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Thursday, 18 June 2009 13:00 |
IT infrastructures tend to become ever more complex as administrators support growth with incremental hardware expansion, which in turn calls for increased real estate, power, cooling, and maintenance. Faced with shrinking budgets, many organizations end up dedicating a majority of their IT spending to simply maintaining data center resources?placing serious constraints on their ability to advance new initiatives.The computing pod is an exciting model for IT infrastructure that helps significantly advance enterprise efficiency. It is defined as a self-contained building block encompassing an optimized power and cooling footprint to facilitate scalability; integrated compute, storage, and network nodes of significant size and processing power; and simplified data center deployment and management to help reduce operational costs. Dell recommends that each pod include the Dell? PowerEdge? modular blade enclosure with PowerEdge blade servers; virtualized storage such as Dell EqualLogic? PS6000 series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays; virtualization software such as the VMware® vSphere?, Microsoft® Hyper-V?, or Citrix® XenServer? platforms; a management module with software such as the Dell Management Console; and switches with stacking capability such as Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3100 series switches. This pod architecture then becomes the basic unit of data center deployment.By elevating data center intelligence through advanced virtualization and software tools in combination with latest-generation server, storage, and network infrastructure, organizations can create highly scalable, self-managing data centers designed to reduce IT infrastructure complexity, simplify management, and increase cost-efficiency. And because this approach can be customized to specific needs, it can provide a flexible computing infrastructure that can quickly and easily adapt to evolving requirements.Also covered: How Dell Business-Ready Configurations can provide a simplified, scalable, resilient architecture for computing pod deployments.
Source : http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q09-20090238-Sherbak.pdf |
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Thursday, 18 June 2009 13:00 |
As online transaction processing (OLTP) and other key enterprise applications take on increasing workloads, administrators are pressed to find ways of handling the performance demands on their storage systems. Traditional mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) have built-in performance characteristics such as seek time and rotational latency that can make it difficult to keep up with escalating needs from transaction-intensive applications.A new option now available for Dell? EqualLogic? PS Series storage is solid-state drive (SSD) technology. SSDs offer exceptional performance?enabling significantly faster random read/write response time compared with traditional mechanical HDDs?along with enhanced reliability, energy efficiency, and space efficiency. To help organizations take advantage of SSD technology, the Dell EqualLogic PS6000S storage array provides outstanding performance in a cost-effective SSD-based array that can easily integrate into multitiered EqualLogic Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area networks (SANs).Although SSDs can offer dramatic performance advantages, their cost and capacity limitations make them most effective when deployed as a targeted solution in particular use cases. For example, SSDs can be a key solution for workloads that require low latency and high IOPS combined with limited capacity (such as virtual desktop infrastructure deployments), and those in which the transfer block size is small (such as OLTP applications). In a tiered storage environment, SSDs enable IT organizations to provide a customized balance of cost-effective capacity and performance with exceptional throughput and response time.SSDs have emerged as an excellent high-performance storage option for certain enterprise workloads. As part of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series of virtualized storage arrays, the EqualLogic PS6000S SSD array can help organizations simply, scalably, and cost-effectively meet escalating application performance demands with enhanced reliability and energy efficiency.
Source : http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q09-20090236-Locsin.pdf |
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Thursday, 18 June 2009 13:00 |
Johann Borgers is the leading provider of acoustically efficient textile components for the automotive industry, with more than 4,700 employees worldwide. The company?s core administrative activities are centralized at its headquarters in Bocholt, Germany, where office-based employees need constant access to key financial and performance data as well as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, the seven end-of-life servers in the data center could no longer provide the reliability, availability, or performance the company required.This case study describes how Johann Borgers deployed virtualized Dell? PowerEdge? 2900 servers with quad-core Intel® Xeon® processors along with a Dell/EMC CX3-10c storage area network (SAN) to help create a reliable, scalable, and highly available server and storage solution. Using VMware® ESX 3.5 virtualization software on the PowerEdge servers enabled the IT team to create virtual machines (VMs) running the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 OS and Citrix Presentation Server? 4.5 software?offering its base of 120 users anytime, anywhere access to the Infor ERP and Microsoft Office applications. Dell Services teams worked with Dell partner CEMA to design and deploy the solution, and the Johann Borgers IT staff also received in-depth SAN training as part of the company?s Dell ProSupport for IT agreement.Transferring management of the local client desktop to the data center offers a single hardware and software management point for IT staff, helping provide total administrative time and cost savings of around 25 percent. The solution has also reduced running costs, cooling costs, and maintenance costs while dramatically improving the availability of critical data and the performance of key IT services. Based on its experience with this project, Johann Borgers now plans to work with Dell on further simplifying its departmental servers and storage.
Source : http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q09-20090348-Borgers.pdf |
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Thursday, 18 June 2009 13:00 |
Internet SCSI (iSCSI) can provide a number of advantages in enterprise storage area network (SAN) infrastructures?offering similar scalability, availability, and manageability as Fibre Channel in a cost-effective way, and enabling IT administrators to work with standard, familiar Ethernet components rather than specialized Fibre Channel equipment. iSCSI-capable Dell? EqualLogic? PS Series iSCSI SAN arrays, Dell PowerVault? storage systems, and Dell/EMC storage systems can provide a simplified, scalable way to implement iSCSI SANs.The underlying technologies?the iSCSI protocol, Ethernet, and TCP/IP transport?help provide a well-known, mature, and cost-effective security infrastructure for iSCSI SANs. Key areas of security that effective iSCSI security strategies must address include data-at-rest (DAR) and data-in-flight (DIF) security; authentication, authorization, and data coherence; and defenses against passive, active, and operational attacks. Key best practices for securing iSCSI SANs include isolating the iSCSI domain, consolidating and securing management portals, disabling unused switch and router features, using access control lists for authorization, using Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) and IP Security (IPsec) when appropriate, and defining a practical and secure key management strategy.Strong security does not necessarily mean expensive security. By taking advantage of the maturity of Ethernet and TCP/IP technologies that serve as the basis for iSCSI networking and following key iSCSI best practices, administrators can cost-effectively implement robust, secure iSCSI SANs as part of a comprehensive enterprise security strategy.
Source : http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q09-20090225-McConnell.pdf |
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Thursday, 18 June 2009 13:00 |
The Dell? NX4 network attached storage (NAS) device is designed to provide flexible, enterprise-class file storage for Microsoft® Windows®, Linux®, and UNIX® environments while incorporating advanced EMC® features that provide functionality well beyond simple file servers, including support for both Internet SCSI (iSCSI) and Fibre Channel. The Data Access in Real Time (DART) OS supports concurrent use of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File System (NFS) protocols, enabling seamless file sharing without compromising data integrity and without requiring performance-reducing emulation.The Dell NX4 is designed to provide high availability without compromise?enabling organizations to continue operating at the same performance and service levels even in the event of a failure. EMC Celerra® SnapSure? software enables administrators to create logical point-in-time snapshots to help meet recovery point objectives (RPOs), while optional Celerra Replicator? software provides a powerful, simplified tool for asynchronous replication and can integrate with SnapSure and VMware® Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to help simplify the testing and execution of disaster recovery processes. Support for multiple backup and restore options helps maximize flexibility.In addition, file-level deduplication and compression can help organizations effectively handle the proliferation of unstructured data, while file-level retention features help them comply with enterprise, industry, or government requirements. The optional Celerra Anti-Virus Agent (CAVA) helps identify and eliminate known viruses before they infect files on the storage system. The open Celerra FileMover application programming interface (API), meanwhile, supports tiered storage access to help reduce costs, increase storage utilization, and enhance service levels. The advanced features of the Dell NX4, combined with flexible file management and support for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel, make this system well suited to help meet enterprise-class requirements while also helping to simplify data management and reduce costs.
Source : http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q09-20090199-Matthews.pdf |
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