SOLUTION BRIEF DELL EQUALLOGIC FS7500: UNIFIED STORAGE SIMPLIFIES FILE SHARING AND ACCELERATES VIRTUALIZATION JANUARY 2012 With the introduction of the FS7500 NAS appliance for the EqualLogic PS Series, Dell customers now have a unified storage option to further reduce management overhead and improve efficiency. All too often, companies have been forced to de- ploy different storage platforms for different needs: NAS for file-based applications and user file shares and SAN for block-based applications and high-performance virtualized workloads. The FS7500 changes the game. Your unified storage solution should let you easily scale your file shares to handle today’s tremen- dous growth in unstructured data. It should also accelerate and simplify your virtualization efforts by giving you the freedom to choose the best storage protocol for each virtual workload based on your unique application requirements, skill sets, and existing storage investments. Moreover, your unified storage must handle unpredictable and spiky bursts in demand, without run- ning into traditional limits on file system size or adding more work for storage administrators. Per- formance must scale linearly with capacity, and you shouldn’t end up with islands of misfit and ineffi- cient storage due to the limitations of any one array architecture. In this technology brief, we explore how Dell’s customers can benefit from the addition of scale-out NAS to the leading scale-out iSCSI SAN storage family. UNIFIED VIRTUALIZED STORAGE: THE BEST OF BOTH STORAGE WORLDS In the virtual world, storage administrators need more from their networked storage: It must handle the massive growth in unstructured file data of various types It must help to virtualize more workloads without compromising storage efficiency Traditionally, customers have often chosen distinct storage solutions for these challenges. Today, most companies manage block and file data on separate, non-integrated networked storage. Both SAN (Storage Area Network, mainly utilizing Fibre Channel and iSCSI protocols) and NAS (Network At- tached Storage, primarily leveraging the CIFS and NFS protocols) can be used for unstructured data, but most customers choose NAS for their shared file requirements. NAS offers a consistent file system that is easily shared among heterogeneous clients, simple configuration, and well-established data protection strategies. On the other hand, most companies have chosen iSCSI or FC SAN for their server virtualization and consolidation efforts, because the most powerful hypervisor features (live virtual machine migration being top of list) were available first for these protocols. However, the major hypervisor vendors now support all key features on NAS storage as well, and an increasing number of companies are deploy- ing virtual machines on a file-based storage platform. Copyright 2011 The Taneja Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1 of 8 87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 T: 508.435.2556 F: 508.435.2557 www.tanejagroup.com Solution Brief The result is that IT shops have assigned different workloads to specific storage platforms. This leads to “islands of capacity” throughout the datacenter, with varying degrees of scalability and perfor- mance. It’s often prohibitively complex to migrate data between platforms, and scale-up NAS storage, in particular, often imposes strict upper limits on file system size. These challenges have given rise to unified storage, which combines SAN and NAS protocols in the same physical devices. Most unified storage systems on offer today, however, are still based on rigid architectures that can limit performance, scalability, and the size of shared file systems. Demand spikes for files can lead to block performance bottlenecks; read/write performance for small files can be unacceptable; upgrades are costly and require weeks of data migration; and unified systems cost more in $/GB than the NAS systems they hope to replace. THE DELL FS7500: ADDING SCALE-OUT NAS TO THE LEADING SCALE-OUT SAN To attack these unified storage limitations head on, Dell started with its industry-leading midrange scale-out iSCSI SAN and added massively-scalable NAS capabilities. The result is a high-performance unified storage solution for a wide range of midsized customer deployments. The EqualLogic FS7500 is a 3U form factor system with a unified architecture, and is compatible with all existing EqualLogic back-end iSCSI block arrays with current firmware. This first unified storage solution built on the EqualLogic foundation enables storage admins to add file-based storage to existing block deployments without restrictive limits on file system size, and with the added benefit of a single interface to manage all file and block storage operations (iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS). Enterprise-class availability is ensured through the use of dual active-active control- lers, redundant components everywhere, and a battery-backed cache. Capacity can be added on the fly with no downtime, as with all EqualLogic systems. The dual active-active controller design of a single FS7500 NAS appliance is combined with a large (24GB per controller) mirrored and battery-backed on-board cache for outstanding file serving per- formance. Each FS7500 appliance can front-end up to eight EqualLogic arrays. Customers can start with the minimum capacity they need and then expand the file system without any downtime by add- ing more EqualLogic arrays. Additionally, for enhanced performance, one more FS7500 appliance (for up to a total of two appliances, comprising four controllers) can be added to the cluster, thereby providing additional cache, CPU and network bandwidth for the file traffic. As a result, the FS7500 avoids the performance degradations seen when capacity is scaled using traditional scale-up NAS so- lutions. As the number of FS7500 controller pairs is increased, performance increases proportionate- ly. This is an essential feature for storage that supports rapidly-growing file shares and highly- consolidated virtualized servers. The FS7500 can be simply and quickly added to any existing EqualLogic storage groups, creating a NAS service that can be easily moved and expanded—and one that coexists seamlessly within exist- ing SAN storage. New arrays and FS7500 appliances are automatically discovered and added to the available storage pool, and data is automatically load-balanced across all disks in the pool. DELL’S UNIFIED PLATFORM DELIVERS UNIFIED OPERATIONS Dell now delivers iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS protocols via a unified platform. This means that you can in- crease your storage efficiency through further consolidation onto a single high-performance platform. But Dell goes further, by increasing the efficiency of your storage operations as well. All file and block setup and ongoing management is via a single unified interface. The EqualLogic Group Manager pro- vides graphically-rich and wizard-based tools for configuration of storage pools and volumes, crea- tion and expansion of CIFS shares and NFS exports, and configuration of authentication, quotas, snap- shots, and NDMP backup services. Copyright 2011 The Taneja Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 2 of 8 87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 T: 508.435.2556 F: 508.435.2557 www.tanejagroup.com Solution Brief As with all EqualLogic systems, automation is paramount. Automated load balancing across all disks, RAID sets, connections, cache and controllers can dramatically reduce the management burden on administrators and helps ensure the highest levels of performance across both file- and block-based workloads. With these features, the FS7500 expands and deepens the EqualLogic family value proposition: pay- as-you-grow scale-out, radical simplicity, enterprise-class availability, linear scalability in both capac- ity and performance, and all-inclusive pricing. DELL’S FLUID FILE SYSTEM: GROWTH WITHOUT SACRIFICING PERFORMANCE File capabilities are delivered via the new Dell Fluid File System (FluidFS), a massively-scalable clus- tered file system built on IP Dell acquired from its acquisition of Exanet. FluidFS is engineered to overcome the restrictions and limitations on scalability and file system size imposed by most tradi- tional scale-up NAS and unified storage solutions. With FluidFS, the FS7500 solution can scale up and out to the limit of the underlying EqualLogic iSCSI arrays (currently tested up to 509 TB of usable file storage)—in a single namespace. This means you can consolidate further without limiting the scratch space or file share size of even your most de- manding applications. FluidFS was architected with several key design principles in mind: No single point of failure. Cross-cluster reliability is achieved via active-active control- lers, high-speed cluster interconnects, write cache mirroring, failsafe journaling, data in- tegrity checks and redundant power supplies. High availability. Any write to a single controller node is mirrored to the peer node con- troller before acknowledgement. In the case of node controller failure, cache is dumped to local disk and the cluster is placed into failsafe journal mode, while the file system re- mains fully available. Robust data integrity. FluidFS manages file system data integrity with metadata that is replicated on separate EqualLogic volumes. All metadata updates are journaled and check-summed on disk with automatic recovery from inconsistency (no FSCK). Equal- Logic arrays provide physical data integrity with RAID protection. Performance that scales with