Thursday, October 2, 2014

Perfect storage array to meet the needs of a modern business?

Besides the basic concerns like full HA (two contollers on separate chassis), full redundant power, premium on site support (hardware, software and performance issues), excellent monitoring, alerting, plugins and easy to use dashboards, best raid and shelf protection, what else?:

·      Large Global Cache with active/active LUN processing across controllers with automated load-balancing
·      Active/active LUN access from any front-end port
·      Independent scaling of resources (CPU, cache, front-end and back-end ports, and drives) with drives detached from controllers
·      Single pool of resources with better than N+1 availability
·      Enough controller head-room to allow the system to meet performance requirements even when controllers fail
·      Capacity scaling to PBs and performance scaling to 100,000s of IOPS
·      End-to-end data integrity checks
·      Host connectivity support for all current technologies ( NFS, FC, iSCSI and FCoE).
·      Efficient use of flash both as data drives and controller cache extension
·      Near zero second RPO asynchronous replication that does not impact production workloads
·      Synchronous replication that provides continuous application availability when the array goes down
·      Cloning to enable parallel processing without impacting production workloads with split and background synchronization
·      Consistent high performance with front-end host requests prioritised over back-end array processes
·      Quality of Service policies and cache partitioning to prioritise critical applications
·      Rapid non-disruptive firmware updates with minimal impact to the array (i.e. ports and cache remain on-line during upgrades)
·      Non-disruptive migrations to next generations arrays
·      Efficiency features, like de-duplication, compression and snapshots, without affecting performance. Both for file and block level.
·      Does the array use Copy-on-Write or Redirect-on-Write snapshots?
o             CoW snapshots will add significant additional IO load to the array for each unique write that occurs
o             RoW will not have this overhead, but performance will be impacted due to the metadata overhead
 
·      Other concerns?

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