DELL EMC POWERSTORE CONFIG: PowerStore Initialization Guide & Dell PowerStore Storage Review
[Music] welcome to chromecast check it out i'm sam major commercial director for drone technologies and on this week's edition of tech it out i'm joined by two guests one is our technical director ben randall and the other much more noisy guest is the dell 1000t power store storage appliance uh the format this week with ben and i will be discussing the device and doing a demonstration of how easy it is to configure and deploy hopefully um so ben thank you for joining me today thank you sam i'm looking forward to showing our viewers uh this time on how easy it is to configure the power store to present storage to the host fantastic so i think before we start we'll use some cinematic magic and do a quick panoramic whirlwind spin around with the array in all its glory [Music] so [Music] so as our audience probably guessed by now obviously non-technical and my feedback on the device is it looks very well put together we've got some great fresh flashing lights front and back and if we put the the front bezel on it looks like something out of either battlestar galactica or or blockbusters with bob holders um but obviously you know you've had a lot of experience of dell's mid-range storage um offerings going back to kind of you know the grandfather and father looking at the old ecological the ps or the sc compellent whatever i've just shows how long you've been doing it depending which way you call those but is there anything you've seen in the latest offering uh in power store that you know either sets it aside or is markedly different than other offerings we've seen well yeah i i'd say that there's nothing here that would be unfamiliar to someone who's been involved in storage the older versions oh clearly it's new hardware we've got a pair of active active controllers known as nodes each one of those has four data ports a copper service port and a copper management port in a real world deployment this would have been very gracefully uh racked uh and stacked um you know we'd have taken all of the the tag numbers and so on and logged in in our itsm support tool um and then you'll be looking at obviously whether installing it as a standalone or a federated system and it would be in a nice lovely data center and not sprawled a bit gracefully across the desk of our our think tank but i guess regardless regardless of where we put this the question is how easy has it been for you to initialize and configure yes i think it's a fairly straightforward device to configure using the network configuration guide the deployment planning guide and the quick start guide if you follow those steps it's fairly straightforward there's configuration that you must follow the switches have to be configured the days of getting a switch out out of the out of the box unconfigured plugging it in plugging the sound to it and they're long gone really we need to configure vlans correctly port configuration but if you follow the networking guide it provides you with that information and you follow the installation checklist that provides the information you need to follow in the correct order to configure the unit interesting so there's uh there's a few things that that should be considered uh you know look at the installation part of it um and i guess there's different ways different ways of skiing the cat some things we must follow the guide for and other things i guess would become personal preference and once you've done it a few times become your way of doing it um what available ports we've got et cetera church will change where we do these things um in your opinion what is the simplest way of doing this what are the best tools you've seen that are helpful and then i guess final final three part questions make it easy how does it compare uh to something as relatively simple as as the sc yeah um as you say there's there's at least three methods that dell uh recommend so dell provides a number of tools there's the fabric design center which enables you to build a configuration for the switches but personally i'd recommend reading the network configuration guide and perhaps using fabric design center to give you an initial template but to but use the clues in that to uh create the switch configuration yourself um also there's the uh dell discovery uh configuration utility which will discover the unconfigured unit although in my preference it was the best way to do it was to connect directly to the service port that was by far the simplest way and that's actually the right way that dell recommended their guide okay so that tells me obviously about the the switching in the fabric uh how do we then i guess go and lay deeper into the array itself and get into the configuration of that once you've got the switch configuration in place uh you connect your laptop to the service port and from that you can via a web browser you can get you can gain access to the initial configuration wizard um that's a very simple straightforward guide um next enter details next to continue and actually the planning checklist provides the information you need for that in the correct order it makes that job a lot easier so looking at the equipment we have here we also have the array itself a pair of s-series switches and a power connect which assume that's management console um looking at previous generations we've had with dell's mid-range storage there was obviously prerequisites we had to follow things like ensuring jumbo frames were enabled that's about the only technical thing i think i remember in those days um what have you had to do i guess prerequisite wise to do this i guess what you found interesting uh in regards to the switching configuration of the power store appliance and switching fabric yeah um well the main thing is that the sound is very aware of of the uh connectivity that it's provided with going through the wizard it will throw up alerts if you haven't haven't configured the switches correctly the recommendations from dell that you use minimum 10 gig switching obviously prefer preferably the dell s series as we've got here but using an mc lag type configuration between the two now in dell's um terminology that would be a vlt connection which is kind of stacking but without being stacked um uh there are other other brands cisco call it vpc and brocade call it mct and also we've got a separate management switch here for our copper connections um again the sand is able to spot that we've just got a single switch with both ports connected it will throw up a warning about that but that's not essential for the actual operation the switch but certainly redundant switches for the data path is essential so a brief deviation from the very loose script that we use for these things uh you mentioned that a couple of vendors there obviously we recommend using a full dell technology stack from the whole single pane of glass ease of management et cetera et cetera but for our customers that have cisco networking or blockade switching how can they check and verify that their power store appliance will be happy in that other switched environment yes uh dell provide a third-party support matrix for their sound storage solution so we've established how the switches need to be configured it's well built it's well architected and that's nothing short of what we've come to expect from dell technologies and i guess the crux of it is how easy it is to administer because if you go back and go back a fair bit but go back to mid 2000s i think we were wheeling uh you know equilogics as they were then around in flight cases to do lunch and learns and they were so simple that you know we could put those literally on a desk and i remember i could log into the laptop and initialize a battery reset array initialize it and be demonstrating that you know we could show customers uh that we could see the host could see you know lands within you know sub 20 minutes so don't worry i'm not going to jump onto the laptop and try and have a go of this today but you know having that being so simple and flexible it took a lot of cost out of it because compared to the competition there was mainly fibre channel so i scuzzy and that simplicity of doing things in minutes not days with the savings were huge i guess to direct it at this piece of technology [Music] any nuances you have found and is it comparable in the simplicity to to what i'm kind of used to last time i touched a piece technology something like the ps well i would say that the initial config of the switches and so on it's more complex than you had to do that but provided you've got that out of the way the actual administration of the of the san itself creating volumes provisioning to hosts that is actually very straightforward the interface is very clear this all sounds really intuitive and easy i think we should enjoy evan's waiting for which is dive into the gui and show people how easy and intuitive this system is to you so uh i'll ask you to chuck it up on the screen so i can see what you're doing as well but let's let's throw up on the board and let's walk through some basics i'll just throw it up on the big screen great thank you [Music] this will need to reboot and apply updates we'll be here for hours yeah there it is fantastic okay so being the luddite that i am the thing i know most about storage is obviously capacity there's a smack bang in the middle of the screen there it's showing us it's got 12.7 terabytes but we've got free versus physical and i know obviously in the world of of power store yes the what it says it has there is not necessarily what you get no because you um what we're seeing here in the screen here is 12.7 terabytes of actual physical storage now dell guarantee a four to one dedupe and compression ratio on your data so we're actually looking at 48 point something terabytes of usable storage off a handful of ssds it's quite yeah that's quite impressive yeah okay uh and let's talk about simplicity then so obviously gui looks very intuitive and easy to use let's go ahead and add a host yeah fair enough so we go to the compute tab select that select hosts and host groups and i recommend that we add a host first and give the host a friendly name so we call them host rhyme and we select the operating system i'm going to go with esxi now go to select iscsi host protocol next and we add the initiator so so so we add the initiator and then go next and that those details are all in there so they'll click add host and that's complete now we add the host group call that host group one be very imaginative with the uh with the naming absolutely i'm noted for my creativity there um we select iscsi as the protocol and we'll select the host from the livable list and then create that you can save it as created the host group which contains the host that's as simple as that yes it's very very simple okay so we have a host uh i guess next means we need to protect that yes can you walk us through i guess i'd recognise it scps days was you know snapshot scheduler and so on has that changed much not very much it's quite close we create a protection policy just go to protection select protection policies yeah and then we create create the uh snapshot rules and so then we create there and we create a rule so if you want to have a daily snapshot so we call this daily snapshot daily snapshot so every day of the week we'll just do time of day yeah so we'll set that to seven call it 8 p.m and again is that how you thinking about that would that re your business hours of business does it you know yeah 24x7 for instance can we create what's going on to take a snapshot yes i mean the snapshots are pretty much instant so we can actually layer these as i'll show in just a second so we've got here we've got a single snapshot per day we'll keep them for seven days you have to create that and then we can create another snapshot rule which we'll call hourly okay snapshot and we select that every one hour and you can see the granularity there goes down to every five minutes so we can say every one hour and we'll keep two days worth and we can create that okay so we've got the two snapshot uh rules there yeah so then we go back to uh protection policies and we can create a policy i'll call this policy one protection protection policy and we call this protection policy one and then we select the rules that we've already created yeah and create that there and they can see there's a few seconds that creates the policy that's quick yeah okay so now we've got the kind of we can then create grandfather file for some copies of exactly we okay so we've got visibility of the host we've protected it i guess we need to assign a slice of storage yes yeah so the procedure for that is to go to storage and then we create a volume group and create we'll call it i'll use this one all in group one and we can assign the protection policy which you created earlier select that and then create and that creates the volume group yeah and assigns the level of protection to it as well okay yes exactly um and then we go to volumes yeah and we can select that and we can go create and now we've got an option here of either creating just a single volume or we can create multiple at the same time okay so so if we call it volume and we'll save volume one i'll be honest yeah well because we you'll see so we've got one selected at the moment we're going to create five volumes and we set them to be 100 gigabytes yep and then we can select the volume group which we've already created and then we go next and we get a warning that we've protected it by the protection policy because of the association with one group that's okay and then we select the host groups we created earlier we should provision it to the host which we've already is a member of that there's an option to provide a logical unit number the land or generator automatically we'll just go with the automatic generation and select next again we get a warning now because we don't actually have a host provision to the storage yeah but that's fine so we'll just continue and then we create create and now we've got a brief pause while it creates volumes and then we've got our five volumes have been created but yeah you just create 500 gig of storage in less than five seconds so that's probably too much or weight for something like what it's actually doing absolutely yeah i mean it's very intuitive i've understood everything you've done there which i think is quite a minor miracle yeah okay um again i mean it's as simple as i'd hoped it would be um what else can you show us in the dashboard can we look at the health of the actual array yes absolutely so we go back to the dashboard and here's the overview where we can see the capacity performance obviously clearly we have a sound that's not really doing much at the moment so everything's looking very low but no nasty alerts which is always good to see exactly we're looking clear on that um if we were to go to hardware we can then see and select the actual appliance we can then see capacity status and so on but we can actually look at the hardware tab in there yeah and that will give us a view of the the disks at the front and you can see that that tally's up with what we've actually got in real life actually thankfully um and the rear view for again we can see the uh the nodes and the reports in use and so on clearly there's no errors here if there was a problem then we'd have an alert on these on this area okay and again for the internal view you can see the stations of the fans and so on yeah okay so again very intuitive uh very clear uh and easy to understand um obviously people that are buying power store now it's very unlikely they'll be migrating from another power store given it's still fairly new in the market yes i can see we have a migration tab i'm assuming that makes life easier um if we look on there what do we see yeah so here we can um import from external storage and we can add a remote system from one of the dell um [Music] previous generation arrays such as the uh ps blimey i mean you can see that going back to what you and i would call equilogic even those customers are still well catered for yes i'll make the assumption and obviously feel free to correct me personal conversation outside of uh our customers that don't potentially have dell that are moving to dell migration we use a vmware or veeam or something to migrate that data yes um that would be the simplest way for a client in that situation okay um and i believe but when you set these devices up you have to make a decision before we get anywhere near this that it's block or it's filed power store itself can be either or um you've set this one up as block yes that's right the the device is by default it's configured to block and file um if you and you change that the configuration uh wizard completely restarts so you need to make that you have to have that plan before you start this otherwise you'll have to go back to the beginning and start reading yeah yeah literally we'll reset the whole thing okay so think about that one before you start uh that's a bad day at the office unfortunately you haven't gone that far unless you've done a lot of configurations okay fair enough we can talk on probably a whole different podcast just about the use of using block or far but are you and i'll do this to everyone can you tell me something very complex a very short amount of time could you you know give us i guess some very quick reasons to why someone would use block over file or file overblock yeah i mean block storage would be of most use where you're connecting to virtualization hosts your provisioning disks to um to servers in that manner and you're running virtual servers on them uh the file option may be more used to a branch cache or something like that where you actually that the storage is essentially becoming your file server okay so it supports active directory integration and so on like that as so some antivirus capabilities thanks ben today's been really interesting it's been good to not only talk about the equipment but to have it here so we can physically show people how i mean how very very simple and intuitive that is and obviously you and i in our positions and given chrome's relationship with dell we know a couple of things that are uh in you know in the future and powerful it makes it even more exciting so yeah i think some really interesting times ahead for dell's mid-range definitely yes thank you exciting times absolutely and thank you for joining us for this edition of technow um if there's anything you'd like us to cover in future podcasts then please do leave that in the comment section and like subscribe and share and join us again on chromecast check it out
2021-04-25 08:26
