Are Tier 1 Controllers Relevant?
by Hu Yoshida on Mar 30, 2012
Nigel Poulton is a very active tweeter (@nigelpoulton) who is also known for his Technical Deep Dive blog site.
I am a close follower of Nigel’s blog posts and tweets, as I always find them interesting and informative. Following my post on how virtualization redefines tier 1 storage – where I asserted that tier 1 is now a function of the virtualization storage controller rather than the storage array—Nigel and I had the following exchange on Twitter:
What exactly is tier 1 #storage today? I expand on #Wikibon‘s definition #HDS.com (Cc: @dfloyer): bit.ly/wo0X06 #virtualization
— Hubert Yoshida (@HuYoshida) March 15, 2012
@HuYoshida @dfloyer Hu, it’s one thing to define and deliver “tier 1″ storage arrays bit.lywo0X06 But r traditional T1 arrays relevant today
— Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton)
[tweet https://twitter.com/nigelpoulton/status/180360323289722880]
March 15, 2012
@nigelpoulton Traditional “T1 Arrays”are not relevent’Itis the intelligence in the Controller that fronts the”array”
— Hubert Yoshida (@HuYoshida) March 15, 2012
@HuYoshida @dfloyer .. Replication is moving away from the controller. No? MF connect is irrelevant to most applications. Highest perf …
— Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) March 15, 2012
@nigelpoulton I disagree that replication is moving away from controllers, if you need “no data loss” RTO, RPO.
— Hubert Yoshida (@HuYoshida) March 15, 2012
@HuYoshida @dfloyer … Highest perf comes from SSD based systems. Looks to me like old definitions of T1 are not relevant today. IMO.
— Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) March 15, 2012
@HuYoshida I’m seeing more and more replication outside of the storage array. MS Exchange, SQL… Oracle…
— Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) March 15, 2012
@nigelpoulton True, but on the other hand VMware uses VAAI to offload replication to storage to enableVM servers to scale.
— Hubert Yoshida (@HuYoshida) March 15, 2012
@HuYoshida 5 years ago it was common to see USP arrays with nearly 100% of LUNs replicated. That is less and less common today IMO.
— Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) March 15, 2012
@HuYoshida but do traditional controllers cope well with SSD? They were designed for rotating rust and higher level funks like repl….!?
— Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) March 15, 2012
The character limitations of Twitter are a little frustrating, so my response to his last tweet is contained here:
Traditional controllers do not cope well with SSD. However, modern controllers supporting page level tiering make efficient use of SSD by using them only for the hot pages and not wasting expensive SSD capacity on allocated unused space and less active pages that can be stored on lower, cost larger capacity disks.
What are your opinions on the relevance of a tier 1 storage controller for replication and SSD?
Comments (1)
VSP and VMAX Tier 1 Shenanigans – Technical Deep Dive on 02 Apr 2012 at 2:10 pm
[...] discussion around the validity of architectures like VSP and their designation as Tier 1, which Hu summarised in a recent blog post he cut and pasted wrote. Hu has asked that I summarise my thoughts on the topic in a blog post so that he can fully digest [...]
