Performance Where It's Needed
Most storage vendors are still caught up in their efforts to make solid-state fast enough, reliable enough, or cheap enough. But the bottom line for IT admins searching for a storage solution is reduced cost and improved efficiency. Solid-state by itself can’t deliver what customers need. For example, no matter how fast a storage system is, if it can’t address the issue of resource contention that plagues most shared storage, the IT admin can’t count on that storage system to deliver performance when and where it’s needed.
NexGen, on the other hand, is focused on the ability to deliver the information customers need to manage the performance of their application workloads. We’re addressing storage performance management with Storage Quality of Service (QoS), which provides visibility to performance resources, allows them to be provisioned just like capacity, and then ensures that performance levels are maintained.
It begins with providing visibility to the available storage performance resources. The NexGen management dashboard presents real-time performance and capacity information so you can make informed decisions about how to provision performance. You heard me correctly, provision performance! NexGen has solved a problem as old a shared storage itself, by providing the ability to provision performance just like capacity.
When a NexGen volume is provisioned, both capacity and performance are defined in the same dialogue box. Each volume is assigned one of three QoS levels (Mission-Critical, Business-Critical and Non-Critical) that define IOPS, throughput and latency. A volume’s QoS setting defines the solid-state to SAS ratio of that volume. Once the volume is created, QoS becomes responsible for maintaining its performance levels.
QoS is not a constraining force. When the seas are calm, performance resources are available to any volume, including lower priority workloads like file shares (Non-Critical). However, if Exchange (Mission-Critical) gets hungry for performance, QoS will guarantee the performance you defined, at the expense of the lesser QoS levels.
QoS is just one facet of the NexGen solution and is an underlying feature of our entire product. For instance, it ensures that Dynamic Data Placement (real-time tiering) and Phased Data Reduction (real-time dedupe) don’t impact performance.
So, not only can we deliver solid-state performance at a significantly lower $/GB than 15K disk drives, we can ensure that the applications that need performance get it, and low priority workloads don’t interfere. This provides maximum consolidation and helps customers avoid creating solid-state silos and the migration challenges that follow.