Dell EMC PowerFlex and VMware Cloud Foundation for High Performance Applications
Tue, 04 Jul 2023 09:44:35 -0000
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The world in 2020 has shown all industries that innovation is necessary to thrive in all conditions. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) hybrid cloud platform was crafted by innovators who realize the biggest asset our customers have is their information technology and the data that runs the business. The VCF offering takes the complexity out of operationalizing infrastructure to enable greater elasticity, growth, and simplification through improved automation. VCF enables options available using on-premises and multi-cloud deployments to address ever changing enterprise needs.
VMware included design factors that anticipated customers’ use of varying storage options in the flexibility of implementing VCF. VMware vSAN is the standard for VCF hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments and is directly integrated into vSphere and VCF. For those circumstances where workloads or customer resource usage require alternative storage methods, VMware built flexibility into the VCF storage offering. Just as we see a wide variety in desktop computing devices, one size doesn't fit all applies to the enterprise storage products as well. Dell Technologies’ PowerFlex (formerly VxFlex) provides a software-defined mechanism to add a combination of compute and storage with scale out flexibility. As customers look to software-defined operational constructs for agility, PowerFlex provides an adjustable means to add the right balance of storage resources while enabling non-disruptive additions without painful migrations as demands increase.
Joining the Dell Technologies Cloud family as a validated design, Dell EMC PowerFlex helps customers simplify their path to hybrid cloud by combining the power of Dell EMC infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundation software as supplemental storage. As a high-performance, scale out, software-defined block storage product, PowerFlex provides a combination of storage and compute in a unified fabric that's well equipped to service particularly challenging workloads. The scalability of compute and/or storage in a modular architecture provides an asymmetrical (2-layer) option to add capacity to either compute or storage independently. PowerFlex makes it possible to transform from a traditional three-tier architecture to a modern data center without any trade-offs between performance, resilience or future expansion.
PowerFlex significantly reduces operational and infrastructure complexity, empowering organizations to move faster by delivering flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable performance and resiliency at scale for deployments. PowerFlex Manager is a key element of our engineered systems providing a full lifecycle administration experience for PowerFlex from day 0 through expansions and upgrades which is independent, but complementary to the full stack life cycle management available through VCF via SDDC Manager. A cornerstone value proposition of VCF is administering the lifecycle management of OS upgrades, vSphere updates, vRealize monitoring, automation and NSX administration. PowerFlex manager works in parallel with VCF to deliver a comprehensive lifecycle experience for the physical ingredients and for the PowerFlex software-define storage layer. PowerFlex also offers a vRealize Operations plug-in for a unified monitoring capability from VMware vRealize Suite which is included in most VCF editions. From a storage management perspective, PowerFlex utilizes a management system that complements VCF and VMware vSphere by working within the appropriate vCenter management constructs. PowerFlex Manager provides the administration of PowerFlex storage functions, while VCF and vCenter manages the allocation of LUNs to provisioned VMFS file systems to provide data stores for the provisioned workloads.
PowerFlex systems enables customers to scale from a small environment to enterprise scale with over a thousand nodes. In addition, it provides enterprise grade data protection, multi-tenant capabilities, and add-on enterprise features such as QoS, thin provisioning, compression and snapshots. PowerFlex systems deliver the performance and time-to-value required to meet the demands of the modern enterprise data center.
Does Supplemental Storage Mean Slow or Light Workload Use Cases?
PowerFlex provides a Dell Technologies validated design as a supplemental storage platform for VCF, unlocking the value of PowerFlex to be realized by customers within the VCF environment. By providing sub-millisecond latency, high IOPS and high throughput with linearity as nodes join the fabric, the result is a very predictable scaling profile that accelerates the VCF vision within the datacenter.
PowerFlex, as a part of VCF, can help solve for even the most demanding of applications. Using the supplemental capabilities to service workloads with the highest of efficiency provides a best of class performance experience. Some illustrative examples of demanding application workloads validated with PowerFlex, independent of VCF, include the following:
SAP HANA
SAP HANA certified for PowerFlex integrated rack in both 4-socket and 2-socket offerings (certification details). Highly efficient in hosting up to six production HANA instances per 4-socket server. Our capabilities outperform external competitors by hosting 2x the capacity. The Configuration and Deployment Best Practices for SAP HANA white paper provides details. While this white paper illustrates a single layer architecture, even better performance characteristics are achievable using the VCF aligned 2-layer architectural implementation of PowerFlex.
Oracle RAC & Microsoft SQL
Flexibility to run compute and storage on separate hardware results in significant reduction of database licensing cost.
- Oracle RAC Solution – Get over 1 Million IOPs with less than 1ms latency with Oracle 12c RAC database transactions in just six nodes delivering 33GB/sec throughput (5.6GB/sec per node).
- Oracle 19c RAC TPC-C achieving more than 10 Million TPMs in eight nodes.
- MS SQL 2019 Solution (white paper) or MS SQL 2019 Big Data Cluster with Kubernetes (white paper) delivering approximately 9 Million SQL Server transactions (TPMs) with less than 1ms latency using just five storage nodes.
SAS Analytics
Validated/certified by SAS for running SAS mixed analytics workloads (white paper) providing an average throughput of 210 MBs per core (40% greater than their recommended 150 MB/sec needed for certification).
Elastic Stack
The validated solution with Elastic provides customers with the required high-performance, scalable, block-based IO with flexible deployment options in multiple operating environments (Windows, Linux, Virtualized/Bare Metal). Elastic validated the efficiency of PowerFlex using only three compute and 4 storage nodes to deliver ~1 billion indexing events measured by Elastic’s Rally benchmarking tool.
EPIC
The validated PowerFlex solution for Epic delivers 6x9’s availability and high performance for critical the EPIC hyperspace workloads while simultaneously enabling hosting the VDI with the operational and analytical databases for a completely integrated infrastructure option.
Cassandra
For customers deploying Kubernetes container-based database deployments like Cassandra, PowerFlex provides 300,000 operations/second for 10 million operations (Read intensive operations) with avg read latency of 1ms on just eight nodes.
PowerFlex gives Dell Technologies the ability to help customers address diverse infrastructure needs. The implementation guide for using PowerFlex for supplemental storage provides the simple steps to provide complementary storage options for VCF deployments. For more information on the PowerFlex product family and workload solutions, please see the product page here.
Other pre-tested Dell Technologies Storage products validated for VMware Cloud Foundation that provide the capabilities to independently scale storage and compute include the offerings below. You can find more details in the Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs document.