Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Manual

Also see for FS7500: Overview Technical manual Installation and setup Hardware setup

Contents

Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Manual Manual pdf 10 page image

Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloadsPage 8Finally, through the use of VMware’s Storage vMotion, the FS7500 enables administrators to leveragemultiple storage tiers for each virtual machine depending upon the application needs. While somestorage may remain on block-based iSCSI volumes, other workloads with more unpredictable storageneeds may be migrated to the NFS volumes where they can be easily expanded. Likewise, new virtualworkloads may be provisioned initially on NFS volumes, and then later migrated to alternative storageon block based iSCSI volumes, if required. In addition, applications with multi-tiered datasets, likeOLTP and VDI applications, when implemented in virtual environments using either block or file storagepools, can also benefit from the auto-tiering capabilities of EqualLogic PS Series arrays.The unified nature of the FS7500 solution provides an opportunity to improve productivity andstreamline infrastructure management. It offers high performance and scalability for both new andexisting Dell EqualLogic storage arrays to manage storage traffic over iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS protocols.This enables you to configure and manage storage for both block-based and file-based applicationsfrom a single management interface. The EqualLogic Group Manager can be used for configuration ofstorage pools and volumes, to create or expand CIFS shares or NFS exports, and to set upauthentication, quotas, snapshots, and NDMP backups. Automated features such as load balancingacross disks, RAID sets, connections, cache, and controllers help to minimize the amount ofadministration that IT must perform for both SAN and NAS services.As with all Dell EqualLogic products, advanced features like wizard-based installation, automated setupand configuration, native support for Active Directory, LDAP and NIS, and high availability features areall included in the base price of the FS7500 system. File-based snapshots (separate from iSCSIsnapshots), enable users to restore their own files without IT involvement. As with all EqualLogicproducts today, all future EqualLogic firmware enhancements are available at no cost to customerswith valid support contracts.Virtual server environments are delivering tremendous capital and operational cost benefits, butrequire consolidated storage pools to take advantage of their full functionality. As more storage isrequired, the volumes hosted by the FS7500 may be expanded without reconfiguring the VMwarehypervisor; thus simplifying the management of a large virtualization environment. With the DellEqualLogic FS7500, your virtualized infrastructure gains the flexibility of a unified SAN and NAS storagesystem, centralized management, and near linear scaling of performance and capacity.Storage Performance MetricsThere are two primary metrics of storage performance:1. Throughput: This is the quantity of data passed from the host to the target. It is expressed in twoways depending on the size of the I/O payload being measured.a. For small data payloads, throughput is often expressed in I/O operations per second (IOPS)because each storage request may contain all its data in a single storage packet, and weare interested in how quickly each transaction can be processed.b. For larger data payloads, throughput is often expressed in megabytes per second (MBPS)because a given payload may be broken into smaller fragments, making IOPS informationnot very useful. The goal is to determine how much data can be moved in a given timeperiod.2. I/O Latency: This is the round-trip delay between the source and target expressed in milliseconds.This number represents how long a given storage request takes to go from the host to the targetstorage device and back again (the round trip). Storage devices with high I/O latency are notsuitable for response time sensitive applications like email and e-commerce.