OPTIMIZING VIRTUALIZED SERVER INFRASTRUCTURE with DELL EMC UNITY Affordable High-Performance Flash Storage for Virtualized Data Centers

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

OPTIMIZING VIRTUALIZED SERVER INFRASTRUCTURE WITH DELL EMC UNITY Affordable high-performance flash storage for virtualized data centers

GROWING CHALLENGES OF VIRTUALIZED DATA CENTERS BENEFITS Virtualization has become a cornerstone technology in many data centers. While • Virtualized data centers have become denser virtualization lets IT organizations lower infrastructure footprint, simplify and more complex, creating performance management, and be more responsive to business needs, many organizations bottleneck, SLA risks and management struggle to move towards an agile, fully virtualized data center. Many applications headaches. Storage infrastructure plays a and services deemed mission-critical and performance-sensitive are still largely critical role in success of these demanding deployed on physical siloes of infrastructure due to performance concerns. If virtual environments. Dell EMC Unity flash virtualized, these applications share virtualized compute resources, but storage is storage solutions are designed for the new often managed in disparate siloes to mitigate potential performance bottleneck. This is because as the scale of virtual environment grows, the environment typically realities of the virtual era and provide an becomes unpredictable. As applications are virtualized and consolidated on affordable, high-performance, versatile platform common compute resources, the hypervisor randomizes the storage IOs generated to meet the diverse needs of today’s virtualized from each virtual machine, creating what is commonly known as the IO Blender data centers. Effect. Moreover, as many IT organizations embrace private cloud infrastructures • Simple and efficient: Simplify management that enable self-service and automation, many storage intensive tasks such as with intuitive interface integrated copy data provisioning VMs can be triggered at the most inopportune times. Traditional management (AppSync integration with storage disc-based platforms are not designed to handle large number of random IO requests, and thus create IO bottleneck and introduce unacceptable levels snapshots and thin clones) and leading unpredictability. integrations with virtualization and cloud management platforms. Consolidate mixed An ideal storage solution, designed for the virtual era, must be able to optimally and workloads with the versatility of a wide array of efficiently tackle the random IO demands of the virtual environment while providing protocols, both file and block. easy scalability and enabling agile service delivery. It must be simple to deploy, manage, and integrate with broader infrastructure management frameworks. A right • High-performance and affordable: Flash storage platform can transform the data center, enabling IT to consolidate all the optimized architecture with density up to workloads, of varying criticality and performance characteristics, on a common 516TBe in 5U delivers abundant IOPS at low shared storage platform. It can allow IT to move at the speed of business by latency. Hybrid flash options coupled with FAST provisioning new services rapidly. automated tiering lowers TCO while assuring OPTIMIZING THE VIRTUALIZED DATA CENTER performance. Dell EMC Unity flash storage solutions are designed for the new realities of the • Agile: Boost infrastructure and service agility virtual era and provide an affordable, high-performance, versatile platform to meet with support for broad virtualization APIs the diverse needs of today’s virtualized data centers. With its support for a wide including VAAI, VASA, VVol, and ODX. array of data storage protocols, radically simple deployments and management Automate infrastructure and enforce policy- experience, tight integrations with hypervisors, and support for hybrid flash as well based compliance. as all-flash configurations, Dell EMC Unity allows small and medium sized enterprises to simply and efficiently consolidate their virtualized workloads on the • Reliable: Protect data and ensure high next-generation flash-optimized storage platform. Additionally, with tight integrations availability with built in replication and EMC’s with EMC solutions for data center services including disaster recovery and high- portfolio of datacenter services, including availability, Dell EMC Unity seamlessly fits into established datacenter processes RecoverPoint replication and VPLEX and provides reliability demanded of the primary storage platform. continuous availability solutions. SIMPLICITY AND VERSATILITY Many storage platforms in virtualized deployments can become too complex to deploy, scale and manage, especially as the scale grows. Storage administrators typically spend enormous amount of time optimizing, managing and monitoring storage. Dell EMC Unity provides a very simple, intuitive and well integrated platform that can relieve storage and virtualization administrators from many mundane yet time consuming tasks. It is radically simple to deploy, with a very user- friendly and intuitive management interface. It integrates seamlessly with VMware infrastructure through EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) for VMware vCenter.

With this integration, VM admins can provision and manage storage right from their native interface. Dell EMC Unity also offers SMI-S support for Microsoft virtual environments. Further, through native integration with VMware vRealize Operations Manager, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, EMC Storage Analytics, and many other third party tools, it simplifies monitoring activities. Lastly, Dell EMC Unity supports a wide array of storage protocols to accommodate diverse workload and connectivity needs. With the support for FC, iSCSI, FCoE, NFS, CIFS and SMB, it can handle any workload and environment. PERFORMANCE AND AFFORDABILITY The primary reason most organizations are unable to virtualize all of their workloads is the concerns around unpredictable performance. Traditional disk-based storage architectures can be a roadblock for organizations on their virtualization journey. Dell EMC Unity features a flash-optimized architecture that is purpose built for today’s realities. The high-performance flash drives provide abundant IO performance to support demanding virtual environments. Additionally, Dell EMC Unity flash storage is available in highly customizable hybrid flash configurations. Organizations can choose the flash to disk storage ratio that makes sense for their unique requirements. And built-in Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) technology ensures that frequently accessed data sets benefit from flash performance while rarely accessed data can make use of lower cost spinning disk drives, thus helping IT organizations achieve a balance between performance and affordability. AGILITY AND AUTOMATION As organizations embrace cloud-based infrastructure delivery models that facilitate end-user self-service and dynamic policy-based automation, the storage platform supporting these deployments need to be agile to support the new demands. Dell EMC Unity supports these next-generation virtualization use cases though comprehensive support for storage APIs and frameworks that help hypervisors offload storage intensive tasks to storage tier while providing better storage visibility, and enable virtualization administrators to leverage policy-based automation. It supports all vStorage APIs for Array Integration primitives as well as Microsoft Offload Data Transfer (ODX) that help offload hosts and reduce network traffic. Support for VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) enables Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) to assign service levels to individual VMs and enforce compliance and granular control over each VM. Additionally, through EMC AppSync, application owners and DBAs can utilize storage-based application-consistent snapshots and copies in their workflows. Through comprehensive integrations and advanced storage capabilities, Dell EMC Unity helps boost infrastructure agility and responsiveness. PROTECTION AND RELIABILITY As organizations virtualize all of their applications, including the mission-critical ones, it is paramount to ensure that the storage platform is able to provide the reliability and protection demanded by these workloads. Dell EMC Unity provides the enterprise-class reliability, data protection and availability. With its built-in replication, IT organizations can replicate their data to an off-site location or a secondary disaster recovery site easily. With its Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), Dell EMC Unity lets administrators easily create and test disaster recovery plans, and fail-over to the recovery site seamlessly in case of a disaster. For more demanding replication requirements for one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many replications scenarios, Users can leverage Dell EMC RecoverPoint replication solutions that offload the array of the replication overhead. For organizations that cannot tolerate any down time, Dell EMC Unity with VPLEX offers a continuous availability solution by creating two active-active sites that serve to load-balance when both sites are up and running. In the case of a failure at one of the sites, the other one seamlessly takes over, avoiding any down time and business disruption. SUMMARY With the proliferation of virtualization, data centers look a lot different today. They have become denser with hundreds of virtual machines sharing common resources. End-user self-service, while boosting end-user productivity, creates storage IO challenges when provisioning infrastructure. Policy-driven automation, while relieving virtualization admins, can put unique demands on underlying storage platforms. Traditional storage architectures were not designed for this new reality, and storage needs a fresh flash-optimized approach to effectively deal with the new normal. Dell EMC Unity, with its flash-optimized hybrid and all-flash configurations, simple deployment and management, and industry leading integrations with virtualization platforms, can help optimized highly virtualized data centers in a simple, affordable manner.

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