Tag: High Availability

IBM DS4300s, EMC CX300s, NetApp FAS940s.

You have systems like these in your shop. They are scattered about, sitting idly or humming along without notice. They have a mix of 36GB, 72GB and 146GB drives in them — 300GB if you're lucky.

Instead of trashing them, have you ever thought about ripping out the small drives and putting in 146s or 300s? Perhaps with the added capacity it could be the perfect DR target. Better yet, what about a Clone Target for VMware using Platespin or Vizioncore?

Or holding your sick MP3 collection?

Be careful not to neglect the value of these older systems.

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Data explosion - sound familiar?
Everywhere we look data is growing at an exponential rate. VMWare, Oracle and Exchange are just a few of the various drivers of storage growth causing people to reevaluate storage platforms.

As IT architects, SAN administrators and Storage professionals approach the task of storage re-architecture, here are a few important points to consider:

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1. Connectivity – Make sure bottlenecks to do not exist within your SAN fabric. Often we find clients who have 4Gbps disk systems connecting to 2Gbps SAN switches or HBAs. A smart idea is to quickly review all pieces of your SAN fabric to identify potential bottlenecks.
2. Drive Count – System performance is often easily fixed by adding additional disk drives to the storage configuration. The reason this fix works is that by spreading out the workload, you gain the advantage of having more drives/arms/spindles accessing and retrieving data, and feeding that data to the storage controller.
3. Drive Size – By using smaller faster drives for high performance environments such as Oracle, you avoid disk drive contention. Contention can manifest itself when too much data is placed on larger drives. An example would be trying to place 2.5TB of data on 10x 300GB Drives.
4. Drive Type – SATA drives are an excellent format for archive or low I/O applications such as file servers or imaging, but become less ideal for larger VMWare, Oracle or Exchange Environments. Make sure you invest in the right technology according to application and workload
5. Controller Segregation – As storage requirements continue to grow, small storage shops can eventually morph into large storage shops. If multiple high performance applications are placed on a single modular array it may overwhelm the system. Consider a second array or a tiered architecture should your array have a high combination of performance-oriented applications
6. RAID Level – Raid 10, Raid 1, Raid 6, RAID-DP, Raid5 and other parity combinations all have their strength and limitations. Do your research to make sure the RAID configuration you are considering will support and maintain application performance for the long term.

Reliant Technology helps customers reduce the cost and complexity to build high performing storage environments. To discuss your environment with a storage architect email sales@reliant-technology, call 877-227-0828 or fill out the form on this page.

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