How Compellent Storage Center works – Part 2

Here we are again with How Compellent works part 2, I’m writing this post just after a lucullian easter lunch with my whole family so please forgive some of my expressions

In the last post we talked about how data is written into PAGES and progressed using Storage Profiles and Data Progression, this time we’ll focus on how Replay works.

Replays are, in fact, snapshots of your volume data at a certain point in time, to apply this concept to the PAGES that Storage Center uses there’s another metadata on each, which identify the category of the PAGE, the categories are:

• Accessible Recently Accessed – These are the active pages the volume is using the most
• Accessible Non-recently accessed – Read-write pages that have not been recently used
• Historical Accessible – Read-only pages that may be read by a volume, applies to Snapshot Volumes only
• Historical Non-Accessible – Read-only data pages that are not being currently accessed by a volume, applies to Snapshot Volumes only, Snapshot maintains these pages for recovery purposes and they should be placed on the lowest cost storage possible

(the descriptions are copy/pasted from a Compellent document)

Let’s see with a simple graphic how it works, let’s see how a Volume is represented inside Storage Center when a Replay is taken, each blue block is a 2MB PAGE:

According to this diagram when the C1 PAGE has been written the old C Page change its state to Historical Non-Accessible, meanwhile C1 is an Accessible Recently Accessed PAGE, all the other PAGES that resides below the Replay separator are Historical Accessible PAGES.So in this case, the C PAGE will be automatically demoted during the first Data Progression Cycle to a lower cost storage.

In this graphic another Replay is taken, as you can see, even with multiple replays only the changed PAGES are allocated as new, in this scenario the C1 PAGE and E PAGE becomes Historical Non-Accessible PAGES.

Here is the Replay expiration, the expiration could be manually or scheduled, during the replay creation you can choose between a “never expire” Replay or a scheduled expiration, that can be eventually changed on the fly. The grey tinted PAGES are pushed toward the new oldest replay available, meanwhile the orange tinted PAGE is released back into the pool, to be immediately available for other purposes.

But what if we need to access data of a single Replay? maybe map it to another server to replicate the production environment?Here comes the VIEW.Now the graphic is getting complicated, in the following diagram we see the upper part which represent the VIEW created from a Replay which is in purple, and the lower part which represent the Volume with multiple snapshots like the examples above:

Here we have created this VIEW and mapped to another server (every VIEW is R/W) where we decided to create a new development environment based on production data that we snapshotted using a Replay, now every READ operation goes through the Replay like the arrows say, if there’s the need to write a new PAGE it will be written in the VIEW space, consuming in fact only the ∆ changes.Now the development environment has the need to be snapshotted itself, can we do it? OF COURSE we can , let’s see with the usual diagram how it works:

So you can clearly see how this technology is really powerful and space-savvy, it is also applicable recursively so you can create a view made from a replay of a view which is a view of a replay etc… etc…Next time I’ll take care of the replication with QOS and deduplication, as always feedback and comments are very welcomed!.

What does a Block-Level Tiered Volume look like?

So, here we go, here’s my first english language post, please be nice and don’t throw me stuff for my bad english.

Last week I had a discussion with Dimitris Krekoukias on storage performance estimation and we ended up discussing Compellent technology in great detail. We talked a lot and I’ve been very verbose on the topic but I didn’t include a single image showing how actually a volume is represented in the Compellent Storage Center array so here we go, here’s a shot from a customer of mine who’s the first Italian Compellent customer (first deployed in 2008):

As you can see the statistics shows where the data for this Volume (or LUN) is located, the “Replay” space is the Snapshot space used, the “Active” space is the changed data since the last snapshot taken (this screenshot was taken a couple of minutes after the latest snapshot).

Feel free to comment and ask question about that!.

Fabio