Efficient Storage Strategies for Virtualized Data Centers

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Efficient Storage Strategies for Virtualized Data Centers Contents

Abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1



Data Center Virtualization Status Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2



Dell EqualLogic Virtualized iSCSI SAN Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2





Seamless, non-disruptive scalability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2





Performance and responsiveness to support business goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3





Reliable and available. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4





Integrated data protection and disaster recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4





Designed to lower cost and simplify management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5





Dell EqualLogic: Ideal storage platform for the next-generation virtualized data centers . . . . . . . . . 6

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Abstract The compelling cost and management benefits of virtualization have inspired virtual machine (VM) sprawl inside corporate data centers. At the same time, organizations are experiencing explosive data growth. Storage is a critical component of any data center, including growing virtual environments, since VMs actually reside on the underlying storage infrastructure. Sub-optimal storage infrastructure can severely restrict the benefits of virtualization and create performance, reliability and agility challenges. This paper considers current data center storage challenges and outlines features of Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays that meet the demands of increasingly virtualized IT environments while optimizing investments.

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Data Center Virtualization Status Report Virtualization has gained mainstream traction as a result of its compelling cost and management benefits. First leveraged to consolidate resources and simplify management of test, development, and internal, non-mission-critical workloads, rapid virtualization adoption facilitated the evolution and maturity of virtualization platforms and tools. Now those platforms are well suited for business-critical Tier 1 applications, allowing virtualization to gain even greater traction in data centers. This recent Tier 1 application virtualization demands new levels of performance, reliability and agility from the virtual infrastructure and, consequently, the storage infrastructure that supports such virtual deployments. As virtualization has proliferated in most data centers, IT has witnessed massive virtual machine (VM) sprawl. As the number of VMs increases, so does storage consumption. Even idle VMs consume storage I/O and physical disk allocation. In addition to VM sprawl, data centers are experiencing explosive data growth as organizations move into the digital information processing age. Stringent regulatory and compliance requirements also mandate organization to retain more data in their data centers over extended periods of time. In its Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems 2011-2015 Forecast, IDC predicts that storage requirements will grow at a rate of 48% year over year. IDC also predicts that organizations will be using storage optimization technologies. The performance, reliability and agility needs of the next-generation data center, combined with explosive data growth, put high demands on the underlying storage supporting virtual infrastructures. Storage plays a key role in ensuring the success of these virtual deployments, since VMs are stored on the underlying storage infrastructure. Inadequate and outdated storage technologies can severely limit organizations from taking full advantage of virtualization. In order to succeed, organizations need storage solutions that are designed in the 21st century with virtualization in mind.

Dell EqualLogic Virtualized iSCSI SAN Solutions Dell EqualLogic PS Series virtualized storage area network (SAN) arrays offer several efficiencies that save IT organizations time and money while extending the benefits of virtualization. Designed to complement virtual server environments, the arrays scale in accordance with business growth and meet demands for performance, availability and reliability. Automated intelligent management capabilities reduce overhead, integration with virtualization platforms optimize performance and agility, and innovative data protection and disaster recovery capabilities keep corporate information safe and users productive.

Seamless, non-disruptive scalability Dell EqualLogic takes a virtualized scale-out, rather than a traditional scale-up, approach to storage deployment. With a scale-up approach, storage capacity (arrays and disks) is added, but controller resources remain steady. As a result, while capacity expands, overall performance flattens. The only way to deliver on performance expectations is to estimate future storage requirements and purchase and deploy controller processing power in advance of actually needing it. Prognosticating future storage needs is complicated at best. Estimate too low and the problem of lagging controller resources goes unsolved. Estimate too high and the budget is spent on idle

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power. And the budget isn’t the only thing to take a hit. Unnecessary capacity upgrades disrupt end-user work, resulting in lower productivity and IT having to fight fires. The virtualized, scale-out approach enabled by EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays allows IT managers to scale capacity and performance seamlessly and only when required. Each array is equipped with its own controller resources. When storage capacity is added, so is performance, in the form of controller-based processing, cache and network resources. Capacity upgrades do not disrupt end-user productivity. With a virtualized storage architecture, there is no need to take services offline. Data is dynamically and automatically balanced over the new resources. By incorporating virtualized scale-out architecture, Dell EqualLogic enables seamless, nondisruptive scaling of storage capacity and performance in a way that naturally complements scale-out virtualized server infrastructure.

Performance and responsiveness to support business goals Performance can have a tangible impact on the success of next-generation virtualized data centers that host and service business-critical workloads such as databases and ERP systems. Dell EqualLogic helps enable outstanding performance through built-in performance optimization features, innovative multi-tiered mixed-media arrays and tight integration with VMware tools and APIs. EqualLogic PS6100XS, PS6000XVS and PS6010XVS multi-tier hybrid arrays include both SSD and SAS drives in a single enclosure. Granular, automated tiering migrates data that is accessed frequently, or hot data, to high-performance SSD resources. Less frequently used data takes advantage of lower cost, high-capacity SAS resources. This has dual cost advantage: It eliminates the need for overprovisioning of resources to meet performance demands, and it eliminates management overhead associated with manual data tiering. The Taneja Group conducted tests of the EqualLogic arrays and documented that they delivered 170% more concurrent users and transactions completed, and 360% more IOPS using PS6000XVS arrays (“Maximizing Database Performance with Dell EqualLogic Hybrid Arrays,” May 2011, Taneja Group). In multi-array implementations, EqualLogic users with firmware Version 5.1 realize outstanding performance gains via the EqualLogic automated performance load-balancer feature. The firmware monitors and automates data placement across multiple arrays to minimize latency and optimize I/O performance. Data placement is continuously re-balanced as access patterns change. Not only does this result in performance improvements, it also alleviates the IT staff from manual load-balancing efforts. Dell EqualLogic also features tight integration with VMware vStorage APIs that further enhance performance. The PS Series arrays were one of the first storage arrays to incorporate VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) support into its firmware. This integration enables offloading of certain storage-intensive tasks to storage tier. That frees up network bandwidth and host compute resources by allowing EqualLogic arrays to perform tasks such as data copy, block zeroing and hardware-assisted volume locking, which in turn speeds provisioning and

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deployment of VMs from templates and improves storage performance for volumes shared by multiple VMs. Dell Labs tests show up to a 95% reduction in network traffic, up to 75% lower host compute overheads, and up to 72% faster VM provisioning. EqualLogic VASA Provider, a component of EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for VMware, integrates with vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA), enabling responsiveness, agility and consistent adherence to service-level agreements through policy-based automation. Through such integration, EqualLogic arrays communicate storage attributes such as drive type and speed, RAID settings and snapshot reserve space to VMware vSphere. Because it is aware of underlying storage capacities, vSphere can perform intelligent migration of workloads across datastores to optimize latency, performance and capacity utilization.

Reliable and available As more and more mission-critical applications are migrated to virtualized environments, the virtual infrastructure needs to be reliable and available around the clock. High-availability features are built into the EqualLogic arrays. Redundant, hot-swappable disks, controllers, power supplies and fans provide a reliable safety net. When a component fails, IT doesn’t have to drop everything to replace it; the backup component simply takes over. And failed components can be replaced while the array is up and running. There is no need to shut down services and disrupt end-user productivity. Arrays are RAID-protected. Multiple drive components provide the levels of data storage needed for both virtualization and reliability. Data is distributed and replicated over the components for protection and to optimize I/O. Built-in advanced system and disk monitoring capabilities alert IT to problems that can be addressed proactively, to further reduce downtime. Networking reliability is ensured through Vertical Port Failover, which delivers full bandwidth availability even if a networking port fails.

Integrated data protection and disaster recovery As Tier 1 applications are virtualized, data protection becomes even more critical. Data protection processes have to work well within virtual environments while delivering efficiency and cost benefits. EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays accomplish this by including a set of tools that simplify and automate data protection in a virtual environment. EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager for VMware (ASM/VMware) enables effective and efficient data protection in virtual infrastructures. This innovative data protection feature combines hypervisorconsistent snapshots with space-efficient, SAN-based snapshots. An easy-to-use graphical interface coordinates the creation, recovery and scheduling of PS Series snapshots, clones and replicas. Dell also supports a strong ecosystem of third-party vendor partners, including Symantec and CommVault, that provide innovative data protection technologies. Disaster recovery is as important as data protection. The EqualLogic Storage Replication Adapter integrates with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which guides IT managers through the

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process of setting up and configuring recovery plans for their virtualized environments. SRM also provides the functionality to test these recovery plans with no impact to production environments. If the production site should fail, the plans are automatically run. SRM starts VMs in the designated order, with updated network configurations at the recovery site. With support for SRM5, EqualLogic users can fail-back to the production environment when it is back online, simply and efficiently.

Designed to lower cost and simplify management One of the greatest benefits of virtualization is cost reduction. IT departments need to contain cost even as their virtual data centers grow. Dell EqualLogic is designed to extend the cost benefits of virtualization through its lower total cost of ownership as well as simple management. The cost of operating a data centers is one of the biggest line-item expenses for IT. It takes a tremendous amount of time and resources to stay on top of the technology that supports every corner of the business. EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays reduce management overhead by minimizing the storage footprint and including tools that simplify storage provisioning for virtual environments. EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays are designed to extend virtualization benefits by reducing the storage footprint and simplifying management while enabling seamless extensibility. EqualLogic Thin Clone technology is extremely space efficient. Thin Clones work by creating space-efficient copies of EqualLogic Template Volumes. They do not store duplications, only differences. Since quite a bit of duplication occurs among the common operating system components across multiple VMs, EqualLogic Thin Clones can help to drastically reduce the storage footprint. Integration with VMware management tools reduces management overhead, improving staff productivity and cost efficiency. • EqualLogic Datastore Manager is used to create new datastores, expand existing datastores and monitor datastores from vCenter. This tool allows administrators to manage VMs and the underlying storage from a single pane of glass. The integrated wizard allows administrators to quickly provision new storage for their virtual environments. New volumes can be quickly created, assigned to the ESX cluster and formatted with the VMFS file system. By automating numerous storage provisioning tasks, EqualLogic Datastore Manager improves productivity. • The EqualLogic Virtual Desktop Deployment Utility helps streamline VDI provisioning in a space-efficient manner. Integrated with VMware View, the utility achieves space efficiency and cost control for VDI deployments via EqualLogic Template Volumes and Thin Clones. It also automates VM pool creation, VM registration, and patch and update management. Intelligent features like automated performance load balancing reduce the management overhead associated with manual storage performance optimization and tiering. Other management features simplify processes that do require human interaction. EqualLogic Group Manager consolidates management of file and block storage infrastructure in a single console. EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters (SAN HQ) provides a single view of multiple SANs. This view includes performance analysis, capacity management, I/O performance and latency statistics, experimental scenario analysis, comprehensive alerts and predefined reports — all the information IT staffs need to proactively and easily manage their storage and plan for the future.

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All of the software capabilities described in this paper are included at no additional cost with EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays. IT managers don’t have to determine what functionality they need to buy now and which products they will need to purchase at a later time. This is especially attractive given that most competing vendors license their software features separately, and those licensing fees are typically tied to storage footprint. So as the storage footprint grows, their software licensing expenses grow. By offering all-inclusive software features, EqualLogic substantially lowers software licensing expenses. Dell’s business-ready solutions greatly simplify virtual deployment implementations. Integrated server, storage, network and software stacks are preconfigured, optimized and tested by Dell before shipping. Deployment time is slashed from months to weeks or even days, greatly reducing time to value while considerably lowering expenses related to setup and configuration of virtual infrastructure. In addition to streamlining deployment, the single-vendor approach reduces prepurchase research and gives IT managers a single point of contact for procurement and on-going support. They continue to benefit from Dell’s expertise and access to consultants and technicians who have implemented a wide range of virtual data center resources.

Dell EqualLogic: Ideal storage platform for the next-generation virtualized data centers Corporate data centers initially embraced virtualization to achieve resource consolidation and cost containment. Initially deploying VMs to serve fast-moving test, development and internal, non-mission-critical environments, IT managers are now starting to support business-critical Tier 1 applications with virtual servers. These next-generation virtual environments require high-performance, reliable, responsive and cost-effective storage infrastructure. Sub-optimal storage selection can severely restrict the benefits of virtualization and impede IT’s ability to support business goals. Through tight integration with virtualization platforms and tools, virtualized scale-out architecture and built-in intelligent software features, Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays deliver the performance, reliability and agility that the next-generation data center demands while reducing cost. Enterprises that build storage infrastructure with Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays are positioned to realize the full benefits of virtualization.

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