APPLICATION TIERING AND TIERED STORAGE

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COFFEE BREAK HOW AN ADMINISTRATOR CONTROLS SERVICES LEVELS ACROSS AND WITHIN APPLICATIONS IN A CONSOLIDATED ENVIRONMENT Storage consolidation allows you to bring many applications together to a single storage pool. It improves storage utilization, dramatically simplifies management, and increases reliability in well implemented SANs. While consolidation makes it easier to manage, provision, and backup your data, how do you manage different application service level requirements?

There is much talk about ctiered storage d 3 doesn 9t that mean separating again what you just consolidated? For many, consolidation alone solves most problems. If all workloads in the environment are of equal importance, you size the environment to meet all their needs.

But, work- loads can have different levels of importance. Of course, you can place all applications on the fastest disks without using tiers 3 but to do so, all your application data is configured in an expensive fashion. In a consolidated environment, how does an administrator control service levels across and within applications?

The answer is to prioritize applications and place them on separate hardware resources, each optimally configured for the required service levels. Instead of optimizing for maximum storage utilization, you optimize for maximum application performance and lowest cost. By tiering applications ... more. less.

and using multiple storage pools for data you can ensure service levels and often avoid unnecessary storage purchases. Unlike Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), tiered storage gives you a way to better manage storage costs and service levels in today 9s application environment. With EqualLogic 9s PS Series storage, administrators can configure separate storage pools within a single SAN to build the most efficient, flexible, and easy-to-manage environment. Using a cSAN within a SAN, d you gain the advantages of consolidation while retaining the ability to easily separate workloads as needed: by application, by service level, by disk type, by cost, even by departments within your organization. For example, you can assign mission critical applications to their own storage hardware resources, ensuring fast and consistent performance. You can place disaster recovery replicas, backups, and archive data on less expensive storage. Yet it 9s all in the same SAN 3 applications and business operations continue even while tiering or re-tiering is in process. Any data can be moved to a different storage tier online, allowing APPLICATION TIERING AND TIERED STORAGE Tiering applications can help you better manage service levels and storage costs, while retaining the benefits of storage consolidation. Can you create storage tiers online, while applica- tions continue? Can you move data or storage resources between tiers online, while applications are running? Are tiers forced to share disk spindles, controllers, or cache with other tiers? Does your SAN automati- cally load balance hetero- geneous storage within a tier? Checklist for Evaluating Tiered Storage Solutions Copyright © EqualLogic, Inc. All rights reserved. EqualLogic, PeerStorage, and Simplifying Networked Storage are trademarks or registered trademarks of EqualLogic, Inc. All other brand or product names mentioned are the trademarks or registered trademarks owned by their respective companies or o rganizations. administrators to easily optimize service levels without down- time or after-hours cmaintenance d tasks. EqualLogic PS Series arrays support disk drives with a variety of performance and capacity metrics. Each array acts as a building block so that different pools don 9t share disk spin- dles, network links, controllers or cache. Pools allow you to dedicate resources to a specific set of tasks, ensuring that these tasks have the necessary processing power, capacity, network bandwidth, and cache to meet your business objec- tives. In addition to online movement of application data between pools, hardware resources can also be moved between pools 3 providing flexibility and online operations as needs change. WHAT ABOUT MANAGEMENT? Creating storage pools adds control and granularity while preparing for the future. Instead of just putting all your data together in the SAN, you can further optimize the SAN. What kind of extra management is necessary? When you create a volume, you need to identify the application 9s priority to determine what pool to place it in. That means a little more planning for the administrator. However, because the PS Series is so flexible and easy to manage, you can estab- lish tiers today and easily change them in the future 3 all online. As always, EqualLogic arrays will automatically load balance across arrays in a tier. A key IT goal is to create the required application environment in the most cost-effective manner while retaining the flexibility for future changes. Tiered storage is also a useful tool for other strategies. Administrators can reduce costs by configuring a pool of RAID 10 storage only for the most critical data and placing other data on RAID 50. Similarly, high performance disks can be used as needed with high capacity disks used elsewhere. Within a pool, tiers can be created allowing a single pool to be composed of different disk and RAID types. Storage pools can be defined simply by departments to prevent resource competition 3 engineering gets Pool A, sales and marketing get Pool B, etc. With EqualLogic, tiering is a standard feature 3 the capability is included, so the choice is yours to use as you require. As always, whether you implement tiered storage or not, you are assured of simple management and automatic functionality. To view other Coffee Break Bulletins or to learn more about EqualLogic, visit us at www.equallogic.com . CB120_USA_090806 3012308 SAN within a SAN functionality Production Data Switched Gb Ethernet Archive Data Single SAN View EqualLogic PS Series arrays automatically load balance, and enable you to move volumes or arrays between storage tiers online, without disrupting applications 110 Spit Brook Road, Building ZKO2, Nashua, NH 03062 Tel 603.579.9762 / Fax 603.579.6910 / www.equallogic.com

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