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
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