Dell PowerVault MD1120 - Manual (Page 4)

A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02
PAGE 4 6/16/2008
1. Introduction
A complete Enterprise storage solution involves various software and hardware components. A
given storage project can be addressed using several approaches. Therefore, it is essential to
identify optimum storage solutions for different applications.
Selecting the right storage components not only impacts the effectiveness of a given application
but may also improve the performance of the entire IT infrastructure that relies on that storage. See
Table 1 for examples of key storage components.
Table 1: Examples of the components in a typical storage solution
Storage Solution Components Examples
Physical Storage Device Technology Storage Expansion Enclosure (for example,
PowerVault
™ MD1xxx Family and MD3xxx Family) 1
Interconnect Technology 3 Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
Host System Interface Technology Non-RAID (HBA) or RAID controllers (for example,
PowerEdge
™ Expandable Raid Controller)
Management Capabilities Dell
™ OpenManage™ Server Administrator
As with many IT solutions, storage deployments can be assessed using numerous criteria, each
with varying levels of importance. In general, the effectiveness of a given storage solution should
be measured using the following attributes:
• Reliability – The solution remains functional and ensures that data is unaltered
• Availability – Data remains accessible by the application.
• Serviceability – The hardware has easy access to assemblies/components, allowing easy
maintenance and replacement.
• Redundancy – The hardware provides redundancy for both the data storage, as well as
for the hardware management capabilities.
• Performance
o Bandwidth Utilization – Data throughput / available Bandwidth
o IOPS – I/Os per second
• Data Protection – Data is protected against catastrophic system failure or components
failure.
• Scalability – Storage capacity can be expanded as the application necessitates.
• Cost – Measured in total lifetime cost, acquisition cost, or $ per Gigabyte.
• Density – The storage solution provides optimal IOPS performance within a given rack
space
• Power and Cooling – Optimization of power and cooling requirements in the datacenter
1 Dell PowerVault MD1xxx Family include the MD1000 and MD1120 enclosures. The Dell PowerVault MD3xxx Family
include the MD3000 and MD3000i storage arrays.