Storage Environment

Technology Refresh

Richard R. SiemersSenior Storage Administrator

Pier 1 Imports, Inc.

• North America's largest

specialty retailer of

imported home furnishings

and decor

• Based in Ft Worth, Texas

• Operates more than 1,000

stores in North America

• Employs nearly 15,000

people worldwide

Previous Environment• Tier 1

– EMC Symmetrix DMX2000 and

DMX1000 for open systems

• Tier 2 and 3– 6 Dell Clariions

– 2 IBM DS4500s

– NetAPP FAS3020

• Challenges– Each system and raid group an

island of performance and

capacity. 250 raw TB total

– 4x everything – bills, vendors,

admin tools, support contracts,

etc.

GoalsFaster, Bigger, Better

AND Less Expensive

• High Availability and High Performance

• Tier 1 Quality Support

• Thin Provisioning

• Simplified Provisioning

• Simplified Monitoring

• Reduce Costs

• Scalable Performance and Capacity

April 2009

July 2009

March

2010

June 2010

Project Scope Timeline

Original Scope:

Replace just EOL

T2/T3 systems

Capacity savings

allowed us to

consolidate ALL

T2/T3 systems to

the new system

Consolidated NAS

capacity to new

system.

Decision made to

move all Tier 1 to

new storage.

Current Solution3PAR

• 2x InServ T800 Storage Servers

– 4 Nodes each (persistent cache)

– 16 Front End Fiber Channel Ports

– 480 Spindles

– 196 TB raw capacity

• Thin Provisioning

• Remote Copy (Replication)

• Dynamic Optimization

• System Reporter

75% Reduction in

Storage Footprint

20% Reduction in

Power & Cooling

Costs

Previous Environment10 Different Arrays

Current Environment2 3PAR Utility Storage Arrays

Data Center Consolidation

Simplified Management

• Provisioning time reduced

to minutes.

– No LUN “Initializing”

– Intuitive GUI

– Mapping and Masking are

dynamic

– Ability to “Create similar”

– Multipath via MPIO

• Native in AIX 5.2+ and

Windows 2008

• MS MPIO from 3PAR for

W2003 and W2000

– Easy conversion between raid

and disk types using Dynamic

Optimization

Highly Virtualized

Secondsto provision service levels

Autonomic planning and

configuration

Thin Provisioning

Traditional (Fat) Provisioning

- dedicate on allocation

Volume

Written

Data

2 TB

Volume

Written

Data

Thin Provisioning

- dedicate on write

Volume

Written

Data

Volume

Written

Data

2 TB

Chunklets

Physical Capacity Consumed by Host

Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor

Get Thin: Thin Conversion

• White space detection and conversion while migrating.

– Host based migrations like volume managers do block level mirroring/migrations that copy the entire LUN, white space full of zeros and all.

• Thin Conversion watches for incoming streams of zeros and prevents allocation of space for “empty” whitespace.

– Deleted data still occupies space. Ideally zero out the free space before migration/conversion.

– High Performance conversion of data stream in real time handled in hardware chipset.

Before After

0000

00000000

T-Class

F-Class

Stay Thin: Thin Persistence

• Non-disruptive “re-thinning” returns space to thin provisioned volumes and to free pool for reuse

– Recover space allocated to data that has been deleted.

– Recover missed opportunities to use the “Thin Conversion” process.

– Leverages file system tools to overwrite free space with zeros.

– High Performance conversion of data stream in real time handled in hardware chipset.

Before After

00000000

T-Class

F-Class

Thin Provisioning

Our Pier 1 Hosts “see” 153 TB, but only consume 99 TB.

35% of our capacity is virtualized.*Your mileage will vary!*

Pier 1 Capacity on Utility Storage

Increased Performance

• Wide Striping

– Eliminates hot-spots: work load spread across all spindles

– Even Small LUN sizes benefit from high spindle counts

Virtualized Storage

High & Predictable Service Levels

Fine & massive

resource

utilization

Traditional Storage

Low & Unpredictable Service

Levels

Capacity utilization and performance are

optimizedCapacity utilization and performance are

tradeoffs

Controlle

rControlle

r

Controller

Coarse &

narrow resource

utilization

Striping: Wide vs “Not So Wide”Physical Disk Performance

8.5 GB “Hyper” Size.

Hot spots developed and

needed to be rearranged

periodically for optimal

performance.

256 MB “Chunk” Size.

Hot spots have yet to

develop here. Every

disk is used evenly.

Striping: Wide vs “Not So Wide”Disk Adapter Performance

IO/sec per disk adapter

in our “old” Tier 1

storage frame.

The new “wide striped”

architecture is evenly

balanced across all

adapters in our

environment.

Performance Management

• System Reporter

– Monitor performance and

capacity over time.

– Web based - No agents on

servers, no client to install.

– Due to Thin Provisioning, we

can monitor data growth

without agents or access to

the hosts/databases

• Previous tools were slow,

required host agents, and

varied between storage

systems.

Pier 1 Performance

Pier 1 Performance

Pier 1 Performance

Summary of Benefits

• Increased Performance

• Simplified Landscape

• Faster Provisioning

• Greater Flexibility

• T1 Support for all tiers

• Reduced Footprint

• Reduced Expenses