Around The Block Blog
by Brian Whitaker, Senior Marketing Manager, Dell Storage — March 28, 2012
How do technology vendors know when it’s time to deliver a new capability? There’s an easy answer to that question. Deliver the capability that customers ask for.
Over the year since Dell acquired Compellent, we’ve kept our ears open to our customers who want us to deliver value to Compellent. There are a few ways to do that:
- Every technology vendor adds new features to their products over time. Compellent is no different – we’ve added eleven new capabilities in the past year.
- Leverage partner technology. This is also expected and is normal for Dell as we’ve always had strong relationships with ‘best-in-breed’ technology vendors.
- Take advantage of Dell’s unique intellectual property. We, here at Dell have a purposeful approach to strategic acquisitions of IP and investment in innovation.
At the recent Dell Storage Forum in London, we announced we were going to extend storage support for Dell and partner networking solutions. Today we’re following through with this commitment to deliver an end-to-end solution by making a better together story for Compellent that encompasses both our own storage networking technology and technology from partners. Going forward, we’ll fully support the following storage networking solutions:
- Dell Force10 S4810
- Brocade 6510
- Brocade DCX-8510
These are additions to our list of tested, supported, fully compatible switches that extend Compellent’s reach into the enterprise. With full support for 10GbE and 16Gbps Fibre Channel, Dell Compellent is helping its customers optimize their core datacenter infrastructure. As they find Compellent’s distinctive capabilities an ideal fit for enterprise workloads, customers have wanted more choice in enterprise switching. Today we have delivered.
Going beyond conventional switches, we've also qualified a range of switches for our M1000e blade servers. By extending our options for Dell blade customers, we help those who want to use Compellent for private cloud or to create a ‘datacenter-in-a-rack’. These blade optimized switches include:
- Dell 4/8Gb FC SAN Module
- Dell M8428-k
- Brocade M5424
By listening and delivering, we’re ensuring that Compellent remains a strong fit for any kind of customer, regardless of whether they prefer Dell’s own enterprise solutions or partner technology. As Compellent continues to develop over time, you’ll see more announcements where it’s become ‘better together’ with technology from other sources. For additional information, visit Compellent’s partner portal, contact your partner or Dell salesperson.
by Berit Johnson, Product Marketing Manager, Dell Compellent — June 29, 2011
Dell Compellent is introducing the latest addition to its unified storage line, the Dell NX3000 for Compellent. Another step in the integration of Compellent into the Dell Fluid Data architecture, the Dell NX3000 for Compellent connects to the Compellent Storage Center SAN and leverages Dell’s cluster-ready, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2-based NAS solution to provide advanced file management services such as single-instance storage (SIS) for file-level deduplication and DFS (Distributed File Services) for namespace service and replication.
The amount of unstructured data is expected to grow drastically over the next several years, causing the need for NAS storage to increase significantly. Companies are tasked with finding ways to effectively manage this data growth under strict budget restrictions.
NAS products such as the Dell NX3000 for Compellent enable end-users to leverage file system protocols to provide file shares for centrally storing unstructured data such as word processing, spreadsheets and presentation files among many users. In addition, NAS systems host file-oriented application data such as static web farm content, document management data stores and source-code storage for both Windows and Linux/Unix clients.
By consolidating all block-level (SAN) and file-level (NAS) storage onto a single scalable Dell Compellent storage platform, end-users experience a number of benefits, including cost savings from leveraging a single virtualized pool for both block- and file-level storage, the ability to take advantage of Dell’s patented architecture for NAS-dedicated volumes, and access to Dell Compellent’s award-winning Copilot support for the entire unified storage solution.
The new Dell NX3000 for Compellent includes the following hardware features that enable improved performance and scalability options for Windows NAS users:
- Leverages a Dell 11G server (2U form factor) with 24GB RAM and dual quad-core processors
- Scales out to 4 clustered nodes with active/active failover
- Supports a quad-port 1Gb NIC or a dual-port 10Gb NIC for network connectivity
- Supports a dual-port 10Gb iSCSI HBA or a dual-port 8Gb FC HBA for SAN connectivity
For additional information about the new product, please visit the unified storage page on our site and view the video.
by Jim Lester, Product Specialist, Dell Compellent — June 29, 2011
With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Dell Compellent’s already great thin provisioning just got that much better. Thanks to the adaptation of new SCSI commands defined under the SBC-3 specification by the T10 Technical Committee, Dell Compellent Storage Center can now reclaim freed space from Red Hat systems. This is possible without any agent that has to be maintained, versioned and tested on each server.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 introduced the SCSI UNMAP command to the ext4 file systems to support releasing space on SAN platforms that also implemented the UNMAP command. Compellent began working on implementing the UNMAP command early, recognizing the great value it could have with our thin provisioning. Starting with Storage Center 5.4 all the necessary pieces were in place to provide free space recovery to platforms like Red Hat 6.
Since this is all built in natively to the system, users don’t have to maintain a proprietary plug-in on every system deployed. All that is needed are the built-in tools.
Step-by-Step Guide on How to Use It
- Make a new ext4 file system and mount it using the new ‘discard’ option. This is the piece that tells Red Hat to send the SCSI UNMAP command to Storage Center when it is done with blocks of storage.
- Throw some files onto the new file system. Below is the screen shot from the Storage Center manager showing how much space has been allocated, about 24 GB.
- Compare that with the output from df. We can see that they are relatively close.
- Now for the magic, delete some data off the volume and look at the file system.
- We can see that the Storage Center has released the space back into the pool and is now only reserving about 15 GB of space.
This technology will allow customers to get even better efficiency out of their storage. Stop having stranded blocks allocated and not doing anything. This could also help increase the overall performance of the system as Dell Compellent’s other features like Fast Track and Data Progression can do an even better job of ensuring that the best performing space is utilized by real active data. All of this is achieved through native standards that don’t require the administrator to maintain any custom utilities on their servers. It just works, and that’s the way it should be.
To view this post along with other technical posts, please visit the Dell TechCenter community.