Home > Storage > Unity XT > Storage Admin > Dell Unity: Best Practices Guide > Essential Guidelines
Dell Unity is a virtually provisioned, Flash optimized storage system designed for ease of use. Dell Unity allows for in generation Data in Place upgrade for continuous growth and sizing. See Dell Unity All Flash and Hybrid Data in Place Conversion Guide for more details. This guide introduces specific configuration recommendations that enable good performance from Dell Unity. At the highest level, good performance design follows a few simple rules. The main principles of designing a Dell Unity system for performance are:
Dell Unity utilizes the latest technology in multicore processors, capable of high levels of storage performance. In order to realize the performance potential, Dell Technologies recommends the use of Flash drives in all Dell Unity systems. The best way to harness the power of Flash is to ensure as much dataset as possible resides on Flash drives. Therefore, Dell Technologies recommends provisioning as much Flash capacity as possible. Use the largest Flash drives appropriate for your solution.
In order to maximize system performance, eliminate individual bottlenecks by utilizing all hardware resources. Spread Flash drives across back-end buses. Avoid Flash drives and non-flash drives in the same enclosure when possible. Build storage pools with many drives. Balance LUN assignment and NAS Servers across both Storage Processors (SPs). Spread host connections across as many front-end ports as possible.
Designing for simplicity also increases the system’s flexibility, and leads to higher, more consistent performance. Using fewer storage pools means that more drives can be devoted to any single workload in the pool, potentially improving performance. Standardizing on a single capacity drive per tier, rather than provisioning a system with multiple drive sizes for different purposes, can reduce the number of required hot spares (see the Hot Spares section for more details), make it possible to build larger pools, and enable greater flexibility for future reconfiguration, if needed.
When in doubt about the impact of certain configuration options, selecting the recommended default is typically the best choice.
Hardware can fail, and Dell Unity is architected to continue providing storage services under such conditions. Understand the hardware limitations of different components of the Dell Unity system in order to design a solution that continues to provide good performance under failure conditions. (Hardware capabilities of different components are provided later in this document.)
Dell Technologies regularly updates the Dell Unity Operating Environment in order to improve performance, enhance functionality, and provide new features. When preforming an upgrade of the Dell Unity Operating Environment, is recommended to minimize system I/O to the system, if possible, to ensure the shortest upgrade duration. Dell Technologies recommends running the latest version on your Dell Unity system.