Pillar Axiom Application-Aware Storage Profiles

Introduction

It is no longer good enough to buy storage arrays of differing types and drive configurations to support separate applications. Because of budget restraints and constraints on physical floor space, it doesn’t make sense to buy a Fibre Channel array to host business-critical, transaction-oriented OLTP applications, a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance to support file sharing and a separate Fibre Channel array or NAS appliance to support the virtualized servers in your mid-sized or enterprise environment.

And, it doesn’t make sense to have multiple storage arrays with differing disk trays and storage controllers just so you can meet the performance and quality of service (QoS) requirements of your applications. What you need is a storage array and integrated software that lets you treat each of your applications in the ways they need to be – business-critical applications can be assigned to the highest priority Fibre Channel disk; front-office applications such as Microsoft Word can occupy less-expensive and slower Serial ATA disk or NAS appliances; and as data ages and become less important to the organization, its priority can also change — it can be moved from primary to archival disk, where it can still be accessed, but at a slower rate.

It becomes incumbent on IT to manage storage and its resources by the type of application running on it – that’s the way upper management wants it. It is no longer necessary to impose the same storage resources on every application or to stovepipe storage on dissimilar arrays. As Pillar Data Systems would say ‘All LUNs should not be created equal’ – it should not be necessary to assign the same resources – priority (CPU), memory (cache) and layout (disk) — to a LUN or file system for each application and data running on the storage array.

In the case of Pillar Data Systems, the company did just that – with its Axiom storage systems, in which the actions of the storage controllers have been decoupled from those of the disk spindles.  And with its AxiomONE software, the company is able to offer differentiated performance, utilization and availability service levels based on different application priorities. Doing so lets IT administrators bring more applications online, and increase storage utilization, while reducing the number of physical assets they must accrue — fewer storage arrays and capacity are required to meet the needs of applications.

Pillar Data Systems has introduced a concept it calls Application-Aware Storage, which lets IT administrators marry storage QoS, availability, performance and utilization to different application priorities. Axiom’s Application-Aware Quality of Service (QoS) technology eliminates the need for companies to purchase double the amount of storage required in order to alleviate the utilization and performance degradation associated with application running on the network.

Pillar Axiom Application-Aware Storage Profiles

Pillar Data Systems has implemented its Application-Aware Storage with a series of pre-built storage profiles – one for OLTP, and separate profiles for VMware, Microsoft Exchange, data warehousing and virtual tape libraries. IT administrators can build their own storage profiles for in-house developed applications – with Pillar’s help or by modifying the pre-built profiles that are most similar to the requirements of the application.

With Pillar’s Application-Aware Storage Profiles, IT administrators can assign high performance levels to OLTP, databases and Microsoft Exchange Servers, while medium QoS levels can be reserved for Web applications and file sharing. Lower priority LUNs can be used for archive, test systems and virtual tape libraries. (See figure on the next page.)

Representative Application-Aware Storage Profiles

Application Profile	Application Priority	Random vs. Sequential vs. Mixed	Read vs. Write vs. Mixed	File Size (NAS) Large/Medium/Small	Data Layout
Web Apps	Medium	Mixed	Read	Medium	Standard
File Services	Low	Mixed	Mixed	Medium	Standard
Database (OLTP)	Premium	Random	Read	N/A	Pooled RAID 10
MS Exchange	High	Random	Read	N/A	Pooled RAID 10
Data Warehouse	High	Sequential	Read	N/A	Standard
Virtual Tape Library	Low	Sequential	Write	N/A	Standard

Application priorities are set as premium, high, medium, low and archive priorities. Data is laid out on disk according to its priority. The high-priority data occupies the outermost tracks of the disk, where it can be accessed fastest. Lower-priority data resides in the inner tracks of the disk.

Here are two profiles Pillar Data Systems has pre-defined:

The VMware Storage Profile

As more servers are consolidated with VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure software, the need for shared storage increases to store the images of the individual virtual machines (VMs) – the VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format, the encapsulation of the server environment) files. Axiom presents LUNs for these VMs from its virtualized pool of storage, making the storage array look like multiple virtual machines (VMs), each with different characteristics – essentially, a group of virtualized storage machines.

IT administrators can share LUNs for several VMs with the same priority characteristics or they can dedicate LUNs for those applications in VMs that need the greatest priority. By keeping multiple VMDKs in a single LUN and sharing resources, though, it creates a random pattern of I/O into the storage pool, thus making is possible to increase contention among the applications for resources. Thus, it is important to be able to balance VM workloads and differentiate the applications’ need for performance and storage resources with Pillar’s VMware Storage Profile. The decoupling of the storage controllers – in Pillar’s terms, the Slammer – from the Brick Storage Enclosures, makes this all possible.

The Database, Online Transaction Processing Profile

If IT is running an Oracle database for data mining or business intelligence, they will see a typical I/O pattern of read heavy, sequential access. They will be able to choose the Database, OLTP profile and adjust it to the needs of their data warehouse. In a typical data warehousing application, data will age and become less important to an organization – if this occurs, IT can dynamically change its storage priority. Additionally, Pillar has added integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager and Automatic Storage Manager (ASM) in Oracle Environments, which accommodates some of the ways Oracle likes to see storage provisioned. For example, the OLTP profile allows striping of the data in 1MB chunks –

called wide stripes — just the way Oracle wants to see storage striped across disks in order to get maximum performance.

SSG-NOW’s Assessment

Pillar Data System’s Application-Aware Storage represents an innovative approach to storage. It is of particular importance for this Larry Ellison-backed storage company that one of the first profiles available is for Oracle environments. Pillar will introduce more application profiles for Microsoft SharePoint environments, SQL, Exchange and other applications such as SAP. Pillar’s approach represents the wave of the future, where storage resources themselves can be adjusted to meet the needs of the business and its applications. Pillar’s move into application-aware storage provisioning is a necessary advance for this company with more than 350 loyal customers.