Solution Brief Permabit SANblox™ Data Reduction Solution The Big Picture Unabated data growth is driving today’s enterprises to require data efficiency throughout their storage environments. With IT budgets tight, managers are focused on lowering their effective cost, reducing footprint, and dropping administrative costs associated with running their infrastructures. Data deduplication and compression together offer the best means of helping customers achieve these goals. Permabit is the recognized leader in high-performance data efficiency solutions for primary storage. It is the only company in the storage industry to combine high-performance inline deduplication and compression for the most complete efficiency solutions available on the market. Permabit’s sole focus lies in this area, and it has been awarded 34 patents, to date. The Permabit SANblox appliance adds inline, high-performance deduplication and compression to Fibre Channel (FC) attached storage arrays and can be deployed in a matter of hours to deliver immediate data reduction savings. SANblox and Existing Storage Systems SANblox can be deployed immediately with new as well as existing storage systems. By lowering the effective cost per GB of storage with 6:1 data reduction, SANblox enables you to meet the price and performance challenges of competing optimized hybrid and all-flash arrays while continuing to leverage the rich data management features that have made your storage an industry leading platform. SANblox leverages existing management features (thin provisioning, snapshots and replication) and sits as a separate appliance on the SAN, so it can be selectively applied to data sets that benefit from deduplication and/or compression, while remaining out of the data path of those that don’t. With inline data efficiency, storage savings from deduplication and compression are realized immediately. The result has the combined effect of increasing effective capacity and reducing effective costs while expanding cache utilization, which enhances performance. Data Reduction Use Cases SANblox provides immediate benefits for applications that store large amounts of redundant data such as virtual server farms and VDI solutions. In addition, applications with compressible data including traditional databases (OLTP, data warehouses), analytic applications and “big data” applications, benefit from SANblox’ best in class HIOPS™ compression technology. Vertical markets such as the energy and healthcare fields will see dramatic storage savings due to applications that process and store system logs or utilize specialized data formats for sensor data. DATABASES, VMs, VDI SANblox LUNS 1 2 3 FIBRE CHANNEL SWITCH 4 M DEDUPLICATION & COMPRESSION ARRAY LUNS 1 2 3 N ANY BLOCK STORAGE Data Reduction Yield Data reduction yields vary by data type and content. While the benefits of data deduplication are well known for backup data, other data types tested on systems paired with SANblox reported the following results: • VDI Thick clones – 10:1 to 50:1 reduction (varies with workflow) • VDI Linked clones - 5:1 reduction • Analytics (large MongoDB) – 4:1 reduction • General compute applications – 6:1 reduction Quick and Easy to install A SANblox appliance can be installed in under an hour with full configuration completed in a few hours. SANblox appliances are installed in pairs, each of which is cabled to FC SAN and Ethernet switches. After cable connections are made, LUNs are WWW.PERMABIT.COM/SANBLOX Permabit SANblox Solution Brief provisioned for SANblox. At that point, set up is as simple as 1-2-3 via the SANblox UI: 1. Attach SANblox to multiple backend LUNs. Support for multiple backend LUNs allows scaling of both capacity and performance. SANblox is able to provide up to 10:1 savings on its own and is able to leverage existing thin provisioning capabilities to deliver even higher data reduction ratios. 2. Create the storage pool. The storage pool provides a global data store that offers deduplication and compression for maximum efficiency, while leveraging zero block elimination and sequential random writes to accelerate performance. 3. Create front-end LUNs. The SANblox UI makes it easy for storage administrators to carve out front-end LUNs for use by application hosts. To take advantage of data efficiency, simply provision a front-end LUNs and logically group them together with application hosts. At this point, configuration is complete and the front-end SANblox LUNs immediately begin to deliver the cost savings and performance benefits of inline data reduction. SANblox - Data efficiency as simple as Plug-In. Save. SANblox Foundation The core of SANblox is Permabit’s Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) software which delivers fine-grained (4k block), inline deduplication and HIOPS™ compression to Fibre Channel SANs. The SANblox appliance takes a global pool of storage presented by VDO and carves it up into a set of SANblox LUNs for use by applications. When data is written to SANblox, VDO sees all write requests that come down from the SANblox LUNs. VDO takes the new blocks and uses the Albireo deduplication technology to find duplicate content. HIOPS Compression then manages the compression of any unique blocks before they are written to the storage device, while VDO keeps track of stored data and manages the data in a way that is seamless to the user. Data reduction through block-level deduplication and compression increases the overall capacity of the underlying device. By running these functions on the SANblox appliance and its processors, storage performance is preserved, and non-optimized LUNs can continue to be delivered to your applications natively. Competitive Differentiation Data efficiency has quickly become a “must have” capability in storage solutions. Although more and more solutions claim to have some data efficiency capabilities, not all versions of deduplication and compression are the same! The following criteria are “must haves” for primary storage data efficiency solutions: Deduplication: must utilize inline processing to enable the most effective use of resources and deliver immediate storage savings. Some offerings don’t offer deduplication at all, while others (such as NetApp FAS) run deduplication post–process, which consumes storage and processing resources, delaying the savings effect of deduplication. A second critical consideration with deduplication is granularity. In general, the smaller the block size, the more efficient the deduplication becomes. A block size of 4K is used by all modern operating systems. Systems that deduplicate across larger block sizes (such as Pure Storage which dedupes at up to a 32K granularity or HP 3PAR which uses 16K) will see 20%-40% less savings than 4K solutions. Compression: must also utilize inline processing or it will be unable to deliver immediate storage savings. Competitive offerings (HDS HUS, HP 3PAR) do not offer compression while others (such as Pure Storage) do most of the work post-process. Finally, there are solutions that are not designed for bulk storage of data, which do not perform well in random IO-intensive primary storage environments (such as NetApp FAS). Performance: many data efficiency implementations are just not designed to deliver data reduction under primary workloads which are typically characterized by heavy random IO (NetApp). These solutions are generally post-process and can put so much load on the system that it impacts the performance of data management operations such as snapshot and replication activities. Other solutions (such as Pure Storage) require data efficiency always be enabled – even with datasets and workloads where the customer will not necessarily benefit (for example, where data is already compressed at the application level). SANblox delivers the best in class for deduplication, compression, and performance! About Permabit Permabit’s mission is simple; to advance the state of the art in data efficiency software. Our focus enables us to deliver unparalleled deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning resulting in unmatched storage savings. We deliver the fastest, most scalable, most resource efficient data efficiency solutions in the world, enabling our customers to grow their businesses and advance their competitive edge. www.permabit.com • [email protected] @Permabit www.linkedin.com/company/permabit One Alewife Center, Suite 410, Cambridge, MA 02140 P: 617.252.9600 • F: 617.252.9977 © 2015 Permabit Technology Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Permabit is a registered trademark and the Permabit logo, Albireo logo, Permabit Enterprise Archive, and Scalable Data Reduction are trademarks of the Permabit Technology Corporation. All other products or services mentioned may be covered by registered trademarks, trademarks, service marks, or product names as designated by the companies who market those products.
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