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January 27th, 2012 09:00
Pool LUNs for File
I read a White Paper regarding Storage Pools and best practices. Did I understand correctly that it is best practice to create a Storage Pool that is specifically dedicated (all LUNs in this storage pool) to File? Meaning if you have a Storage Pool with a mix of say 600GB SAS and 3TB NL-SAS with FAST VP that if you are going to use this storage for File that you should use the entire Pool for just File and not for Block? Am I understanding correctly?
Does this best practice maybe get broken on smaller systems?
Thanks for any help!!
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Kenneth_Ray
32 Posts
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January 27th, 2012 10:00
Thank you!
When I stated 'smaller systems' I meant more along the lines of the number of drives (capacity) more so than model of the array (VNX/VNXe).
For example on a VNX5300 Unified it would be hard to adhere to that recommendation when there aren't a large number of drives.
But, like you said it is a recommendation.
Just seems in general it is difficult on 'smaller' (read less capacity) arrays when the drive sizes are so large to configure and adhere to some of the best practices, especially, when RAID 6 is probably a must on 3TB NL-SAS and RAID 5 is best for the 600GB SAS 15K and you can't mix the RAID types in a pool and you have the FAST VP that is so heavily used as a selling point, etc... Now, I've just gone off on a tangent....
Thanks again!
jps00
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392 Posts
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January 27th, 2012 10:00
>Am I understanding correctly?
Yes, you read correctly. Note this is a recommendation.
Continue reading, and there is an explaination of "Performance Domains" (and "Availablity Domains"). That is where pools are provisioned to optimally support their storage usage.
>Does this best practice maybe get broken on smaller systems?
The typical 'modest' storage system performs either File or Block. Storage systems performing both File and Block are typically the higher performing models.
HTH
jps00
2 Intern
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392 Posts
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January 30th, 2012 05:00
Its actually better to quantify your workloads in terms of IOPS first, and then capacity.
As you mention, its very easy to get the needed capacity for a workload with a very few modern mechanical hard drives. However, those few hard drives also have few IOPS, especially when using NL-SAS drives. To get the needed IOPS performance from mechanical drives may result in committing additional drives resulting in an excess of capacity.
Clustor
57 Posts
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January 30th, 2012 13:00
"The typical 'modest' storage system performs either File or Block. Storage systems performing both Fileand Block are typically the higher performing models"
Hmm. That's not what we're seeing, but i we don't see as much as EMC offcourse
.
VNX5300 machines are sold for file+block most of the time, that's what most customers are interested in these days with the whole concept of unified storage etc.
When reading the current version of the VNX best practices guides, i got the impression EMC strongly recommends seperating File Pools from Block pools. I can understand such recommendations as the File component tries to manage the underlying pool , but without knowledge of the workload coming from LUNs used by block on the same pool.
Technically (and GUI-wise) there's no restriction on mixing the two though...