DELL EqualLogic Next-Generation Intelligent STORAGE for Virtualization Cost SCALE UP Significant Overspending The legacy storage technologies in use at most organizations today were designed and developed before the advent of widespread virtualization. That means they re fundamentally inadequate for the new challenges IT organizations face, including tremendous growth in data volume, serious limitations on infrastructure budgets and staff, intense pressure to achieve optimized application performance, and increasingly volatile fluctuations in business demand. Legacy storage technologies also prevent IT organizations (and the businesses they support) from realizing the full benefits of virtualization including business agility and responsiveness to rapidly changing needs, nonstop availability of critical services, improved application performance, and optimized utilization of infrastructure investments. To meet these challenges and reap these benefits, organizations need a nextgeneration intelligent storage platform that is designed from the ground up to address the needs of today s highly dynamic and highly virtualized data centers. This technology brief examines the high-value capabilities built into Dell EqualLogic storage solutions and explores the benefits they deliver. Cost SCALE OUT Capacity Capacity Figure1: Dell EqualLogic virtualized scale-out storage architecture minimizes cost inefficiencies in scaling storage infrastructure. Virtualized Scale-Out Architecture Most legacy storage architectures are designed only to scale up. In the traditional storage architecture, IT starts by implementing expensive, overprovisioned controllers and then adds disk capacity behind it. Eventually, performance deteriorates to the point where it becomes necessary to add more expensive, overprovisioned controllers in front of new sets of disks. Legacy storage also typically requires IT to reconfigure the storage environment every time storage capacity is added. This disrupts service to the business and forces IT to perform such additions during off-hours. Dell EqualLogic architecture, in contrast, lets IT scale out storage by bundling controller functionality and management software with each storage array. Dell EqualLogic technology also allows IT to adaptively spread storage objects across all available storage resources in a shared pool of multiple storage arrays. So storage administrators can flexibly distribute data as necessary to optimize performance, utilization, availability and cost. This virtualized scale-out architecture in which storage objects are fully separated from storage resources allows IT to smoothly and incrementally increase capacity on an as-needed basis. Rather than constantly overspending and overprovisioning for projected future needs, IT can buy only the amount of capacity the business Technology Brief Sponsor
MIXED MEDIA HYBRID STORAGE ARRAY CONVENTIONAL STORAGE Array 1 SAS Continuous, automated tiering of data Figure 2. Dell EqualLogic multi-tired hybrid arrays containing SSD and SAS drives in a single enclosure optimize cost/ performance ratio while supporting most I/O intensive workloads. requires at any given time and scale as the needs grow. And it can do so without disrupting existing storage infrastructure. This architecture also lets IT maintain the appropriate ratio between controller and disk-array capacity to ensure optimal performance and optimal ROI. By providing this virtualized scale-out storage architecture, Dell EqualLogic: Enables, seamless, nondisruptive scaling of capacity and performance. Allows IT to buy what it needs, when it needs it without overprovisioning disk or controller resources. Eliminates the complexities associated with planning the purchase and installation of legacy storage. Multi-Tiered Hybrid Arrays Solid state disk (SSD) drives technology offers many potential benefits when it comes to highperformance, low-latency access to stored data. Unfortunately, SSD drives are expensive and do not support the high-capacity needs many organizations have. Dell EqualLogic enables organizations to leverage high-performance, low-latency SSD drives by combining them with more conventional and economical high-capacity serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drives in a single enclosure while automatically, continuously and granularly migrating the most frequently accessed data to SSD resources. This capability empowers IT organizations to gain SSD performance for frequently accessed data and to use the less expensive, highercapacity SAS storage for data that s not accessed as often, without the burdens of manual administration. This multi-tiered hybrid architecture is especially beneficial for workloads with complex, high-i/o requirements, such databases and virtual desktops. By empowering IT to implement multi-tiered hybrid arrays, Dell EqualLogic: Cost-effectively boosts performance for even the most challenging high-i/o applications and services. Ensures optimum utilization of SSD resources. Keeps cost/performance ratios continuously optimized over time. Automated Performance Load Balancing Across Multiple Disk Arrays To get the most value from existing investments in storage infrastructure, IT has to optimize the distribution of data across disk arrays. This process is typically a time-consuming, manual task and it can lag behind rapidly changingdata access patterns. Dell EqualLogic, with automated performance load balancing built into its firmware, overcomes the limitations of conventional manual storage management by continuously and granularly distributing data across arrays to eliminate bottlenecks and to ensure that all available storage resources are optimally utilized. This data distribution is transparent to end users, and no interruption of service availability occurs. There is also no increase in the complexity of storage administration because this load balancing happens behind the scene. This performance Array 2 optimization feature is available to EqualLogic users with firmware version 5.1 and above. Overburdened DELL EQUALLOGIC PS SERIES SAN ARRAYS Array 1 Array 2 Underutilized By automatically load-balancing data across the storage arrays, Dell EqualLogic: Continually optimizes the performance of all business applications and services. Reduces day-to-day storage administration workloads. Gets maximum business value out of every investment in additional storage capacity. Balanced Heavily accessed hot data blocks Seldom accessed cold data blocks Figure 3. Dell EqualLogic Auto Performance Load Balancer feature automatically balance I/Os across multiple arrays to optimize application performance and data placement. Standards-Based 1GbE/10GbE Ethernet Connectivity Many IT decision makers assume that they have to invest in costly, special-purpose storage connectivity gear and maintain expertise in specialized Fibre Channel networking technology in // 2 //
order to build and operate a high-performance SAN environment. With advances in Ethernet technology, this is no longer the case. Dell EqualLogic architecture delivers requisite storage connectivity using standards-based iscsi protocol over 1GbE and 10GbE. In fact, many customers report getting better results with iscsi-over-10gbe than they did with their previous Fibre Channel environments. The use of iscsi protocol over Ethernet reduces capital costs for storage infrastructure, since economies of scale make Ethernet hardware significantly less expensive than Fibre Channel equipment. It also reduces operating costs, since expertise in Ethernet technology is already commonplace among networking professionals. The popularity and simplicity of Ethernet networking makes it easier to scale storage environment, as well. Dell EqualLogic s standards-based Ethernet connectivity: Reduces ownership costs for storage infrastructure. Leverages existing in-house Ethernet expertise. Speeds and simplifies the continued scaling of enterprise storage capacity. Thin Provisioning Conventional storage strategies are built on the notion of overprovisioning. For example, if an application or service owner requests 2TB of disk space, IT has to provision that disk space even though the 2TB is only an estimate of the amount of storage that will be needed at some point in the future. So a large portion of that allocated capacity could remain unused for months or years. To avoid this suboptimal utilization, Dell EqualLogic enables thin provisioning. Thin provisioning makes it possible to maintain two distinct views of the storage associated with any application or service. One view is a virtual size seen by the operating system, applications and users. The other view is a physical size seen by the storage administrators and limited by physical resources. Thin provisioning thus lets storage administrators judiciously limit the actual physical storage allocated to an application to the amount it presently needs, while reserving its total projected requirements as a virtual allocation. Just as important, thin provisioning makes it easy to incrementally add physical capacity toward the projected virtual allocation on an as-needed basis. Dell EqualLogic provides thin provisioning as a standard software-based feature, with no additional licensing cost. By providing thin-provisioning capabilities, Dell EqualLogic helps IT organizations: Defer capital spending on storage capacity. Eliminate work and service disruptions associated with repeated changes in the allocation of physical resources. Ensure that all application storage requirements are met on an as-needed basis. Conventional Volumes EqualLogic Thin Clones Figure 4. Dell EqualLogic radically lowers storage footprint by leveraging EqualLogic Thin Clones and Template Volume. Template Volumes and Thin Clones Dell EqualLogic substantially reduces consumption of finite physical storage capacity through the use of EqualLogic Template Volumes and Thin Clones. Thin clones conserve storage capacity by only storing the differences between the thin clone volumes and a corresponding template volume. For example, administrators can create a template volume for a core virtual machine images and then store multiple variations of that template volume as a series of thin clones. Since most virtual machines share the same base operating system components, EqualLogic Thin Clones can radically reduce the total storage footprint necessary to store the virtual infrastructure. Similarly, for the testing and development of database infrastructure, administrators can create thin clones of the database for developers and quality assurance staff to use. The Thin Clones will only store the variations between each test instance of the database and the master template volume. As a result, multiple instances of the database will take relatively little disk space. With Dell EqualLogic Thin Clone technology, IT organizations can: Substantially reduce the storage footprint along with associated capital, power and cooling costs for virtual infrastructure. Facilitate distribution of multiple copies of data volumes to different business groups. // 3 //
Dell Labs tests show up to 95 percent reduction in network traffic, up to 75 percent lower host compute overheads, and up to 72 percent faster virtual machine provisioning. Tight Virtualization Platform Integration There are many reasons to integrate the storage infrastructure with broader virtualization infrastructure. As organizations virtualize their business-critical Tier 1 applications, they expect their virtual infrastructures to deliver high performance, high availability and optimum agility while lowering costs. Dell EqualLogic fulfills these needs by tightly integrating with virtualization platforms at all levels. Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for VMware Host Integration Tools for VMware (HIT/VMware) enhance the integration between Dell EqualLogic and VMware vsphere. This software toolset is installed as a virtual appliance and offers tools to simplify storage management, streamline and optimize VDI provisioning, enable business continuity, and help build a resilient virtual infrastructure. Like all EqualLogic software features, HIT/VMware takes advantage of the all-inclusive pricing model. There are four components to this toolset: EqualLogic Datastore Manager is used to create new data stores, expand existing data stores and monitor data stores from vcenter. Administrators who want to quickly provision new storage for their virtual environment can do so with this new integrated wizard. Administrators can simply provision new volumes, assign them to the ESX cluster and format them with the VMFS file system. The tool also automates numerous provisioning tasks. EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager for VMware (ASM/VMware) is an innovative data protection feature that combines hypervisor-consistent snapshots with space-efficient SANbased snapshots. ASM/VMware provides an easy-to-use graphical interface that coordinates the creation, recovery and scheduling of snapshots, clones and replicas. It enables effective business continuity strategies that help organizations efficiently protect their virtual infrastructure. EqualLogic Virtual Desktop Deployment Utility streamlines VDI provisioning in a spaceefficient manner. This tool is integrated with VMware View and employs Template Volumes and Thin Clones to achieve space efficiency and cost control for VDI deployments. It also enhances productivity by automating VM pool creation, VM registration, patch and update management. EqualLogic VASA Provider integrates with vstorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA). This integration allows EqualLogic to communicate storage attributes to vsphere. These attributes include drive type and speed, RAID settings, and snapshot reserve space. This information exchange allows VMware to become aware of the underlying storage and to perform intelligent migration of workloads across data stores on the underlying storage so as to optimize latency, performance and capacity utilization. With this integration, EqualLogic enables the responsiveness and agility demanded by business-critical tier-one applications through policybased automation. EqualLogic Support of VMware vstorage APIs for Array Integration VMware vstorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) enable offloading of certain storage-intensive tasks to the storage tier. Dell EqualLogic PS Series arrays were one of the first storage arrays to incorporate VAAI support into their firmware. This integration frees up network bandwidth and host compute resources by allowing EqualLogic arrays to perform tasks such as data copy, block zeroing, and hardware-assisted locking. Delegating these tasks to the storage layer can enable quick deployment of virtual machines from templates and improved storage performance for volumes shared by multiple virtual machines. Dell Labs tests show up to 95 percent reduction in network traffic, up to 75 percent lower host compute overheads, and up to 72 percent faster virtual machine provisioning. EqualLogic Multipath I/O for VMware Through integration with VMware vstorage APIs for Multipathing, Dell provides customers with the EqualLogic Multipath I/O (MPIO) for VMware vsphere. In addition to providing multiple redundant network connections to storage arrays, the MPIO provides storage-aware, end-to-end management of data paths between the host and storage arrays. EqualLogic MPIO provides fault-tolerant load balancing and helps improve storage performance and scalability while automating multipath configuration. Dell EqualLogic Storage Replication Adapter for VMware SRM 5 The VMware vcenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is tightly integrated with Dell EqualLogic Storage // 4 //
Replication Adapter (SRA). SRM guides users through the process of setting up and configuring recovery plans for their virtualized environments. Additionally, SRM provides the functionality for testing these recovery plans with no impact on production environments and, at the time of failover, for automatically running the recovery plan starting virtual machines in the designated order with updated network configurations. With support for SRM5, EqualLogic users can fail-back to the production environment when it is back online, simply and efficiently. Using the PS Series Auto- Replication feature, SRM enables nondisruptive automated testing of recovery plans and automates the recovery process, while EqualLogic provides cost-effective and easy-to-configure replication over any distance, using existing IP networks. By integrating tightly with VMware and other virtualization platforms, Dell EqualLogic: Greatly simplifies storage management for virtual infrastructures. Optimizes the speed and ease with which the virtualized environment can respond to changing business demands. Improves performance while lowering compute and network overhead. Enables improved responsiveness and better service levels agreement (SLA) adherence. A Storage Architecture for the Agile Enterprise With explosive data growth and the intense changes brought about by virtualization, no IT organization can afford to remain complacent when it comes to storage. Dell EqualLogic is the ideal next-generation intelligent storage platform for virtual infrastructure. The Dell EqualLogic storage platform uniquely and effectively addresses the challenges of virtualization, enabling IT organizations to reap its full benefits and thereby more nimbly and cost-effectively respond to constantly changing business needs. ABOUT DELL Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers the innovative technology and services they trust and value. With its broad portfolio of storage offerings including DAS, SAN, NAS, objectbased, and disk-based and tape backup, Dell provides customers with open, capable, and affordable intelligent data management solutions. For more information, go to www.dellstorage.com. // 5 //