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Dell PowerVault MD1120 Optimization Manual
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Dell PowerVault MD1120 Optimization Manual

Dell PowerVault MD1120 Optimization Manual

Optimizing the dell powervault md1xxx family sas solution
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Download this manual See also: Hardware Owner's Manual, Setup Manual
Optimizing the Dell
PowerVault MD1xxx
Family SAS Solution
SAS Solutions Team
Dell │ SAS Solutions Team
delltechcenter.com

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Summary of Contents for Dell PowerVault MD1120

  • Page 1 Optimizing the Dell PowerVault MD1xxx Family SAS Solution SAS Solutions Team Dell │ SAS Solutions Team delltechcenter.com...
  • Page 2 Access are either trademarks or a registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

  • Page 3: Table Of Contents

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 TABLE OF CONTENTS     ................................... 4 NTRODUCTION   Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) ..............................5     SAS S ........7 ECOMMENDED AINTENANCE FOR OWER AULT AMILY OLUTION  ...

  • Page 4: Introduction

    • Power and Cooling – Optimization of power and cooling requirements in the datacenter Dell PowerVault MD1xxx Family include the MD1000 and MD1120 enclosures. The Dell PowerVault MD3xxx Family include the MD3000 and MD3000i storage arrays. PAGE 4 6/16/2008...

  • Page 5: Serial Attached Scsi (Sas)

    Serial Attached SCSI storage technology, specifically for the Dell PowerVault MD1xxx Family (MD1000 and MD1120) storage expansion enclosures and Dell SAS RAID controllers (PERC 5/E and PERC 6/E). Dell external RAID enclosures (MD3xxx Family) are outside the scope of this document and are discussed under a separate paper.
  • Page 6 A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 • SAS introduces the concept of port aggregation to storage interconnects. External storage devices can connect via a x4 (by four) wide-lane. Cabling aggregates four SAS lanes, each operating at 3.0 Gbps, for a full external connection bandwidth of up to 12.0 Gbps on a single...

  • Page 7: Recommended Maintenance For Dell Powervault Md1Xxx Family Sas Solution

    2. Recommended Maintenance for Dell PowerVault MD1xxx Family SAS Solution Dell strives to provide the best possible customer experience for all of our Enterprise server and storage products. Proper maintenance of your solution is essential to ensure that the equipment remains in optimal working condition.

  • Page 8: Dell Sas Product Offering

    Perform periodic physical inspection of your connections and cabling Damaged cables and loose connections may cause functional issues with your storage solution. Dell recommends a physical equipment audit two times a year or anytime after re-cabling or re- deploying your storage hardware.
  • Page 9 Supports 250GB, 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB 3.5-inch SATA physical disks (MD1000) • Supports 36GB, 73GB, 146GB GB 2.5-inch SAS physical disks (MD1120) • Refer to the Dell PowerVault MD1120 System Support Matrix on www.dell.com for the latest updates Ease-of-Use •...

  • Page 10: Sas Cabling

    For example, physical disks purchased direct from Dell may include features not generally available to the rest of the industry. As such, Dell supports only Dell tested and qualified hardware. Hardware purchased direct from Dell carries the full Dell system warranty and ensures full compatibility.

  • Page 11: Powervault Md1Xxx Family Storage Enclosure Details

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 For MD1000 - http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/md1000/ For MD1120 - http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/md1120/ 4. PowerVault MD1xxx Family Storage Enclosure Details The Power Vault MD1xxx Family includes two JBOD enclosures, the MD1000 and the MD1120.

  • Page 12: Daisy-Chaining Multiple Powervault Md1Xxx Family Storage Enclosures

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 MD1xxx Family Primary EMM Secondary EMM Storage Enclosure Physical Disks Physical Disks MD1000 7 through 14 0 through 6 MD1120 12 through 23 0 through 11 Split mode is useful in deployments where a single PowerVault MD1xxx Family storage enclosure provides limited amounts of storage each for two different servers.

  • Page 13: Powervault Md1Xxx Family - Common Features And Capabilities

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Figure 5: Max configuration on a single PERC 5/E or PERC 6/E controller (both ports connected) PowerVault MD1xxx Family – Common Features and Capabilities Regardless of the topology, the PowerVault MD1xxx Family storage enclosure provides a set of common features and capabilities.
  • Page 14 73 GB (the equivalent of two 36 GB physical disks in RAID 0 configuration). For the latest information on support for specific physical disks, see the Dell Storage web site at: http://www.us.dell.com/storage/ Mixing Physical Disk Spindle Speeds Mixing different physical disk spindle speeds is supported, but not recommended within a single RAID group.
  • Page 15 3 Gbps SAS lanes in a single cable to deliver an aggregate of 12.0 Gbps connection. All PowerVault MD1xxx Family SAS cables purchased from Dell have been tested and comply with the ANSI SAS 1.0 standard. Dell supports using only Dell-provided cables.
  • Page 16 Administrator. (For details, see the OpenManage User’s Guide.) • PowerVault MD1xxx Family storage enclosures use the Dell Update Utility (DUP) for downloading firmware during serviceability. In a daisy-chain configuration, all EMMs in the configuration are updated via a single DUP instance on the host. After a firmware download, all updated enclosures and the host server must be power cycled for the changes to take effect.

  • Page 17: Perc 5/Eand Perc 6/E Controller - Detailed Features

    Background Patrol Read is an automatically scheduled background task that scans and resolves possible physical disk errors that may lead to physical disk failure and result in data integrity issues. Dell recommends implementing Background Patrol Read in all the configurations.
  • Page 18 (for example, RAID 5) is called RAID level migration. Dell recommends that data in the virtual disk be backed up before a RAID level migration is initiated. Dell also strongly recommends that the size of the physical disks to which the RAID level is to be migrated is greater than or equal to the size of the physical disks in the existing virtual disk.

  • Page 19: Capacity Requirements

    PERC 5 and PERC 6/E controllers support virtual disks greater than 2 TB in size, but Dell recommends checking the capacity of the operating systems to support boot volumes of that capacity.
  • Page 20 A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/vectors/2004_2tblun.pdf Table 3: PERC 5/E and PERC 6/E controller features Feature PERC 5/E PERC 6/E SAS Technology 3Gbps 3Gbps Host Bus Interface x8 PCI Express x8 PCI Express...

  • Page 21: Dell Openmanage Server Administrator

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 6. Dell OpenManage Server Administrator Dell OpenManage Server Administrator is a management application for configuring PowerEdge servers. The Server Administrator’s configuration abilities for host-based RAID and non-RAID disk storage are of particular interest for this paper.

  • Page 22: Reconfiguring Virtual Disks -- Raid Migration And Capacity Expansion

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Figure 6: Screenshot of Create Virtual Disk Advanced Wizard with Disk Selection Displayed The Create Virtual Disk Express and Create Virtual Disk Advanced wizards set the virtual disk initialization to “Fast Initialize”...

  • Page 23: Moving Physical Disks And Virtual Disk Configurations - Disk Roaming And Disk Migration

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Table 4: Virtual disk reconfiguration on the PERC 5/E and PERC 6/E RAID controllers Target Disk Requirements PERC 5/E and PERC6/E Controller Starting RAID Level RAID Level...

  • Page 24: Importing Migrated Virtual Disks

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 • Virtual disks on a SAS controller can only be migrated to another SAS controller. • When moving an enclosure, power down the enclosure and the server before moving the enclosure.
  • Page 25 A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Figure 7: Physical Disks with a Foreign State Server Administrator displays the Import/Recover Foreign Configuration or the Import Foreign Configuration task when the controller detects a foreign configuration. If you have an incomplete foreign configuration which cannot be imported, using the Clear Foreign Configuration task, erases the foreign data on the physical disks.
  • Page 26 A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Figure 8: Controller Tasks Drop-down Menu With the Import/Recover Foreign Configuration and Clear Foreign Configuration Tasks Displayed PAGE 26 6/16/2008...

  • Page 27: Storage Applications And Components

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 7. Storage Applications and Components Identify customer usage model and needs In order to select the correct storage solution, it is important to understand the application and user requirements.
  • Page 28 This should be used in situations where greater redundancy and data protection is required as well as a reasonable storage capacity. Note: For more details on RAID configurations see the Dell ‘Getting Started with RAID’ document (http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/storage/RAID/RAIDbk0.pdf) PAGE 28...
  • Page 29 The MD1120 is a storage expansion enclosure housing up to 24 2.5-inch hard drives in 2U of rack space. With its use of 2.5” hard drives that consume less space and use less power than 3.5” hard drives, the MD1120 is the transactional performance focused expansion enclosure in the Dell portfolio.

  • Page 30: Application-Specific Guidelines

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Application-Specific Guidelines E-Mail Servers The storage requirements for e-mail servers can vary depending on the size, the amount, and the type of users. While small departmental e-mail servers may work well with a small amount of storage and limited features;...

  • Page 31: Web Servers

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Not recommended: • RAID 0, Concatenated – Not recommended due to lack of redundancy and data protection. Note: While these configurations are not recommended, they can be configured and utilized.

  • Page 32: Database Or Online Transaction Processing Servers

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Recommended: • RAID 10 – Recommended for enterprise web server solutions where availability and redundancy and performance are the highest priority, usually for stand-alone portal sites that are critical to the organization’s business.
  • Page 33 A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) oriented servers are used in a number of industries for the entry and retrieval of transactions. For example, OLTP is common in banking, airlines, mail-order, and supermarkets.

  • Page 34: File Servers

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 3U / 15 x 3.5” drive 2U / 24 x 2.5” drive OLTP Recommended Not Recommended Possible Recommended: • MD1120 – Recommended for OLTP or Database servers with typical capacities where performance and power efficiency are high priority.
  • Page 35 A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 • RAID 50 – Recommended for those solutions that require a balance between storage capacity and performance. • RAID 60 – Recommended for those solutions that require a balance between storage capacity and performance with maximum data protection.
  • Page 36 A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Table 21: User Store File Server RAID Guidelines RAID Level Application Concatenated 0 File – User file store Recommended Not Recommended Possible Recommended: • RAID 5 – Recommended for file servers that require maximum storage capacity and moderate data protection and performance.

  • Page 37: Streaming Media Servers

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Streaming Media Servers Streaming media servers are systems that provide web-casting, video conferencing, Internet entertainment (for example, Internet TV or Internet radio), and multimedia services. These systems generally require a balance between storage capacity, availability, redundancy, and performance.

  • Page 38: Hot Spares

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Not Recommended: • Concatenated – This solution is not recommended due to lack of redundancy and limited performance. Note: While these configurations are not recommended, they can be configured and utilized.

  • Page 39: Summary And Conclusions

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 8. Summary and Conclusions It is important to understand the characteristics of each storage component in order to assess the performance of the overall application. It is also necessary to understand how the storage component is configured since this has a direct impact on the effectiveness of an application.

  • Page 40: Appendix - A: References

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 Appendix – A: References 1. SAS Protocol Specification (http://www.t10.org/drafts.htm#SCSI3_SAS) SFF-8470 Connector Specification (http://www.sffcommittee.com/ns/index.html) Beyond The 2-TB SCSI Logical Unit (http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/vectors/2004_2tblun.pdf) Dell PowerVault MD1000 Documentation (http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/md1000/) Dell PowerVault MD1120 Documentation (http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/md1120/)

  • Page 41: Appendix - B: Glossary

    Derived from the expression “Just a Bunch Of Disk” MD1xxx Family – The Dell PowerVault MD1xxx Family include the MD1000 and MD1120 enclosures. MD3xxx Family – The Dell PowerVault MD3xxx Family include the MD3000 and MD3000i storage arrays PERC – PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller RAID –...

  • Page 42: Appendix - C: Revision History

    A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION VER A02 10. Appendix – C: Revision History Revision Description Date Modified By SAS Solution First Release 4/17/2006 Core Team Updated to reflect Dell PowerVault MD1000 and SAS Solution 6/16/2008 MD1120 enclosures (aka.

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