Storage Hardware

What do you think of this time of year? Kids returning to school? Football season? True, but September is now all about virtualization, literally. With Microsoft’s launch earlier this week of its embedded Hyper-V and VMworld just around the corner in Las Vegas, the timing is just right for Dell to introduce its new virtualization solutions.

And yet, the timing really doesn’t have anything to do with what Dell, Microsoft, VMware and others are announcing. The fact is that the market and our customers are demanding virtualization. Customers have under-utilized servers, power and cooling issues, and are facing increasing energy and facility costs to expand their datacenters to meet the increasing needs of their internal clients. These were some of the discussion points during our earlier virtualization launch in May of this year. During that launch, we introduced the PowerEdge R805 and PowerEdge R905, some of the first servers on the market to be designed specifically for customers looking to virtualize their environments.

According to Yankee Group, approximately 72 percent of businesses affirmed that they have already deployed or plan to deploy virtualization solutions. Now that virtualization is a mainstream technology, the question isn’t “will businesses virtualize?” – the question is “when will businesses virtualize their datacenters?” And then the question all those customers will ask is which company is best positioned to provide the platforms and services to make the rollout a success.

We today issued a five-page news release on the myriad announcements but let me net them out for you here.

• The PowerEdge M905 and PowerEdge M805 full-height blades, designed and built from the ground up by Dell engineers to be optimized for virtualization environments. The M905 has taken home top performance numbers in industry standard benchmarks;
• Microsoft® Windows Server 2008™ with Hyper-V™ available as a factory-installed option on Dell PowerEdge servers;
• Partnerships with PlateSpin and Vizioncore, two virtualization management companies;
• Advanced EqualLogic integration across industry hypervisors for simplified data protection, recovery and backup;
• The Dell EqualLogic PS5500E offering 24 or 48 terabytes of raw capacity in a 4U array – more than doubling the density and tripling the capacity of previous models;
• New services designed to simplify the design, deployment, security and management of virtualized environments including new infrastructure consulting services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments, site recovery manager services for VMware environments and new lifecycle management services for VMware environments.

As you can see, our approach to virtualization is different from what others are talking about. We're not announcing just hardware or just software or services. We're once again introducing a full suite of hardware (built by Dell engineers from the ground up as virtualization platforms), software and partnerships, and related virtualization services. Our aim is to remove the complexity around virtualization. Good stuff.

- (editor's note - this post also comes from Greg White in storage marketing. Thanks again Greg)

Data tiering – classifying and segregating data on different types of disk drives – has been around for awhile, but has been somewhat limited by drive choices. Support for additional drive types on new disk arrays, like the Dell/EMC CX4 series, could make this more relevant for a much broader audience.

Initially, you basically had two choices - Fibre Channel (FC) or SATA. Over the last year or two, SAS drives have become alternatives for FC drives in some storage systems, as SAS drives offer 15K and 10K RPM options at typically lower cost due to higher industry volumes.

Today, new drive options, like Solid State (Flash) and Low Power SATA drives, are increasing the range and spread of potential data tiers. For example, flash drives can offer up to 30 times the performance of traditional 15K FC drives in some applications. Today, these drives come at a premium to FC drives; however, over time as prices decline, more and more users may use these drives for their most performance hungry applications.

Low power SATA is at the other end of the spectrum. These drives can consume almost a third less power than traditional SATA drives, making them ideal for storing data for long term retention where performance is not critical.

This raises a few questions for discussion:

1. Do these new options - and the increasing spread between choices - make data tiering more attractive or simply muddy the waters?

2. What are the implications for managing your data, storage systems, applications, as well as other considerations, like managing your spares for example?

3. How do you classify data and implement tiering on these new drive options?

Today’s storage systems that can support flash, FC, SAS, SATA and low power SATA drives as well as virtual provisioning are the future of storage. While tools that ease the process of tiering are increasing in number and maturing, there are opportunities to leverage these new drive options to start increasing storage efficiency and resource management through tiering efforts.

- (editor note - this post comes to us from Greg White in storage marketing. Thanks Greg)

Many organizations have been looking to desktops, notebooks and servers for power and cooling savings and the associated environmental benefits of green IT solutions. What about storage?

Up to this point, storage has lagged far behind because the lowest hanging fruit has been in other areas. Server virtualization and system management have been able to provide large savings in power and cooling for organizations of all sizes.

Now, storage is beginning to take center stage in this debate. Green storage opportunities fall into three key areas: components, platforms and methodology.

New storage arrays are starting to take some of the learnings from the server guys and putting in more efficient power supplies, variable speed fans and more efficient disk drives.

In addition, the platforms are doing more to address efficiency, like utilizing virtual provisioning and de-dupe technologies to increase resource utilization and reduce the number of drives that need power – the biggest source of most storage arrays power consumption.

Lastly, organizations are looking more at how, where and for how long they store data. While tape may be cumbersome to recover from in a short period of time, it is still much more power efficient than storing data on hard drives, and where disk storage is desired, there are new options like low power SATA drives that can be deployed.

Are these new improvements in storage leading you to start factoring storage into your power and cooling planning? Is green storage a key consideration, something that is nice to have, or not even on your radar now?

There is an ongoing debate about the merits and future of both iSCSI and Fibre Channel. The growth is in iSCSI, but there is a massive installed base of FC. We believe in unifying your fabric on Ethernet and moving to 10Gbit iSCSI over time as the most cost-effective and least complicated method for storage.

But what to do now? Many organizations have both FC and iSCSI and aren’t ready to commit to one or to throw away their current investments. Most manufacturers force you to choose one or the other, and then live with that decision for years.

Today we’re announcing the new Dell/EMC CX4 series arrays which can alleviate the burden of this decision and remove the uncertainty of the future thanks to their innovative modular I/O technology. It’s called UltraFlex – stay tuned to blog as we will dive deeper into this in upcoming posts.

With UltraFlex, you get two benefits:

· First, since all of these arrays come standard with both 1Gbit iSCSI and 4Gbit FC connectivity, you can consolidate storage on iSCSI for your stranded servers that don’t required FC performance or merit FC connectivity expense with your existing FC servers and infrastructure.

· Second, you are protected in the future thanks to open slots where you can seamlessly add more ports. This can be current technologies or it can be future ones like 10Gbit iSCSI and 8Gbit FC.

With Dell/EMC CX4 you get a storage device that is flexible and future-ready - giving you the choice to adapt your storage to your changing needs without having to start over or commit today.

iSCSI and Fibre Channel UltraFlex I/O modules on CX4-120

Front view of the CX4-960 including, from top to bottom, 3U DAE (disk array enclosure), 4U SPE (Storage Processor Enclosure) and 2U SPS (Standby Power Supply)

This video shows how to recover a complete file system (you might also think of it as recovering an entire volume) using the integrated snapshot capabilities of Dell EqualLogic storage arrays.