Best Practices Guide - Promise Technology, Inc.
Contents
1. 8 copal Revenibio PoP cca aE t E a TE 9 kodi EDTV x MOUS tc E T Tm 9 ZRG We Lo a DIVOS a e E E E A E E 10 Seling p ACCESS CON OM aseina aA AEE aE EEE aS aA a EEO A EE E AE aia 10 ASSINO OEO a TE E E E R E eres 10 ENADO EUN i e sis m NN T E E E 10 eee Wigiaiem Ule pe RE E E E Em 11 fie eR ANE o TO VTi CS E tenes 11 TMN Mhe Pero NCS MERE EE AE A RAEE E EE S AR 11 DismibU NG VO Load among SubSVSIBIIIS uote anan i a Rie OE Ei em oddue 11 Distribulnd VO Load on Logical Drive S ssiirsassiiamsr inn o a a Ea E Run 11 Distributing VO Load on Fibre Channel F OMS casica a e Aa a i 11 Identifying and Removing Slow DIVES csiis teinnciniuin a a a aaa a a a 11 SLEALE E E E A E A AE A A A A A N O A A E A A O 12 PRD OULU geli 13 Contact US oA A 13 List of Figures Rre T BAGIO e E E E ee 4 Figure 2 SAN topology 5 Figure 3 Recommended RAID configuration cccccccseeeeceeeeeeeeeeeecseeesceeeeeeeeseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesseeeeeseaeceeessaaeeeeeessaeeeeessaeeeeeeeeaas 8 Figure 4 How global revertible hot spares WOKK cccccseeeeceeccaeeeeeeeeeaeeeceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaeseeeeeesaeeeeeeesseeeeeeeseeeseeeeesseeeeeeesaaeeeeseneas 9 List of Tables Table 1 Recommended Setti2. access control between the VTL and the VTrak E610f to balance the I O load Please refer to the section in this best practices guide on Setting up Access Control for more details about how to configure access control Distributing I O Load on Logical Drives Through the WebPAM PROe performance monitoring function you can also find out whether the I O load is evenly distributed among the logical drives If the load is not evenly distributed you may adjust the access control between the VTL and the logical drives of the VTrak E610f to balance the I O load Please refer to the section in this best practices guide on Setting up Access Control for more details about how to configure access control Distributing l O Load on Fibre Channel Ports You can use the performance monitoring function to find out whether the I O load on the Fibre Channel ports connected to the VTL is evenly distributed If the load is not distributed evenly you may change the preferred path to the logical drives through the FalconStor VTL management console Please refer to the FalconStor VTL User Manual for detailed instructions on how to change the preferred path to the logical drives from the storage subsystem Identifying and Removing Slow Drives Not all SATA drives are equal Some drives perform significantly slower than others in term of response time and latency Any slow drive brings down the overall VTL solution performance Therefore Promise recommends stress
3. as global revertible hot spares The advantage of global revertible hot spares is that each of the hot spares can be used for rebuilding the same logical drive or different logical drives in the same enclosure or in different enclosures Therefore when there are unevenly distributed drive issues there are still enough hot spares to provide coverage and to allow RAID redundancy to be restored in the shortest time frame As revertible spares when the rebuild completes and the failed drive is replaced with a new drive the used spare will automatically be freed up and become a revertible spare again after the reversion process called Transition initiates and completes in the background Due to reliability considerations Promise does not recommend mixing drives from different enclosures in the same disk array Therefore when a rebuild completes through using a hot spare from a different enclosure Promise recommends replacing the failed drive as soon as possible When the new drive is inserted Transition will start automatically in the background Eventually the disk array will consist of drives in the same enclosure again The follow diagram illustrates how global revertible hot spares work Figure 4 How global revertible hot spares work Enclosure 1 E610f a m E m Assuming using RAID 6 configuration Everything started out optimal condition Enclosure 2 PD1 and PD2 were replaced with new drives Transition instantly kicked
4. in automatically When Transition completed the new drives became part of disk array 2 and Enclosure 1 and Enclosure 2 PD16 were reverted back to hot spare The configuration recovered exactly Enclosure 2 PD1 and PD failed the same as the original stage Enclosure 1 E610f Rebuild instantly kicked in automatically using Enclosure a i 2 PD16 and Enclosure 1 PD16 oen rmm e After rebuild completed the 4 disk array 2 became crossing M L enclosure 1 and 2 2 T ND As illustrated in Figure 4 global revertible hot spares ensure overall system reliability in case of drive failure In addition they also facilitate management by enabling the entire rebuild and Transition process to be automated Once the process completes the system is restored to its original state Logical Drive Attributes To achieve the best performance Promise recommends configuring each of the logical drives with the attribute values as listed in the table below Best Practices Guide 000000009 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Table 2 Recommended settings for logical drive attributes Attribute Name Value lI CL M otripe Size 64KB Backup restore and deduplication I O requests are usually 128KB 256KB or larger A stripe size of 64KB can ensure the VTL or SIR I O request will stripe across as many drive spindles as possible hence achieving the best I O performance VTL restore or SIR read requests are
5. in this best practices guide were tested on the following hardware and software versions e Promise VTrak E610f external disk array subsystem firmware version 3 33 0000 00 SR 2 5 e Promise VTrak J610s external disk subsystem firmware version 1 07 0000 12 e FalconStor VTL Server v5 1 Best PracticesGuide UC 000002 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Guidelines This section provides an overview of the topics discussed in this best practices guide for configuring and tuning the VTrak E610f and FalconStor VTL to achieve optimal performance Detailed instructions are provided in the corresponding sections of this Guide Choosing a Suitable Topology and HA Option e DAS SAN Configuring the VTrak Single Dual Controller Module Memory Option Hard Drive Recommended Settings Alert Notification Configuring the RAID RAID 5 and RAID 6 Global Revertible Hot Spare Logical Drive Attributes Initializing the Logical Drives Setting up Access Control e Assigning Storage to VTL e Assigning VIL Tape to VTL Clients Tuning the Performance Distributing I O Load among Subsystems Distributing I O Load on Logical Drives Distributing I O Load on Fibre Channel Ports Identifying and Removing Slow Drives Best Practices Guide 0000000008 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Choosing a Suitable Topology To support different VTL market segment requirements the VTrak E610f offers two topology options for VTL Direct Attached Storage DAS a
6. sequential for single streams The Read Ahead setting boosts performance for sequential I O Even in the case of multiple stream reads Promise lab tests indicated it boosted the performance significantly combined with Force Read Ahead enabled at the controller level VTL backup requests are sequential write operations for single stream However a VTL appliance can usually serve multiple backup clients simultaneously With multiple stream VTL backup the write access becomes random By enabling the Write Back cache it avoids performance degradation due to random drive access therefore improving the performance dramatically Initializing the Logical Drives After creating the logical drives make sure to initialize all of them This action ensures optimal performance Depending on the capacity of the logical drives it may take 40 minutes to a few hours to initialize all of the logical drives Therefore you are wise to plan ahead before running a performance test or placing a solution into production For detailed instructions about how to initialize logical drives please refer to VTrak E610f Product Manual You can find all of the Product Manuals on the Promise website under the Downloads section Support Downloads Setting up Access Control This section offers instructions and recommendations for how to assign storage to VTL as well as how to assign VTL tape to VTL clients in a SAN topology These recommendations apply to SAN t
7. PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Best Practices Guide Promise VTrak E610f External Disk Array Subsystem and FalconStor VTL November 2 2009 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Table of Contents loro ju Bol GUIE aici asec 2 BENET OCI T 2 Eier G 3 Choosing a Suitable Topology RE 4 p m 4 FU OS HOF DA cT M 4 OOF Uy M 4 POMC O LOVE c M 4 c 5 FU OTS FOF AN E 5 Access Control in a SAN Topology ERPERRERRE 5 Conngurning TTA Emm AEE A a AEEA EAA RA 6 Single Dual Controller Module saersi EE E EE E a eE Ena 6 Memo OPUN aane E E E E E E 6 a DIVO ea E E 6 Recomended EnG araa OTT 6 AIETEN OURC ON cere a E E E E T E E 7 Conngunng The ID rie ccc 8 FAID Sand RAIDO soe
8. TL cluster If one of the VTL appliances fails the other VTL appliance takes over the VTL requests from the backup clients without service interruption In this case an optional VTL appliance could be installed with two Fibre Channel ports each connected to the remaining Fibre Channel port on each of the storage controllers Best Practices Guide 4 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC SAN Figure 2 SAN topology VTL Appliance A VTL Appliance B ISI o a Creare mr LLL MB iz i VTL Appliance D T IE VTrak E610f VTrak E610f 00001000 1 Wn VTrak J610s X DUE pem ERE i Er m i DA oil oe VTrak J610s Expansion Unit s Expansion Unit s J J In a SAN topology Figure 2 multiple VTL appliances are connected to multiple VTrak E610f units through one or more Fibre Channel switches collectively called an FC fabric Similar to the DAS topology the capacity of each VTrak E610f could be expanded using VTrak J610s expansion units through SAS connections TI m T HA Options for SAN A SAN topology also provides two levels of high availability options similar to the DAS topology at the storage level and at the VTL appliance level The difference is the appliances and storage are always connected through the Fibre Channel switches instead of being directly connected As illustrated in Figure 2 above this topology offers completely redundant paths from all VTL ap
9. ak E610f Product Manual Assign VTL Tape to VTL Clients A SAN topology is typically used to connect VTL appliances and VTL clients where backup software has been installed Access control is required to configure which client has access to which VTL appliance and more specifically to which VTL tape on the appliance Similar to assigning storage to VTL the FalconStor VTL solution also offers a way to assign VTL tape devices to VTL clients similar to LUN Mapping on the VTrak E610f For detailed instructions on how to assign VTL Tape to VTL clients please refer to the FalconStor VTL User Manual Tuning the Performance This section lists tips for fine tuning the VTrak E610f for optimal performance with the FalconStor VTL solution Distributing I O Load among Subsystems You can determine the I O load on each subsystem through the real time performance monitoring function in Promise WebPAM PROe software Promise WebPAM PROe software is a web based graphical user interface embedded inside each VTrak E610f To access the graphical user interface launch your Internet browser and type in the IP address of the Management port you will be connected to the Promise WebPAM PROe software login screen Through the performance monitoring function you can see the I O load of each subsystem and can determine whether the loads are evenly distributed If the loads are not evenly distributed you can adjust the access control between the VTL clients and the
10. an Hsinchu Taiwan 886 3 578 2395 sales tw promise com Promise China Beijing China 86 10 8857 8085 or 8095 sales cn promise com Promise Japan Tokyo Japan 81 03 5333 3631 sales jp promise com Promise Australia Sydney Australia 61 2 8065 2055 sales au promise com PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC 2009 Promise Technology Inc The information contained herein is subject to change without notice The only warranties for Promise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty Promise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein Promise is a trademark of Promise Technology Inc All other brand and product names are registered marks of their respective proprietors Issue v1 1 Nov 2009 Best Practices Guide 14
11. closure 1 PD1 PD15 forms disk array 0 PD16 serves as hot spare On disk array O multiple logical drives can be allocated LDO 1 2 3 Enclosure 2 PD1 PD15 forms disk array 1 PD16 serves as hot spare On disk array 1 multiple logical drives can be allocated LDa b c d As illustrated Figure 3 in each enclosure PD physical drive 1 through 15 form a disk array and PD 16 serves as the hot spare In each disk array multiple logical drives volumes can be carved out Depending on the capacity requirement this configuration can be repeated on up to four VTrak J610s expansion units per VTrak E610f RAID head Depending on the application requirement you may configure more drives as hot spares or you may also configure fewer hot spares RAID 5 and RAID 6 The recommend RAID configuration for the logical drives is RAID 6 as RAID 6 offers excellent reliability due to double spindle failure protection In the case that logical drives are used to store backup data temporarily for later deduplication processing the logical drives can be configured as RAID 5 In either case you should configure at least one hot spare drive for every 16 physical drives to protect the RAID redundancy in case of drive failure Best Practices Guide 000000008 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Global Revertible Hot Spare To achieve the best reliability and manageability Promise recommends configuring all of the spares
12. es in this Best Practices Guide and refer to the additional resources specified in this paper Best PracticesGuide 8D About Promise PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC With a long history of innovation Promise Technology develops and manufactures sophisticated RAID solutions recognized worldwide ranging from a complete line of RAID controller cards to SAS SATA RAID subsystems Meeting enterprise mid range and entry level data protection needs Promise products are distinguished by their common RAID code unified management interface and unparalleled support Known as the originator of SATA ATA RAID products Promise s comprehensive product base includes High Availability HA standalone RAID subsystems with standards based management interfaces host based internal RAID controllers NAS appliances for SOHO and SATA ASICs integrated into an extensive list of industry leading motherboards Headquartered in Milpitas California Promise has operations throughout Asia and Europe Contact Us Promise USA Milpitas CA 1 408 228 1400 sales promise com Promise EMEA El Son The Netherlands 31 40 235 2600 sales eu promise com Promise Germany Dortmund Germany 49 02 31 56 76 48 0 sales de 2eu promise com Promise Italy Rome Italy 39 06 3671 2626 sales it eu promise com Promise UK Wokingham England 44 0 870 112 59 77 sales eu promise com To learn more visit www promise com Best Practices Guide Promise Taiw
13. formance VTL applications Promise recommends using two gigabytes of memory on the controller and four cell battery for ample cache memory backup retention Two gigabytes of memory and four cell battery are not the default configuration of VTrak E610f When ordering ask for the following SKUs Two gigabyte memory SKU VTEMEM2G Four cell battery SKU VTBAT4CELL To place your order please contact Promise Sales See Contact Us on page 5 Hard Drive VTL is generally a high capacity application For this reason Promise recommends using high capacity low cost enterprise capable SATA drives Please refer to the Promise VTrak E610f compatibility matrix on the Promise website under Support gt Compatibility Matrix for compatible hard drive models Recommended Settings The following table lists the recommended settings for the VTrak E610f for VTL and Single Instance Repository SIR applications Best Practices Guide l 6 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Table 1 Recommended settings Setting Value Rationale Supports high availability and load balancing with VTL SIR The default setting is Active Active Redundancy Type Active Active LUN Affinity Force Read Ahead Enabled Achieves the optimal performance for multiple stream backup restore and deduplication The default setting is Disabled Please refer to VTrak E610f Product Manual about how to enable it Adaptive Write Protects the data integri
14. he alert notification on the Promise VTrak E610f external disk array subsystem as this feature notifies the system administrator and allows him to act accordingly in the event of any status change or failure condition The administrator should set up event notification either through Email or Simple Network Management Protocol SNMP during the initial setup phase Best Practices Guide eT PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Usually Email is a preferred notification method In certain user environments there may be an existing alert notification infrastructure that is based on a standard network management protocol such as SNMP In this case SNMP notification can be configured to integrate with the existing infrastructure For detailed instructions on how to configure event notification through Email and SNMP please refer to the VTrak E610f Product Manual You can find all of the Product Manuals on the Promise website under the Downloads section Support gt Downloads Configuring the RAID Promise VTrak E Class external disk array subsystems support RAID levels of 0 1 1E 10 5 6 50 and 60 They also support the mixing of different RAID level volumes in the same disk group to meet the requirements of different application performance profiles This section provides the proven configurations for typical VIL applications to achieve the best backup and deduplication performance Figure 3 Recommended RAID configuration Disk Array 0 En
15. nd Storage Area Network SAN A DAS topology shown in Figure 1 is a lower cost approach suitable for small to medium scale deployments A SAN topology is massively scalable in terms of both capacity into the petabyte range and of performance up to multiple terabytes per hour for large scale backup applications with stringent backup window requirements With both the DAS and SAN topologies there are High Availability HA options that can be configured at the storage VTrak and appliance VTL levels for meeting different application requirements DAS Figure 1 DAS topology VTL Appliance A VTL Appliance B Option for HA In a DAS topology the VTL appliances are directly connected to the VTrak E610f through their Fibre Channel ports VTrak E610f The VTrak E610f can be connected to up to four Promise VTrak J610s expansion units VTrak J610s Expansion Unit s gt a T a La d i z sg UO HA Options for DAS There are two levels of high availability options for meeting different application requirements Storage Level The VTrak E610f supports dual controller modules which offer fully redundant paths to the VTL appliance with no single point of failure As shown in Figure 1 above each VTL appliance has two Fibre Channel ports each of which can be connected to one Fibre Channel port on each of the storage controllers Appliance Level This HA option offers redundancy at the VTL appliance level for the V
16. ngs NETT T oo T om 7 Table 2 Recommended settings for logical drive attributes ccccccsssseecccceeseeeeeceeeeceesauueeeeceseaueeeeeeeeaeeeessseageeesessaaeeeess 10 Best Practices Guide l PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC About This Guide This Best Practices Guide describes the recommended VTrak E610f configurations and tips for achieving the best performance with the VTrak E610f and the VTL appliance It is intended for system administrators storage architects system integrators and resellers who are planning to install or qualify FalconStor VTL using Promise VTrak E610f Introduction The explosive growth of data generated by businesses continues to bring challenges in the area of backup and recovery operations Increasing volumes of data and narrowing backup windows have made traditional tape backup increasingly difficult to maintain In addition tape backup has often led to longer recovery periods leaving more room for media and mechanical failures Businesses require faster and more reliable ways to back up and recover their data Virtual tape appliances such as FalconStor Virtual Tape Library VTL Storage Appliances and Enterprise Edition address the challenges associated with tape backup FalconStor VTL solutions offer fast backup data deduplication enterprise wide replication and tape integration in one solution without requiring changes to the existing environment Built in data deduplication features automatically and
17. opologies only Assigning Storage to VTL Assigning storage to VTL can be achieved either through configuring zoning on the Fibre Channel switch or through configuring LUN Mapping on the VTrak E610f This best practices guide provides instructions on configuring LUN Mapping on the VTrak E610f For instructions on configuring zoning on the Fibre Channel switch please refer to the Fibre Channel switch User Manual Enabling LUN Mapping By default LUN Mapping is disabled on the VTrak E610f When LUN Mapping is disabled all of the logical drives on the external array storage subsystem are accessible to all of the Fibre Channel initiator hosts For a DAS topology or for a SAN topology using zoning access control LUN Mapping should be disabled However for a SAN topology with access control set through LUN Mapping LUN Mapping must first be enabled on the subsystem before access control can be configured Please refer to the VTrak E610f Product Manual for detailed instructions on how to enable LUN Mapping Best PracticesGuide 1 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Configuring LUN Mapping Once LUN Mapping is enabled it can be configured per logical drive and per initiator in other words on a per VTL appliance basis To assign a logical drive to a VIL appliance create a LUN map between the logical drive and the Fibre Channel initiator ports on the VTL appliance For detailed instructions on how to configure LUN Mapping please refer to the VI r
18. pliances to all storage subsystems with no single point of failure Access Control in a SAN Topology As the SAN topology places multiple VTL appliances and VTrak E610f units inside the same storage network it is important to configure the access control among them properly This can be either achieved through zoning on the Fibre Channel switch or through logical unit number LUN mapping on the VTrak E610f units Refer to the section in this best practices guide entitled Setting up Access Control for more details about how to configure the access control between the VTL appliances and VTrak units Best Practices Guide 00000000 B PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC Configuring the VTrak This section lists best practices for configuring your VTrak E610f with FalconStor VTL for optimal performance In addition to the best practices specified in this section we recommend you also follow the general best practices for Promise VTrak E Class RAID solutions in the following knowledge base article 10093 Best practices for E Class VTrak RAID http kb promise com KnowledgebaseArticle10093 aspx Keywords best practice Single Dual Controller Module Depending on your application availability and performance requirements you may choose either the single or dual controller module configuration To achieve high availability and optimal performance Promise recommends using the dual controller module configuration Memory Option For high per
19. testing the drives during a pre production test then identifying and removing the slow drives before you deploy the solution to the production environment You may also find out whether there are any slow drives using the WebPAM PROe performance monitoring function The WebPAM PROe real time performance monitoring function is available in VTrak E610f firmware version 3 33 0000 00 and Best PracticesGuide 0200000000001 PROMISE TECHNOLOGY INC later Please refer to the VTrak E610f Product Manual for more detailed instructions on how to use the WebPAM PROe software and the real time performance monitoring function Summary The FalconStor VTL solution addresses the business challenge of making backup and recovery fast and reliable Storage plays a significant role in the reliability and performance of the VTL solution Through efficient use of the Promise VTrak E610f external disk array subsystem the VIL backup and recovery performance becomes exceptional the backup and recovery windows are significantly shortened and the total cost of the VTL solution is dramatically reduced Promise VTrak E610f external disk array subsystem is a versatile storage solution that can support many different application requirements However for different applications best practices may vary In order to achieve the best performance when planning FalconStor VTL installation with Promise VTrak E610f external disk array subsystem please follow the guidelin
20. transparently eliminate redundant data extending data retention and allowing users to reduce or even eliminate investments in physical tape media However FalconStor VTL solutions require massive amounts of storage that must scale both in performance and in capacity In the market many existing disk array products are designed for traditional enterprise transactional computing They cannot provide the scalability that VTL applications require and they are usually too expensive to deploy in large volume Promise VTrak E610f external disk array subsystem was designed to work seamlessly with VTL applications providing exceptional input output I O performance for concurrent VTL operations like backup restore and deduplication with a host of features including e Aggregated 1 6Gb s bandwidth and low e Dual 4Gb Fibre Channel host interface ports overhead implementation e Support for RAID levels 0 1 10 1E 5 6 50 e Robust error recovery and 60 e No single point of failure design e Active active dual controllers The VTrak E610f has 16 drive bays and can support up to 80 SAS or SATA drives through Promise VTrak J610S expansion units or up to 80 terabytes TB of raw capacity based on using a 1TB SATA drive It offers a highly scalable reliable and cost effective storage solution for FalconStor VTL Appliances and Enterprise Edition appropriate for small and medium size businesses SMBs to Enterprise customers The recommendations
21. ty in case of Battery Backup Unit BBU Back Cache failure or a low battery condition The default setting is Enabled Auto Rebuild HeadAheadCache Disabled Ensures compatibility with VTL SIR The default setting is Disabled Enabled Enable Automatic Rebuild to replace bad drive or Predictive Drive Migration PDM to replace a drive that is going to fail These actions improve data reliability by reducing or eliminating periods of lost redundancy The default setting is Enabled Enabled Helps to achieve the optimal performance for multiple stream backup restore and deduplication The default setting is Enabled Write Cache Enabled Helps to achieve the optimal performance for multiple stream backup restore and deduplication The default setting is Enabled Medium Error Threshold This value is the number of bad blocks tolerated before the controller marks a physical drive as Dead By enabling this setting you can identify problem drives before they fail thereby improving system performance and reliability The default setting is 0 meaning disabled Please refer to E610f Product Manual about how to set Medium Error Threshold Also see the best practice at http www promise com support support eng1 asp And search for keyword Medium Error Threshold Promise recommends leaving all other settings at their factory default values Alert Notification It is important to set up t
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