Remember back in the day when you would spend countless hours designing your storage array to determine how many hard drives you would need to meet the performance needs of your applications? In many cases you would design an elaborate storage layout including RAID groups, volumes and LUNS complete with color-coding to keep track of all the different data types and drives that are being managed.
EMC's 60,000 Mailbox Microsoft ESRP 2013 Submission
It sure looks impressive but your proposed storage layout shouldn't require a degree in graphic arts! In some cases "simple" tools were created to help design storage for optimal performance such as this one shown here but you have to wonder, is this a storage calculation or determining the trajectory to the moon?!
Exchange Storage Sizing Tool
Wait a minute, what's that? You mean you still do this today?!
Luckily this is becoming a trend of the past because flash based storage is the future and the future is here.
The reason storage admins went through all of this work is because traditional spinning disks are limited in performance so customers are forced to use complex spreadsheets just to keep track of the racks and racks of storage arrays and various disk types needed to meet the capacity and performance requirements of their applications.
At Pure Storage we have developed an all-flash array that dramatically improves performance at a cost that is equal to or better than disk based storage! Inline de-duplication, compression and thin provisioning helps to ensure you are storing one copy of the data so you get the best return from your investment.
On average, applications run 10 times faster on our flash arrays than with traditional spinning disks. For customers who run SQL Server, this has resulted in reducing the time it takes to run various processes from days to hours or hours to minutes. With sub-millisecond latencies you can improve response times to the application and stop worrying about managing the storage array for optimal performance.
This is literally changing the way companies do business
and why Pure customers are just as passionate about our technology as our employees are!
Best of all, there aren't any complex spreadsheets or formulas. Pure Storage uses a single storage pool optimized for performance and utilization with resources within the array virtualized. While you can still create volumes as logical units for organizing data from the server to the array, it isn't necessary since you will receive the same level of performance and data protection regardless of how you carve up the array (for an excellent write up on how this works I recommend the following blog post: http://www.purestorage.com/blog/defying-the-laws-of-luns/).
So are you ready to throw out the complex spreadsheets, sizing tools and advanced training classes for designing and managing a storage array? Join the Pure movement and see why customers like Mattersight are excited to significantly improve performance, reduce overall costs and simplify management of their storage array!
10/22/2013
Of course sizing is simple when you have one product a single storage tier.
Posted by: Paul Galjan | 10/22/2013 at 07:22 PM