There is no doubt that the barriers to virtualization have been rapidly falling. In fact today with VMware’s Monster VM capabilities and the scalability of vSphere 5.5, many organizations have recognized that practically any application can be virtualized and they have adopted a virtualization first policy. But there are still some customers that have been hesitant about virtualizing their most critical applications. Often times I/O bottlenecks and high storage latency are the cause for poor application performance. That is where a new breed of storage comes to the rescue.
All Flash based storage is making huge inroads into the Data center replacing the need for massively large and expensive traditional spindle based storage. By offering a consistent low latency storage platform, entirely flash based storage arrays are the ideal storage for running critical applications that demand the utmost of storage performance.
Thanks to our friends at Pure Storage the Technical Marketing team at VMware has recently received a loaner all flash based Pure FA-400 Flash Array. Over the next several weeks we will be doing a series of articles exploring various design considerations, performance studies, and ultimately how you can successfully run business critical applications like MS SQL, Oracle, and SAP in a virtualized environment backed with flash storage.
The Gear Arrives and is setup in a Flash
It was like Christmas unpacking the gear, it even came with a screw driver to install the array.
With just a few cables to plug in the array was up and running. Look we used the screw driver (it really does come in handy)
The Pure admin web UI. All Flash based arrays have no need for storage tiring, disk groups, and raid levels, making configuring the array simple and intuitive. Using the admin interface we were able to create new LUNS and assign them to hosts in a matter of a few minutes.
Now the real fun begins, in our next article we will profile the use of VAAI on flash arrays and study its benefits. We also plan to look at thin versus thick provisioning in flash based storage arrays and evaluate the pros and cons of each.
