PowerStore: The Perfect Choice for Azure Arc-enabled Data Services
Fri, 26 Apr 2024 17:37:36 -0000
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Keeping pace with technology can be tough. Often our customers’ resources are stretched thin, and they want to be confident that the solutions offered by Dell Technologies are up to the task. Dell Technologies performs an astonishing amount of work to prove out our products and give customers confidence that we have done our homework to make customers' experiences the best they can be. Additionally, we work with partners like Microsoft whenever possible to ensure that our integrations are world class as well.
Great partnership
Recently we partnered with Microsoft on one of their newest and most exciting offerings in the Microsoft Data Platform, Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance. This exciting new product deploys containerized SQL Server in a High Availability (HA) configuration on the infrastructure of your choice. This new offering allows SQL Server instances to be deployed on-premises, yet deployed through and monitored by Azure.
Dell Technologies collaborated with Microsoft to plan and perform lab testing to evaluate the performance and scale of Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance. Based on that plan, we executed several test scenarios and submitted the test configuration and results to Microsoft for review.
Dell PowerStore: the perfect storage solution
Due to the HA features of Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance, Kubernetes ReadWriteMany (RWX) storage is recommended as a backup target and a typical implementation of this is a Network File Share (NFS). Typically, this would require two storage devices, one for block (database files) and one for file (database backup), or an NFS server backed by block storage. PowerStore is uniquely suited to meet this storage requirement, offering both block and file storage in the same appliance. PowerStore also offers all-flash performance, containerized architecture, and data services such as data reduction, replication, and encryption for demanding database workloads. Dell PowerStore meets all the feature and performance requirements for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance in a single appliance.
Incredible results
In our testing, we deployed SQL Managed Instance by means of the Azure portal onto our on-prem Kubernetes cluster and put it through its paces to assess performance and scale. The configuration that we used was not sized for maximum performance, but an average configuration that is typical of what customers order for a general-purpose workload. The results were incredible!
The slide below, presented by Microsoft at Microsoft Build 2022, summarizes it nicely!
The full Microsoft Build session where this slide was presented can be found here. Other details are covered in a Microsoft Blog Post: “Performance benchmark of Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.” Complete details and additional benefits are covered in our co-authored whitepaper, “Dell PowerStore with Azure Arc-enabled Data Services.”
For even more background on the work Dell Technologies is doing with Microsoft to enable hybrid, multicloud, and edge solutions, see this on-demand replay of the Azure Hybrid, Multicloud, and Edge Day digital event.
We learned a lot from this project. Stay tuned for additional blogs about more of the great findings from our latest collaborative effort!
Author: Doug Bernhardt, Sr. Principal Engineering Technologist
Related Blog Posts
Time to Rethink your SQL Backup Strategy – Part 2
Wed, 10 May 2023 15:17:38 -0000
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A while back, I wrote a blog about changes to backup/restore functionality in SQL Server 2022: SQL Server 2022 – Time to Rethink your Backup and Recovery Strategy. Now, more exciting features are here in PowerStoreOS 3.5 that provide additional options and enhanced flexibility for protecting, migrating, and recovering SQL Server workloads on PowerStore.
Secure your snapshots
Backup copies provide zero value if they have been compromised when you need them the most. Snapshot removal could happen accidentally or intentionally as part of a malicious attack. PowerStoreOS 3.5 introduces a new feature, secure snapshot, to ensure that snapshots can't be deleted prior to their expiration date. This feature is a simple checkbox on a snapshot or protection policy that protects snapshots until they expire and can't be turned off. This ensures that your critical data will be available when you need it. Secure snapshot can be enabled on new or existing snapshots. Here’s an example of the secure snapshot option on an existing snapshot.
Once this option is selected, a warning is displayed stating that the snapshot can’t be deleted until the retention period expires. To make the snapshot secure, ensure that the Secure Snapshot checkbox is selected and click Apply.
Secure snapshot can be applied to individual snapshots of volumes or volume groups. The secure snapshot option can also be enabled on one or more snapshot rules in a protection policy to ensure that snapshots taken as part of the protection policy have secure snapshot applied.
Since existing snapshots can be marked as secure, this option can be used on snapshots taken outside of PowerStore Manager or even snapshots taken with other utilities such as AppSync. Consider enabling this option on your critical snapshots to ensure that they are available when you need them!
There's no such thing as too many backups!
If you're responsible for managing and protecting SQL Server databases, you quickly learn that it's valuable to have many different backups and in various formats, for various reasons. It could be for disaster recovery, migration, reporting, troubleshooting, resetting dev/test environments, or any combination of these. Perhaps you’re trying to mitigate the risk of failure of a single platform, method, or tool. Each scenario and workflow has different requirements. PowerStoreOS 3.5 introduces direct integration with Dell PowerProtect DD series appliances, including PowerProtect DDVE which is the virtual edition for both on-premises and cloud deployments. This provides an agentless way to take crash consistent, off-array backups directly from PowerStore and send them to PowerProtect DD.
To enable PowerStore remote backup, you need to connect the PowerProtect DD appliance to your PowerStore system as a remote system.
Next, you add a remote backup rule to a new or existing protection policy for the volume or volume group you want to protect, providing the destination, schedule, and retention.
Once a protection policy is created with remote backup rules and assigned to a PowerStore volume or volume group, a backup session will appear.
Under Backup Sessions, you can see the status of all the sessions or select one to back up immediately, and click Backup.
Once a remote backup is taken, it will appear under the Volume or Volume Group Protection tab as a remote snapshot.
From here, you can retrieve it and work with it as a normal snapshot on PowerStore or enable Instant Access whereby the contents can be accessed by a host directly from PowerProtect DD. You can even retrieve remote snapshots from other PowerStore clusters!
This is yet another powerful tool included with PowerStoreOS 3.5 to enhance data protection and data mobility workflows.
For more information on this feature and other new PowerStore features and capabilities, be sure to check out all the latest information on the Dell PowerStore InfoHub page.
Author: Doug Bernhardt
Sr. Principal Engineering Technologist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-bernhardt-data/
PowerStore Revalidated with Microsoft Azure Arc-enabled Data Services
Mon, 27 Feb 2023 22:29:17 -0000
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Microsoft Azure Arc-enabled data services allow you to run Azure data services on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud. Arc-enabled data services align with Dell Technologies’ vision, by allowing you to run traditional SQL Server workloads or even PostgreSQL on your infrastructure of choice. For details about a solution offering that combines PowerStore and Microsoft Azure Arc-enabled data services, see the white paper Dell PowerStore with Azure Arc-enabled Data Services.
Dell Technologies works closely with partners such as Microsoft to ensure the best possible customer experience. We are happy to announce that Dell PowerStore has been revalidated with the latest version of Azure Arc-enabled data services[1].
Deploy with confidence
One of the deployment requirements for Azure Arc-enabled data services is that you must deploy on one of the validated solutions. At Dell Technologies, we understand that customers want to deploy solutions that have been fully vetted and tested. Key partners such as Microsoft understand this too, which is why they have created a validation program to ensure that the complete solution will work as intended.
By working through this process with Microsoft, Dell Technologies can confidently say that we have deployed and tested a full end-to-end solution with Microsoft and validated that it passes all tests.
The validation process
Microsoft has published tests that are used in their continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for partners and customers to run. For Microsoft to support an Arc-enabled data services solution, it must pass these tests. At a high level, these tests perform the following:
- Connect to an Azure subscription provided by Microsoft
- Deploy the components for Arc-enabled data services, including SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL server
- Validate K8s, hosts, storage, networking, and other infrastructure specifics
- Run Sonobuoy tests ranging from simple smoke tests to complex high-availability scenarios and chaos tests
- Upload results
When Microsoft accepts the results, they add the new or updated solution to their list of validated solutions. At that point, the solution is officially supported. This process is repeated as needed as new component versions are introduced. Complete details about the validation testing and links to the GitHub repositories are available here.
More to come
Stay tuned for more additions and updates from Dell Technologies to the list of validated solutions for Azure Arc-enabled data services. Dell Technologies is leading the way on hybrid solutions, proven by our work with partners such as Microsoft on these validation efforts. Reach out to your Dell Technologies representative for more information about these solutions and validations.
Author: Doug Bernhardt, Sr. Principal Engineering Technologist
[1] Dell PowerStore T has been validated with v1.15.0_2023-01-10 of Azure Arc-enabled data services, published 1/13/2023, which is the latest version at the time of publishing.