deliver, they are just one of the many test scenarios I ran.

We can see the delta between the No Compression and Inline compression is almost zero. This test shows that while we all know inline data reduction has overheads on the I/O path, that does not necessarily translate into slower performance for the application.

In this case, Nutanix in-line compression is so efficient, that customers can enjoy excellent data efficiencies for applications like MS Exchange, with virtually no impact on performance or additional CPU overheads on the CVM.

Oh and all of this performance on Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)!