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November 21st, 2018 07:00

SC4020 over provision

I currently have a Compellent SC4020 that I use in my VMware environment. I have been using the SAN for a little over a year now and I present 4 volumes to VMWare with 2 being 4 TB and the other 2 are 5 TB luns. I use thick provisioning on the VMware side per Compellent recommendations since that side is thin and does not store zeroed out data which is what I do observe. The compellent side does de-dupe and compression per volume if enabled and I am getting an average of 2:1 dedupe on the system. This allows me to have slightly more storage available on the compellent side including RAID overhead which is a selling point of the device. However, support is concerned when they see the array over-provisioned which makes no sense if the free space is available and you are watching this our why else use thin. My array currently has about 48 percent free space but I have to over-provision because of the thick provisioning on the VMware side. Do other compellent users do this and at what point do you start looking at adding disks? Another thing to note is that the free space has stayed about the same since spinning the SAN up so currently I don't have massive data adds that don't get taken care of by dedupe and compression. My system is dual redundant with Raid 10 dm and Raid 6-10. Snapshots are taken daily and most Raid 10 gets pushed down to Raid 6 daily.

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November 22nd, 2018 12:00

Hello phil435, When you say "support is concerned when they see the array over-provisioned", who are you referring to? I have seen many customers over the year who over-provision their SAN. As long as you monitor the used space this is not an issue. I recommend to set up Threshold Alerts to let you know when space becomes low. To configure Storage Center Threshold Alerts please refer to page 743 of the Dell Storage Manager 2016 R3 Administrator’s Guide: https://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/storage-sc2000_administrator-guide_en-us.pdf The Compellent SAN thin-provisions the data on the SAN so as space is needed it is added by the system. Let's say for example you have a 20 TB system you can create 10 - 3 TB Volumes. Until actual space is used by the SAN it does not have an issue.
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