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| Advantages of using SFW with server consolidation | ||
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Storage Foundation is ideally suited to support a server consolidation environment. Once servers are consolidated, SFW provides key features that assure fault tolerance and improve storage utilization. SFW's fault-tolerant features, such as software mirroring and RAID-5, Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP), and clustering support assure high availability for consolidated storage, when business continuity is a requirement in a competitive business environment.
The SFW features that support server consolidation are:
Ability to work in a heterogeneous storage environment You are not tied to a solution offered by a single hardware vendor.
Simple migration of data with disk group import and deport commands If you have SFW disk groups already set up on multiple servers, you deport them on the source server, disconnect the attached storage, reattach the storage on the new larger server, and use the disk group import command to import the disk groups on the new server.
Storage virtualization with software RAID volumes
Once the applications and data are consolidated on the new server, mirrored and RAID-5 volumes provide fault tolerance for critical data. Striped volumes add performance capabilities. Volumes that are both striped and mirrored offer both better performance and fault tolerance. Logical RAID volumes overcome the limitations of physical disks because these RAID volumes can span across disks and even disk arrays, thus assuring more efficient use of storage. Volumes can be configured online without restarting the server.
Capacity management and online volume growth
Managing the space allocated for different functions is an important task that a system administrator must do on a consolidated server. SFW HAs a capacity monitoring function that alerts administrators when used space on a volume is near its capacity so that the volume can grow while it remains online. With this feature, you do not have to preallocate set amounts of storage for different purposes. More storage can be held in reserve in a pool for use only when it is needed. SFW volumes can be configured to increase capacity automatically when they pass a certain threshold.
If you need to take down a disk or even a whole disk array for maintenance, you can migrate the data online through the command.
Special features that support storage in a SAN
The importing and deporting of disk groups with host ID protection and private disk group protection can support storage in a SAN.
Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP)
The DMP software option increases performance of SAN-based disk arrays by spreading I/O between multiple paths to an array. Each path has a separate host adapter and cabling connecting the array and the server. If one path goes down, the DMP software automatically switches the storage associated with the failed path to an alternate path. Thus, the DMP software provides both fault tolerance for path failure and increases in performance through load balancing.
Clustering
Storage Foundation supports clustering with MSCS and Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions includes Cluster Server. Clustering adds fault tolerance for servers. If one server in a clustered group of servers goes down, the storage of that server is taken over by another server in the cluster.
Additional fault tolerance features
RAID-5 logging, dirty region logging, Hot Relocation, and FastResync (FR) increase the efficiency of the mirroring and RAID-5 functions in SFW.
Online performance monitoring and tuning tools provide easy identification and minimization of I/O bottlenecks. These features allow you to increase throughput of the I/O in your system.