Not all data is accessed equally. Some data is more popular than other data that may only be accessed infrequently. With the introduction of FAST VP in the CX4 & VNX series it is possible to create a single storage pool that has multiple different types of drives. The system chops your LUNs into slices and each slice is assigned a temperature based on the activity of that slice. Heavy accessed slices are hot, infrequently accessed slices are cold. FAST VP then moves the hottest slices to the fastest tier. Once that tier is full the remaining hot slices go to the second fastest tier, etc… This does absolute wonders to your TCO: your cold data is now stored on cheap NL-SAS disks instead of expensive SSDs and your end-users won’t know a thing. There’s one scenario which will get you in trouble though and that’s infrequent, heavy use of formerly cold data…
NL-SAS
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When troubleshooting performance in a CLARiiON or VNX storage array you’ll often see graphs that resemble something like this: write cache maxing out to 100% on one or even two storage processors. Once this occurs the array starts a process called forced flushing to flush writes to disk and create new space in the cache for incoming writes. This absolutely wrecks the performance of all applications using the array. With the MCx cache improvements made in the VNX2 series there should be a lot less forced flushes and a much improved performance.
In September 2013 EMC announced the new generation VNX with MCx technology (or VNX2). The main advantage of the new generation is a massive performance increase: with MCx technology the VNX2 can effectively use all the CPU cores available in the storage processors. Apart from a vast performance increase there’s also a boatload of new features: deduplication, active-active LUNs, smaller (256MB) chunks for FAST VP, persistent hotspares, etc. Read more about that in my previous post.
It took a while before I could get my hands on an actual VNX2 in the field. So when we needed two new VNX2 systems for a project, guess which resources I claimed to install them. Me, myself and I! Only to have a small heart attack upon unboxing the first VNX5400: someone stole my standby power supplies (SPS)!
Once your Isilon cluster is up and running you’ll want to keep an eye on it. A piece of software that’s extremely useful to monitor both performance and capacity usage is InsightIQ. Very easy to set-up, it’s extremely powerful both in pro-active and reactive monitoring scenarios. Either sit back and watch the scheduled reports land in your mailbox or take a more active approach and drill down to find the source of a performance problem. Let’s explore further!
Yesterday we racked and stacked the EMC Isilon systems, prepared most of the cabling and pretty much prepared to start the Isilon systems. Which is pretty uneventful if you consider we’ve been dragging along hundreds of kilograms of equipment all day yesterday… The whole process can be pretty much split in four parts: configure the cluster and initial node, join the remaining nodes, configure the network, configure the rest.