Dell Compellent Storage Virtualization
The optimal storage platform for server virtualization
Overview:
Dell Compellent storage virtualization perfectly complements any leading virtualization environment. By aggregating physical disks into logical virtual volumes, the Dell Compellent Storage Center removes the limitations inherent in physical drives. The result is a dynamic pool of storage resources shared by virtual machines (VMs). Storage is presented to VMs as a single, virtualized pool of capacity, regardless of disk type, RAID level or server connectivity.
This all-in-one storage array puts data in the right place at the right time. The Dell Compellent Storage Center can help you can optimize efficiency, agility and resiliency, enabling you to slash storage costs up to 80 percent. You can scale on a single platform while securing your data against downtime and disaster. And best of all, with Fluid Data technology, your storage system can dynamically adapt to meet your evolving business needs.
Dell Compellent enables virtualized enterprise storage at the disk level, creating a dynamic pool of shared storage resources available to all servers. With read/write operations spread across all drives, multiple requests can be processed in parallel, boosting system performance. Dell Compellent Storage Virtualization allows users to create hundreds of volumes in seconds to support any virtual server platform and optimize the placement of virtual applications.
How to Increase Performance with Storage Virtualization
- Improve asset utilization
- Reduce the cost and complexity of managing both servers and storage
- Eliminate capacity planning; provision from a single shared pool
- Create easily restorable backups and highly available replicated server environments
- Reduce power and cooling costs and shrink the data center footprint
- Improve productivity and flexibility
- Create any size virtual volumes without allocating drives to specific servers or dealing with complicated capacity planning and performance tuning
- Present network storage to servers simply as disk capacity, regardless of tier, RAID level or server connectivity
- Automatically restripe data across all drives in the storage pool when adding disk capacity
- Dynamically scale the storage pool and implement system upgrades without disruption
- Use virtual ports to increase port capacity, disk bandwidth, I/O connectivity and port failover
Key Benefits:
Creating a Virtual Data Center
Many organizations are adopting server virtualization technologies to reduce capital costs, create a fl exible pool of resources and shrink the data center footprint. But server virtualization is only half the solution. To take full advantage of the benefi ts of server virtualization, organizations need the support of an advanced storage platform.
Data Center Virtualization: Create an automated data center with virtual servers and virtual storage.
Extend the Benefits of Server Virtualization
Compellent's storage platform is the perfect complement to server virtualization, allowing organizations to create an on-demand data center. Compellent delivers industry-leading storage virtualization by removing the limits of physical drives and aggregating them into logical virtual volumes. Administrators can provision from this virtual pool without restrictions, creating storage for hundreds of virtual servers with no wasted storage capacity.
- Reduce Data Center TCO. Cut storage and server costs. Shrink the data center footprint and lower power costs and CO2 emissions.
- Simplify Management and Provisioning. Create a flexible data center that adapts to changing business needs on demand. Quickly allocate storage to virtual servers without downtime, provisioning new servers in minutes.
- Improve Availability. Architect a data center built for continuous availability. Boot virtual servers from the SAN, recover locally with continuous snapshots and adopt replication for disaster recovery.
Improving Storage for Server Virtualization with Block-Level Intellige
With Compellent, disk space is virtualized into a single pool of storage accessible by any virtual server and automatically managed at the block level. This gives administrators the flexibility to dynamically change storage attributes without impacting application availability. Simply add servers online to storage and storage online to servers - all without downtime.
- Virtual servers can utilize the shared storage pool without being associated to specific drives or volumes
- Mix drive capacities and speeds within volumes - all drives are aggregated as a single resource to accelerate data access and improve overall performance
- Improve performance with no tuning required; data is automatically re-striped as new disks are added
- Managing data inside the volume is the foundation for an unmatched feature set
Advanced Storage Platform: Compellent's innovative architecture intelligently
virtualizes disks to enhance server virtualization.
Reduce the Cost of Storage for Virtual Servers
With Compellent's Thin Provisioning administrators can create a virtual volume for each virtual server without pre-allocating the physical storage capacity upfront. This approach improves overall storage utilization, reduces upfront and ongoing hardware costs and controls the rapid capacity growth that can be exacerbated by the addition of virtual servers.
- Thin provision storage for hundreds of virtual servers without wasted capacity
- Ensure that unused storage resources are available to any application or operating system
- Reduce overall management time with simplified provisioning and automated capacity planning - create any number of volumes without allocating physical disk space
- Ultra-effi cient utilization reduces disk drive counts to significantly lower power and cooling costs and CO2 emissions
Improve Utilization: Thin Provisioning extends the scalability
and efficiency of storage for any number of virtual servers.
Automatically Optimize Cost and Performance Across the Data Center
Compellent's Automated Tiered Storage places blocks of data on the preferred tier of storage to cut overall storage costs and improve performance. Frequently accessed data can remain on faster storage, while less-frequently used data can be automatically migrated to more economical storage, without the need for administrator intervention. Automatically moving inactive data off high-performance drives frees up spindles to increase performance across all virtual servers accessing the shared disks.
- Dynamically balance storage resources for virtual servers; spend less to store inactive data
- Eliminate time-consuming manual data classifi cation and data movement
- Improve business continuity by storing more Replays (snapshots) on lower cost, higher capacity drives
Spend Less to Store More: Automatically store inactive data on lower-cost drives.
Provide Continuous Availability and Robust Recovery for Virtual Servers
Build a fully redundant data center with storage technologies designed to increase availability including Boot from SAN, Continuous Snapshots and Thin Replication. Easily boot virtual servers from a centrally-stored golden image on the Compellent SAN. Create space-efficient snapshots of virtual servers and replicate those servers to a secondary site for a cost-effective disaster recovery plan.
- Rapidly provision virtual servers; test patches and roll-out server upgrades to multiple virtual servers
- Recover any virtual server in seconds with a high number of Replays
- Adopt replication for a greater number of servers to improve overall availability; reduce replication costs with bandwidth optimization and native IP support
- Reduce data center footprint by booting virtual servers from centralized storage
The Optimal Storage Platform for Virtual Servers
All the benefi ts of server virtualization - from reduced hardware costs and simplified management to robust disaster recovery - can be amplified across the data center with Compellent's feature-rich SAN. A unique Dynamic Block Architecture makes Compellent a perfect match for a virtualized server environment, allowing administrators to maximize utilization, automate tiered storage, simplify replication and speed data recovery.