Storage Nation

Nigel Poulton tweeted today:  " What are peoples thoughts on best practices for multiple pools on the likes of USP V and VMAX. Trade-off between perf vs resiliency etc…" Good question Nigel, one of the biggest problems customers have is being able to fully utilize all their resources. It's not just that the ROI for storage tends to be underwhelming, but more frustrating is the fact that their storage was provisioned in a way that makes resources inappropriate or unavailable for the pressing needs at hand. Pools are used two ways – to reserve storage capacity for certain functions such as snapshots or to create QoS levels for storage.  The difficulty lies that in the creation of pools for QoS, resources that are committed to pools are practically locked into them and cannot be easily redistributed to other pools to meet changing demands.  As storage systems age and are filled with data, the various pools are consumed unevenly

There were some problems with the links that were posted this week regarding Oracle's ASM Storage Reclamation Utility (ASRU) and 3PAR's Thin Persistence. ASRU is a stand alone utility that compacts data in a specified Oracle disk group and then frees up space that Oracle no longer needs. Here is a short white paper on it (PDF).

I wrote a post yesterday that showed IOPS calculations for a few different native wide striping configurations and I thought I'd add storage tiering to the mix today.  Native wide striping places data from all volumes across all drives in the array (or of a certain drive class if you have mixed drives in your array) and randomizes workloads across all resources.

Separated at birth? There have been some interesting discussions lately about storage tiering   And just because 3PAR beat most everybody else to the punch this week with our AO announcement , I think it's important to keep things in perspective – storage tiering does not solve everybody's problems

3PAR customers really like our automated management.  The last thing they want is something that is a kludge to manage. They don't want to deal with stupidly complex provisioning such as meta LUN hashups.   The fact is, you don't need SSDs to achieve excellent mixed workload performance.  The latest blog post from Steve Duplessie goes right at the management burden of SSDs.