Pooling arrays within a cluster allows you to distribute I/O across multiple arrays which increases performance and allows capacity to scale across all arrays in the pool. Scale-out architecture grows linearly as your SAN needs grow which allows you to continue to leverage older hardware, and eliminates the penalty associated with incorrectly forecasting the future performance and capacity needs of a SAN. Pooling Arrays within a Scale-Out Cluster Nimble Storage scale-out architecture provides pooling of arrays for horizontal scalability of both performance and capacity to existing storage arrays. For further information about the rebalancing process, please see the following section titled Pool Rebalancing to fully understand the time associated with cluster and pool management. Merging scale-out clusters is a quick process because it doesn t require any immediate data rebalancing however this process may be followed by migrating volumes between pools or merging pools which does result in data rebalancing across the member arrays. For example, if you would like to remove an array from a cluster, then you should first evacuate it from its current storage pool to migrate data to the remaining pool members. However, it is important to understand that changing pool membership can take time while the existing data volume, snapshots and clones are rebalanced on the resulting pool arrays. there is no downtime for hosts or applications. Moreover, it is transparent to hosts i.e. Adding, Removing and Merging Scale-Out Cluster Arrays Changing cluster membership is a quick process that makes storage performance and capacity available immediately, or removes it entirely. If you require more granular array grouping then you should use separate Storage Pools.
Creating separate scale-out clusters of arrays might also make sense for sensitive data such as finance and human resources to meet security audit requirements. B E S T P R A C T I C E S G U I D E : N I M B L E S T O R A G E B E S T P R A C T I C E S F O R S C A L E - O U T 3Ĥ Cluster boundaries can also make sense for organizational boundaries to keep data assets separate. This provides the ability to scale beyond a single array, managing all of the pools of storage within the cluster. This means that there is a single management domain and single pane of glass management view. Cluster Arrays Based on Management Boundaries A Nimble Storage scale-out cluster or group contains one or more individual arrays that are managed as a single logical storage array (up to 4 in the 2.x releases). The following section features best practices and suggestions to follow when planning your deployment. Planning Scale-Out Clusters and Pools Nimble Storage provides a rich set of features associated with scale-out clustering around data rebalancing, migration and host integration to get the most out of your investment. Storage Array: Arrays are a highly available purpose-built storage appliance that consists of redundant storage controllers, disks and solid state flash storage. Volumes within a pool are striped across all the pool member arrays. Storage Pool: A pool is a logical collection of one or more arrays in a cluster containing volumes and their respective snapshots and clones. Terminology Scale-Out Cluster: Multiple Nimble Storage arrays that are combined together and managed as a single logical storage entity. This document walks through the planning, hosting, and networking best practices associated with Nimble Storage s scale-out cluster.
Multiple types and generations of arrays can be combined in a single Nimble Storage cluster, protecting your investment. Scale-out storage is ideal for IT environments looking to eliminate individual silos of storage across their infrastructure. Adding multiple arrays into the cluster linearly increases both performance and capacity, while leveraging the resources of all arrays in the cluster. 3 Introduction Nimble Storage scale-out cluster functionality allows scaling of performance and capacity beyond the limits of a single array, while maintaining the management simplicity of a single array.
0 kommentar(er)
