Posted on behalf of Bob Ganley, Storage Strategy and Planning
Last week we announced our densest storage array yet, the PowerVault MD3 series. With the ability to store up to 180 terabytes of data in a 60-drive, 4Urack enclosure, the MD3 series will have a positive impact on your operations. The following initiatives are just a few that are ideal for the MD3:
High performance computing – If you are analyzing large data sets and doing computer modeling such as quantitative research, weather analysis, life sciences modeling, oil and gas exploration even Big Data analytics you need storage that provides:
- Massive performance to support high bandwidth applications
- Extreme power and cooling needs
- Dense storage solutions to maximize data center real-estate
- Maximum uptime to minimize modeling disruptions
High volume data processing – If you have data-intensive applications which need to store large amounts of data like digital video and surveillance systems you require:
- Dense storage solutions best fit for archiving high volume of video files
- Exceptional storage performance for read/ write: 6Gb SAS x4 wide port for capacity expansion provides 24Gb/s of drive side bandwidth
- 5 nines array ensure maximum availability
Data center consolidation – If you’re pursuing initiatives to control data storage sprawl and want to improve storage density and environmental costs you could attain the following benefits:
- Up to 10% reduction in power/cooling
- Up to 2.5x the drive per rack unit compared with previous generations
- Simplified non-disruptive storage growth with dynamic data redistribution
- Improved capacity utilization – all drives will share in the workload
In addition to positively impacting your operations, the MD3 series will also simplify your storage management, increase your service level, and optimize performance for VMware.
- Simplified management – A new option called Dynamic Disk Pooling (DDP) creates one large pool of storage from a group of disks and allows the non-disruptive growth of that pool as more drives are added. Furthermore DDP spreads data protection information and spare capacity across all drives in the pool. DDP is a great alternative to traditional RAID configuration for data bases, mixed workloads or virtualization.
- Better Service Level Agreement management – With DDP, disk failure performance drops much less and there is up to a 10x faster return to normal operation after failure attainment than typical RAID protected storage. ALUA data path management simplifies network management.
- Better performance for VMware workloads through integration with the Vstorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) which offloads storage-intensive tasks to the storage layer.
The success of your initiative can be directly impacted by the underlying storage. You can rely on the MD3 dense storage enclosure as a high performance, high efficiency foundation for success! Check out more details on the MD3 here and get live #VMworld updates from @GanleyBob!