Enable Automatic Storage Tiering PS6010E

Hi, you need to put the array in the same pool as the volumes are in for it to tier the data.

Ok, In that I need to create a Volume in the SSD disk before doing the merge?

http://screencast.com/t/DEXyPFbDw44

by the way my Vmware Pool is SAS Based Disks and my tier disks are SATA SSD

does it matter?

anyone guys?

thanks

Hi.

As long as you have no volumes in the SSD pool, you can just merge it into the VMware pool.

I did however notice you were running a firmware version of 5.0.4, and i do not believe the advanced load balancing is available before version 5.1.2 firmware. It is needed for more advanced tiering of hot blocks.

The recommended firmware version now is 5.2.4-H1 and can be downloaded from support.equallogic.com

Oh, and its adviceable to run the same firmware version on all members.

And ofcause, read the upgrade documentation :-)

Oh, one more thing.

You can read more about load balancing/tiering in this document:

www.google.dk/url

Hi don.

I feel bad, that i gave some rather bad advice.

I was giving my advice from the understanding i got from the load balacing whitepaper.

Especially page 9 and 10 shows, that with fx hybrid arrays in pools with "lower performing" arrays, that most hot data should remain on the ssd tier, and the cold data should be balanced over to the lower performing array.

I snagged this from the tiering with the APLB segment:

"For example, combining large capacity PS65x0 class arrays with lower capacity PS60x0 arrays using disks that provide higher I/O to get better total system ROI may be the appropriate design for some customers. Others might choose to combine members with 10K SAS and members with SSD to meet their application workload requirements. Many other configurations are possible, these are simply examples."

I guess its more complicated than that :-)

I see there's a lot to talk in this topic

Let me just add to this discussion. Our company had initially bought a PS6010XV half populated running raid 50. That gave us about 2TB of storage capacity. We soon ran out storage and we had essentially two options: populate the rest of the array, or buy a new array with slower drives but more capacity. We decided on the latter because populating our PS6010XV put us over budget and for a cheaper price we got a fully populated PS6010E which gives us about 20TB of storage capacity.

Great, now we have another SAN. What do we do? Do we add it to the existing pool? Or create a separate pool because the two SANS have different spindle speeds?

Well, if these arrays were running the firmware versions prior to 5.1.x then creating two pools for each respective array would have been a good choice. This is because had they been in the same pool, the 15k drives would have to "slow" down to the 7200 RPM speed of the new PS6010E array.

So now let's talk about the new firmware version. One of the best parts of this firmware version is the Automatic Performance Load Balancer. This load balancing technology monitors the latency of the members within the pool. If it notices a certain block of data is being accessed a lot on a particular member and that member has a latency of over 20ms it will then see if there is another member in the pool with a lower latency so it can move that "hot" block to the member. It's really hard explaining, but pretty much since the primary metric that APLB uses is latency, it does not matter if you have a 15k array in the same pool as a 7.2k array.