Smart Scale for Dell PowerProtect Appliances, Part I: Innovative Technology to Manage Multi-Exabyte Data
Wed, 24 Apr 2024 17:12:31 -0000
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In its recent Global DataSphere Forecast 2021—2026, IDC predicts that, over the next 5 years, data will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.2% and reach more than 221,000 exabytes by 2026[1]. Storing large amounts of data is just one issue; you must protect it as well. Managing an organization's data can be challenging, but it has become even more challenging as cyberattacks are on the rise. When budgets are tight, the burden of protecting data becomes even greater.
With more work on your plate and higher service levels to meet, you might find yourself struggling to keep up with these challenges, which are underpinned by the fact that organizations must often manage multiple data centers and cloud environments. Each data center almost inevitably ends up with a protection storage infrastructure with multiple appliances. These appliances are expanded, upgraded, and retired over time to accommodate new evolving workloads. There is also the challenge of optimizing capacity and performance. This can be a difficult task, but Dell Technologies is committed to help organizations overcome some of these challenges.
Introducing a new technology: Smart Scale for PowerProtect appliances
Keep pace with data growth. Reduce complexity by managing multiple appliances as a single pool of resources through a unified namespace. Pool up to 48 PB of usable capacity, 3 EB logical capacity with typical deduplication rates.
What is Smart Scale?
PowerProtect DD Management Center (DDMC) is a scalable, virtual system-based solution for centralized management of multiple PowerProtect DD series appliances. DDMC is composed of browser-based pages and is installed and runs on a VMware platform or compatible cloud service. Smart Scale is a new feature in DDMC that enables you to group multiple PowerProtect DD systems into a system pool, providing a layer of abstraction between your client's protection policies and the ultimate destination of the client's protected data. Smart Scale simplifies capacity management across multiple DD series appliances in a data center. Analytics provide capacity insights and actionable recommendations for capacity addition and placement, and help to identify unexpected changes.
By enabling Smart Scale services from DDMC, the Smart Scale architecture pools together a set of DD series appliances into a group under the data center in which they are coordinated with each other for space balancing. Smart Scale supports up to 32 systems in a system pool and four system pools in a data center.
As protection policies are created, a system pool (rather than a specific system) can be specified as the targeted protection storage. The underlying placement of mobile storage units (MSUs) to appliances can remain transparent to the data protection client. This abstraction helps to provide capacity management and optimal storage unit placement capabilities for the customer without making risky and disruptive changes to the infrastructure. With this new modern approach to management, you can optimize global capacity utilization and deduplication, provide workload balancing to optimize SLAs, and enable easy upgrade or replacement of individual systems in the infrastructure.
How does Smart Scale work?
Smart Scale enhances the traditional storage unit construct, allowing the creation of MSUs that are transportable from one DD series to another within a system pool, making data consolidation and data redistribution straightforward and practical. Smart Scale services perform the actual placement of the backups to one of the DD series appliances in the system pool. The services then seamlessly redirect the backup software, eliminating the need for the backup administrator to modify backup policies with the risks involved when placements are changed. Smart Scale also uses mobile boost users (MBU) that move with the storage unit. This ensures continued secure access without administrative overhead.
Benefits of Smart Scale
Smart Scale simplifies enterprise infrastructure management and provides more scale efficiency than ever before. It includes the following benefits:
- Optimized capacity consumption.
- Simplified capacity management across multiple DD series appliances.
- Maximized deduplication among multiple storage units used in concert.
- Improved load balancing across multiple DD series appliances and more efficient distribution of workloads.
- Heightened ability to meet and surpass data protection SLAs.
- Nondisruptive addition or retirement of DD series appliances.
- Analytics that provide capacity insights and actionable recommendations for capacity additions, placements, and relocations.
- Support for Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE). A system pool can have a mix of encrypted and non-encrypted systems.
How do I get started with Smart Scale?
You can deploy Smart Scale into existing DD series environments using DDMC. The traditional backup operations co-exist with the new Smart Scale capability and the operations that system pools and MSUs support. Smart Scale services are deployed from DDMC on a VMware ESXi platform.
DDMC with Smart Scale services provides:
- Namespace redirection
- Capacity projection insights and recommendations
- Storage unit placement and nondisruptive migration
- Performance analytics
Smart Scale supports DD9900, DD9400, DD6900, and DD6400 models with DDOS 7.8 and later. DDMC must be upgraded to 7.8 or later but supports managing a mixed DD series appliance infrastructure that includes DD systems that are not Smart Scale capable. Smart Scale also supports PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE) starting with DDMC version 7.11, where only on-premises DDVE deployed on VMware ESXi is supported. However, the DDOS version must be 7.11 or later. With DDVE support for Smart Scale, a mixture of physical PowerProtect DDs and DDVEs in a system pool is supported.
Data protection software that supports Smart Scale integration includes Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell NetWorker, and Veritas NetBackup.
For the next installments in our Smart Scale blog series, see the following blog posts:
- Smart Scale for Dell PowerProtect Appliances, Part II: Architecture Deep Dive
- Smart Scale for Dell PowerProtect Appliances, Part III: MSU Migration, Replication, Recoverability, and Security
Additional resources for Smart Scale
- Dell PowerProtect DD series appliances
- Smart Scale for PowerProtect Appliances – Technical white paper
- Dell PowerProtect DD Management Center Interactive Demo
Authors:
Vinod Kumaresan (LinkedIn)
Sonali Dwivedi (LinkedIn)