Storage Environment Technology Refresh. Richard R. Siemers Senior Storage Administrator Pier 1 Imports, Inc.

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1 Storage Environment Technology Refresh Richard R. Siemers Senior Storage Administrator Pier 1 Imports, Inc.

2 North America's largest specialty retailer of imported home furnishings and decor Based in Ft Worth, Texas Operates more than 1,000 stores in North America Employs nearly 15,000 people worldwide

3 Tier 1 Previous Environment EMC Symmetrix DMX2000 and DMX1000 for open systems Tier 2 and 3 6 Dell Clariions 2 IBM DS4500s NetAPP FAS3020 Challenges Each system and raid group an island of performance and capacity. 250 raw TB total 4x everything bills, vendors, admin tools, support contracts, etc.

4 Goals Faster, Bigger, Better AND Less Expensive High Availability and High Performance Tier 1 Quality Support Thin Provisioning Simplified Provisioning Simplified Monitoring Reduce Costs Scalable Performance and Capacity

5 Project Scope Timeline June 2010 April 2009 Original Scope: Replace just EOL T2/T3 systems July 2009 Capacity savings allowed us to consolidate ALL T2/T3 systems to the new system March 2010 Decision made to move all Tier 1 to new storage. Consolidated NAS capacity to new system.

6 3PAR Current Solution 2x InServ T800 Storage Servers 4 Nodes each (persistent cache) 16 Front End Fiber Channel Ports 480 Spindles 196 TB raw capacity Thin Provisioning Remote Copy (Replication) Dynamic Optimization System Reporter

7 Data Center Consolidation Previous Environment 10 Different Arrays Current Environment 2 3PAR Utility Storage Arrays 75% Reduction in Storage Footprint 20% Reduction in Power & Cooling Costs

8 Simplified Management Provisioning time reduced to minutes. No LUN Initializing Intuitive GUI Mapping and Masking are dynamic Ability to Create similar Multipath via MPIO Native in AIX 5.2+ and Windows 2008 MS MPIO from 3PAR for W2003 and W2000 Easy conversion between raid and disk types using Dynamic Optimization Highly Virtualized Seconds to provision service levels Autonomic planning and configuration

9 Thin Provisioning Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor Volume Volume Volume Volume 2 TB 2 TB Written Data Written Data Written Data Written Data Chunklets Traditional (Fat) Provisioning - dedicate on allocation Thin Provisioning - dedicate on write Physical Capacity Consumed by Host

10 Get Thin: Thin Conversion White space detection and conversion while migrating. Host based migrations like volume managers do block level mirroring/migrations that copy the entire LUN, white space full of zeros and all. Thin Conversion watches for incoming streams of zeros and prevents allocation of space for empty whitespace. Deleted data still occupies space. Ideally zero out the free space before migration/conversion. High Performance conversion of data stream in real time handled in hardware chipset Before T-Class F-Class After

11 Stay Thin: Thin Persistence Non-disruptive re-thinning returns space to thin provisioned volumes and to free pool for reuse T-Class F-Class Recover space allocated to data that has been deleted. Recover missed opportunities to use the Thin Conversion process. Leverages file system tools to overwrite free space with zeros. High Performance conversion of data stream in real time handled in hardware chipset Before After

12 Thin Provisioning Our Pier 1 Hosts see 153 TB, but only consume 99 TB. 35% of our capacity is virtualized. *Your mileage will vary!*

13 Pier 1 Capacity on Utility Storage

14 Increased Performance Traditional Storage Low & Unpredictable Service Levels Virtualized Storage High & Predictable Service Levels Controlle r Controlle r Coarse & narrow resource utilization Controller Fine & massive resource utilization Capacity utilization and performance are tradeoffs Capacity utilization and performance are optimized Wide Striping Eliminates hot-spots: work load spread across all spindles Even Small LUN sizes benefit from high spindle counts

15 Striping: Wide vs Not So Wide Physical Disk Performance 8.5 GB Hyper Size. Hot spots developed and needed to be rearranged periodically for optimal performance. 256 MB Chunk Size. Hot spots have yet to develop here. Every disk is used evenly.

16 Striping: Wide vs Not So Wide Disk Adapter Performance IO/sec per disk adapter in our old Tier 1 storage frame. The new wide striped architecture is evenly balanced across all adapters in our environment.

17 Performance Management System Reporter Monitor performance and capacity over time. Web based - No agents on servers, no client to install. Due to Thin Provisioning, we can monitor data growth without agents or access to the hosts/databases Previous tools were slow, required host agents, and varied between storage systems.

18 Pier 1 Performance

19 Pier 1 Performance

20 Pier 1 Performance

21 Summary of Benefits Increased Performance Simplified Landscape Faster Provisioning Greater Flexibility T1 Support for all tiers Reduced Footprint Reduced Expenses

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