EqualLogic Frameless Architecture: Part 1
July 29th, 2010
Video Transcript:
When you look at many SAN solutions today, many of our competitors have a frame-based SAN.
With EqualLogic, we have a frameless or virtualized architecture.
When you start looking at a frame-based architecture, what you basically start off with is a frame. You have to sit down and decide, for the next 3-5 years, how much data growth and performance, the types of features, functionality, etc. that you need, and with a frame-based SAN, that usually comes as a specific model number, and a specific model number of a SAN that you purchase can grow to a specific amount of drives.
When you look at many SAN solutions today, many of our competitors have a frame-based SAN. With EqualLogic, we have a frameless or virtualized architecture. When you start looking at a frame-based architecture, what you basically start off with is a frame. You have to sit down and decide, for the next 3-5 years, how much data growth and performance, the types of features, functionality, etc. that you need, and with a frame-based SAN, that usually comes as a specific model number, and a specific model number of a SAN that you purchase can grow to a specific amount of drives.
As an example, you start off with dual controllers for redundancy and performance, and a number of disks. With EqualLogic, we also do this same thing. We also start off with dual controllers and a certain number of drives and this is your basic SAN. Right now the frame vs. frameless, or the competitive architecture vs. EqualLogic, doesn’t look that different. Let’s grow that frame-based SAN.
As months go by, you need to add more capacity for disks or performance, so we go ahead and we add more drives. With the EqualLogic array, when you’re ready to add more drives for capacity and performance, you not only add disks, but you also add two more controllers for cache throughput and performance with your disks. As you add more and more EqualLogic arrays, your performance and your capacity, will scale more linear than by just adding disks or spindles to your SAN. Then if you’ve planned out your performance or capacity requirements for 3-5 years, you’ve just purchased your SAN, what happens if you’re acquired by another company, you acquire another company, or a new application comes online, compliance, video surveillance, etc, now what happens with your frame-based SAN, is you’ve now added all the disks and all the spindles that you can to your frame-based SAN. What this means is there is no way to continue to grow with this frame-based SAN. If you’re frame-based SAN in this example grows to 60 drives, you’ve filled those drives up, now you need that 61st drive, you need to buy another frame-based SAN and that’s a forklift upgrade.
However with EqualLogic, what you’re going to see here is that you can have up to 16 physical EqualLogic arrays, and you can manage those as a single storage system. So whether you have one, single EqualLogic array, or 16 EqualLogic arrays, you manage that EqualLogic environment the same way. Ease of use and scaling are still going to be the same from day one, or day 365. Also, what you’re able to do, is these 16 physical EqualLogic arrays can be solid state drives, SAS drives, beta drives, it doesn’t matter. Every single, physical EqualLogic array is called a member. Multiple EqualLogic arrays or multiple members fit into an EqualLogic group.
Also, you don’t have to worry about provisioning and rate types. Once you select the rate type per EqualLogic array, the array or member will take care of the provisioning, the hot spares, the movement of date, etc. So as you see you have one physical array or 16 array or members, you basically are working with a single pool of storage. From that single pool of storage, what you’re going to do is create volumes, so these volumes 1, 2 and 3; you would map these as physical drives, or drive letters to a Windows server. These volumes 1, 2 and 3 could be drive E, F and G to your local Windows server. Also if we talk about virtualization as an example with VMware, volumes 1, 2 and 3 could be mapped or connected as data stores to your ESX servers.
With your frameless architecture, or virtualized architecture for SANs, whether you have one or 16 EqualLogic arrays you manage that the same way. The same thing is not just for management, but also when we look at the pool of storage. With our automatic load balancing and tiering, what you’re able to do is these volumes can move from one physical array to another, and because of our virtualized architecture, the physical server or virtual server doesn’t care what physical array these volumes are on.
During production you can have these volumes on high performance, low capacity, 15K SAS arrays and solid state SAS arrays and then later on as you look at compliance with archive and keeping data around longer, it might not necessarily need that production type of performance, but we still need to have it readily available so these volumes can actually automatically tier themselves, and they can move from solid state and 15K SAS drives to 10K SAS drives and SATA drives. You can have EqualLogic take care of the movement of data or you as the network administrator can simply click on these volumes and say move it from one rate type to another rate type that’s on separate or distinct drives and different EqualLogic arrays.
Read EqualLogic Frameless Architecture: Part 2