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62 2012 Issue 04 | dell.com/powersolutions
Managing the data delugeFeaturesection
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2012 Issue 4. Copyright © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2012 Issue 4. Copyright © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
Today IT is at the heart of productivity
and revenue generation, whether an
organization is a small or medium
business at a single domestic location,
a large enterprise with locations worldwide, or
somewhere in between. Now more than ever,
organizations of all sizes are looking to boost agility
and flexibility so they can keep up with ever-changing
capacity and performance demands. Effective data
management helps organizations meet mounting
challenges within the confines of tight IT budgets and
condensed staffing.
Decision makers now have advanced data
center technology options they can leverage to
help enhance performance, improve workload
and application processing, and optimize resource
utilization and operational efficiency.
Dell PowerVault MD3 Series storage area
network (SAN) Internet SCSI (iSCSI) arrays, in
particular, are designed to provide a reliable, flexible,
efficient, and cost-effective platform that empowers
organizations to achieve desired business outcomes
(see Figure 1). With the launch of PowerVault MD3
Series feature enhancements, advanced data
management and protection have been added to
a rich feature set that enables tremendous agility,
flexibility, and efficiency for IT organizations in
managing their data center environments.
Minimizing drive failure recovery time
A primary concern for storage administrators is
managing a complex environment and losing data. To
protect an organization’s data, storage administrators
use advanced features and various levels of protection
such as RAID groups and snapshots. While traditional
RAID protects data from a single or multiple drive
failure, it can be difficult to configure, and in the event
of a drive loss, recovery time—and subsequently the
data loss window—is proportional to the RAID type and
size as well as the type of hard drive.
As drive capacities expand, the time necessary for
traditional RAID systems to rebuild to an idle spare
after a drive failure is increasing because the idle
spare gets all the write traffic during a rebuild. That
traffic can slow down the system and data access
during the rebuild operation.
Dynamic Disk Pool (DDP) provides an advanced,
easy-to-use feature for managing disk groups and
Robust storage for agile data management
The dynamic nature of data can quickly swell capacity
and performance demands in any organization.
Feature-rich Dell™ PowerVault™ MD3 Series arrays offer
easy-to-manage storage designed to scale capacity,
boost performance, and save capital costs.
By Vamsee Kasavajhala
Powerful data management
Designed for high availability and easy scalability, Dell PowerVault
MD3 Series arrays deliver efficient data management, protection,
and recovery capabilities for organizations of all sizes.
dell.com/powersolutions | 2012 Issue 04 63
Managing the data delugeFeaturesection
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2012 Issue 4. Copyright © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2012 Issue 4. Copyright © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
administering a storage environment, and
it offers faster recovery time from a disk
failure than a traditional RAID system. The
DDP feature is designed to allow all the
drives to work in parallel, enabling much
faster recovery times than traditional
RAID systems allow (see Figure 2).1 Fast
recovery times help reduce the risk
window for data loss. As a result, DDP
benefits can be an important consideration
when administrators evaluate which data
protection features may best suit their
deployment (see Figure 3).
In addition, the DDP algorithm prioritizes
the rebuilding of critical segments of data,
once those segments are recovered; then
the system is designed to sustain even a
third drive failure. To extend the concept,
once the third drive’s critical segments are
recovered, a fourth drive failure can be
sustained, and so on. Traditional RAID, in
contrast, does not provide this flexibility.
DDP helps avoid storage emergencies by
making an individual drive loss a nonevent.
When utilizing DDP, storage administrators
do not have to manage idle spares. DDP
allows for any number of drives in a pool,
which helps simplify adding or removing
drives from a pool. When a drive is added or
removed, DDP is designed to rebalance the
data across the available drives.
Gaining dynamic capacity
with thin provisioning
Storage administrators face many decisions
daily, and one particularly challenging
decision is estimating the amount of
storage an application requires. For
example, a pharmaceutical company
starting a research project may expect
its databases to grow 10 times during a
two-year period—requiring 11 TB capacity.
If the administrator in this example
immediately provisions that estimated
storage requirement, a significant amount
of storage resources will be allocated but
remain unused for much of that time—
causing an inefficient use of capital.
The other option—increasing storage
capacity on the server repeatedly over
Figure 1. PowerVault MD3 Series storage platform designed for performance, reliability, scalability, and ease of management
Figure 2. Drive failure recovery times for nearline SAS drives in a dynamic disk pool and a traditional RAID-6 group
Ease of management
Performance
Tremendously high reliability
Flexible optionsFibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity
and SAS and nearline SAS drives, SSDs, and SEDs
Scalable to 192 drives
Dell PowerVaultMD3 Series storageDensity
4U enclosure with 60 drivesor 2U enclosure with 12 or 24 drives
5040
30
20
10
0
6070
80
90
100
Application
OS
Application
OS
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Ho
urs
re
qu
ire
dfo
r d
rive
fai
lure
re
cove
ry
One drive failure Two drive failures
Traditional RAID-6
Dynamic disk pool
3 TB nearline SAS drives
51 hours
100 hours
8 hours 12 hours
1 Based on August 2012 testing at Dell Labs by Dell engineers comparing drive failure recovery between 3 TB nearline SAS drives in a DDP and traditional RAID-6.
64 2012 Issue 04 | dell.com/powersolutions
Managing the data delugeFeaturesection
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2012 Issue 4. Copyright © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2012 Issue 4. Copyright © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
time—commonly requires working after
hours, bringing systems down, and disrupting
operations each time. The administrator in
this case has the option of overprovisioning to
simplify management or growing multiple times
and suffering the consequences, which may
lead to a trade-off between capital costs and
management costs.
Thin provisioning can provide the
advantages of both strategies in this scenario.
It enables the administrator to logically
overprovision storage to the application
but physically provision only the storage
that is needed, and growth can occur
automatically over time. This approach allows
the administrator to achieve management
goals without disruption, while contributing to
capital cost reduction goals that help ensure
benefit gains from future storage technology
advancements. Note: Thin provisioning is
supported only on DDP disks.
Optimizing applications
in virtualized environments
Organizations of all sizes are moving applications
to virtualized environments as a means of
helping reduce capital and operational costs.
Data management and protection capabilities in
Dell PowerVault MD3 Series storage as well as an
optional high-performance tier for maximizing
read/write access enhance performance and
availability to optimize application delivery as
virtualization is extended throughout the data
center (see Figure 4).
Solid-state drive cache
To meet today’s enterprise requirements, Web,
cloud, and virtualized applications require both
high capacity and performance. Hard disk drives
(HDDs) including Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
and nearline SAS drives and self-encrypting
drives (SEDs) provide capacity but not top
performance. Solid-state drives (SSDs), on the
other hand, provide outstanding performance but
may compel administrators to compromise on
capacity and cost.
PowerVault MD3 Series storage arrays offer
an SSD cache feature that lets administrators
combine the advantages of HDDs and SSDs in
one cost-effective storage solution. SSD cache
enables PowerVault MD3 Series arrays to
add SSDs and use them as extended cache to
optimize performance of the entire storage
system. The controller dynamically adapts to
the data being used and automatically moves
frequently used data to fast SSDs to accelerate
overall read performance. Applications
characterized predominantly by read operations
can benefit from the SSD cache feature.
Disk storage function offloading
With large hypervisor-based implementations,
optimizing application computation rather than
the actual data management tasks on the servers
Traditional RAID DDP DDP benefit
Array and logical drives
Drives are typically optimized for enclosure utilization; spare drives are idle.
Data, protection information, and spare capacity are spread across all drives in the disk pool.
DDP offers easy administration and enhanced utilization of purchased capacity.
Drive rebuild A single drive, a hot spare, is used for all rebuild writes—a slow process—and it impacts all logical drives in the array.
All drives share in the rebuild— a fast process—minimizing impact to all logical drives in the disk pool.
DDP enables a significant reduction in the impact of a drive failure.
Array expansion
Logical drives are restriped across a new group.
Data is dynamically redistributed to new drives.
The array is back to optimal operation in minimal time.
Note: DDP and RAID can coexist in an array. An administrator does not have to select either feature, and DDP is designed to perform well in a mixed-workload environment.
Figure 3. Benefits of a dynamic disk pool (DDP) in contrast to traditional RAID
dell.com/powersolutions | 2012 Issue 04 65
Managing the data delugeFeaturesection
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2012 Issue 4. Copyright © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2012 Issue 4. Copyright © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
has become critical to maximize compute
resources. VMware vSphere® Storage
APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) is an
application programming interface (API) with
a set of primitives that enable the offload of
specific disk storage–related functions from
a VMware® ESX® hypervisor to the storage
array controllers. Offloading these functions
can free network bandwidth and host
compute resources by allowing PowerVault
MD3 Series arrays to perform tasks such
as full copy, block zeroing, and hardware-
assisted locking. Delegating these tasks to
the SAN layer enables quick deployment
of virtual machines from templates and
enhanced storage performance for volumes
shared by multiple virtual machines. In
addition to VAAI, PowerVault MD3 Series
arrays feature the Dell PowerVault MD3
Series Plug-In for VMware vCenter. The
plug-in enables VMware administrators
to monitor and manage the arrays in
conjunction with VMware virtualization, and
VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Storage
Awareness (VASA) provides coordination
between VMware vCenter™ software and
PowerVault MD3 Series arrays.
Disaster recovery
Because organizations continue to work
with ever-increasing amounts of data,
protecting vital data is no longer simply a
matter of copying changed files to tape.
Data protection has grown increasingly
complex because critical data changes
occur throughout the workday, and this
data requires protection against damage,
loss, and lack of availability. PowerVault
MD3 Series arrays are designed to provide
advanced protection capabilities. Snapshots
offer point-in-time copies of data for
easy recovery of files altered accidentally
or deleted. Virtual disk copy provides
comprehensive replication of source
data that enables quick, seamless virtual
disk relocation and disk-based backup
and recovery. And remote replication—
previously only available on PowerVault
MD3 Series Fibre Channel arrays—allows
data to be replicated remotely from one
PowerVault MD3 Series array to another.
Using the Dell PowerVault MD Storage
Array VMware Storage Replication Adapter
(SRA), remote replication is tightly integrated
with VMware vCenter Site Recovery
Manager (SRM) software to facilitate
centralized disaster recovery management,
automation, and testing for virtualized
data centers. SRM enables nondisruptive,
automated testing of recovery plans
and automates the recovery process,
while the PowerVault MD3 Series arrays
supply cost-effective and easy-to-configure
replication over existing IP networks.
The core server virtualization
platform that provides IT environments
with the tools to help reduce the cost
and complexity of managing their IT
infrastructure can now be expanded
to help simplify disaster recovery as
well. Storage and server virtualization
solutions from Dell and VMware provide
a comprehensive, virtualized data center
that enables a dynamic, highly automated
computing environment.
Maximizing performance
with feature-rich storage
Business growth for organizations
spanning small and medium businesses to
large enterprises requires storage that can
scale in capacity, flexibility, performance,
and manageability. Dell PowerVault MD3
Series feature enhancements include many
high-end storage capabilities, offering
organizations of all sizes efficient, cost-
effective, and easy-to-manage storage
arrays that support effective application
delivery in virtualized environments.
Learn more
Dell PowerVault storage:
dell.com/powervault
Dell PowerVault MD Series resources:
dell.com/pvresources
Author
Vamsee Kasavajhala is a technical
marketing senior advisor for Dell PowerVault
storage solutions.
Figure 4. Key software features in PowerVault MD3 Series arrays
High-performance tier:Optimized, high-speed
read/write access
Thin provisioning:Storage is provisioned as needed
VMware virtualization:Integrated VAAI, VASA,
Dell PowerVault MD StorageArray VMware SRA, and
Dell PowerVault MD3 SeriesPlug-In for VMware vCenter
SSD cache:Hot data stored on SSDs
Dell PowerVaultMD3 Series storage
Application
OS
Application
OS
DDP:Tremendous data availability,
dynamic recovery, no downtime,and ease of use
Data protection:Snapshots, virtual disk copy,
and remote replication