FAQ
Permabit SANblox™ FAQ
What is SANblox?
SANblox is the storage industry’s first inline data efficiency appliance for Fibre Channel SANs. A breakthrough in data
reduction technologies, SANblox enables any SAN deployment to deliver 6X more capacity, at 85% less cost with a
minimum 300 microsecond latency.
Why sell SANblox
Customers with Fibre Channel storage arrays are always looking to optimize their storage investment because data growth
continues to exceed storage budget growth. SANblox delivers an average of 85% reduction in storage consumption and
“effective cost”. These attributes level the playing field in competitive sales when compared to all flash arrays!
With SANblox, you can instantly enable your customers by adding industry-leading data efficiency, compatible with
all leading SAN all-flash, hybrid, and HDD storage arrays, to their existing SAN. Incorporating data efficiency capabilities
prolongs the life of in-place SAN solutions facilitating incremental storage sales into existing arrays. In addition, SANblox
can also be bundled with new arrays optimizing financial returns on investment.
Which types of applications will see the biggest
benefit from SANblox?
Compression
25
Deduplication
SANblox has broad horizontal application across a wide
Deduplication + Compression
variety of datasets and applications. It provides immediate
15
12
benefit for software applications that store large amounts
9
6.0
of redundant data such as virtual server farms and VDI
3.0
2.0
1.7
1.5
1.3
1.2
solutions. It is also beneficial for software that produces
Exchange Environment
User Directories
Database Environment
Virtual Server/Desktop
(with Workflow)
compressible data such as traditional databases (OLTP, data
warehouses), analytic solutions and “big data” applications,
including those that process and store system logs and sensor data. These applications are the backbone of the finance,
healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing and energy industries.
Data Reduction Ratios
33
What makes SANblox unique and superior?
SANblox is the only high performance data efficiency solution on the market to supply both inline deduplication and
compression to any Fibre Channel array. It is unique in that deduplication and compression are designed to work in
concert so that the most appropriate optimization technology is used on the appropriate data set.
Because SANblox sits as a separate appliance on the SAN, it can be applied to data sets that will benefit from
optimization technologies, while remaining out of the data path. And, the modular approach of SANblox leverages
existing management features of the array (such as thin provisioning, snapshots, and replication features) to minimize
the number of new administration tasks required.
WWW.PERMABIT.COM/SANBLOX • 1
Permabit SANblox
FAQ
What advantage does having inline data efficiency give SANblox?
With inline data efficiency, storage savings from deduplication and compression are realized immediately. Key
advantages of an inline approach:
• Requires less processing load – inline avoids costly double pass dedupe/compression.
• Increases performance for hybrid arrays and disk arrays cache – inline operation expands the effective size of
DRAM/flash cache so more workloads hit higher performing fast media.
• Decreases costly multiple writes –writes only unique and compressed blocks inline for immediate storage savings.
• Enables high change workloads that bring post-process systems to their knees (i.e. what EMC refers to as unstable
condition) – inline is real-time transaction ready.
• Provides predictable performance and minimal latency – inline enables you to meet SLAs.
• Protects data – inline enables immediate replication for DR of reduced data.
In contrast, with post-process data efficiency, which is used by companies such as Pure Storage, data is written
unmodified to media and data reduction techniques are applied at a later point in time. Post-process techniques write
to disk or flash twice: first, when the data is originally written, and again later after data efficiency is applied. The result is
increased storage consumption, wear on flash-based storage media and duplicate operational load on processors.
Does SANblox create a bottleneck because it sits in front of the SAN?
SANblox delivers up to 230,000 random read 4K IOPS. SANblox data efficiency expands the effective size of the cache,
typically by 6:1. This increases cache hit rates and overall IOPS. In one test, the number of cache hits was increased from
80% to 95%.
Does SANblox performance scale?
Multiple units can be combined to increase performance.
If a SANblox appliance fails, will data be lost on the SAN?
No, unlike gateway products that perform write-back caching to mask poor performance, SANblox always commits
data to storage before a write is acknowledged. Writes are never acknowledged before being persistently stored, and
both data and metadata are maintained in the enterprise storage device. This improves data safety because once a write
completes, data is immediately under the protection of the array. SANblox is configured in HA pairs only to provide high
availability for the application itself.
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