SANRAD Storage Service Level Assurance (SLA)

Enhancing the performance of virtual server environments

The Problem

When multiple applications in a virtualized environment run on a single physical infrastructure, storage access interference can occur between higher and lower priority applications. For example, if an Exchange server resides on the same virtualized infrastructure as a file server, a spike in the file server demand could cause bottlenecks and impact the Exchange service.

Without an SLA feature the system administer has limited tools to identify such bottlenecks, and even when identified, the administrator has no tools to address the problem. The traditional solution is to separate high priority applications to isolated hardware but this limits the cost savings benefit that can be gained from virtualizing these applications on a unified infrastructure, and exposing them to the SAN.  

The Solution

SANRAD's storage Service Level Assurance (SLA) monitors the I/O streams from virtualized and non-virtualized servers to the SAN and allocates storage access bandwidth by priority. By deploying SANRAD's storage SLA, E-mail servers and databases, that require high bandwidth access to storage, can be guaranteed access priority, ensuring no performance interference by lower-priority applications.

Combined with SANRAD's support for mixed SAS / SATA drives the SLA ensures that higher-speed, more expensive SAS drives receive bandwidth priority over lower-cost SATA drives. In this way, SANRAD SLA can assure the return on your investments in tiered disk infrastructures.

SANRAD SLA provides the following key benefits:

• Bandwidth protection for high priority applications from interference by lower priority applications residing on the same infrastructure.
• Performance enhancement for critical applications such as Exchange, Oracle, and SQL server by protecting access to performance critical log volumes.
• Tiered Storage Protection – Assures access to fast disks is not hampered by slow disks residing on the same infrastructure (e.g. SSD, SAS, and SATA in mixed SANs).   SANRAD SLA can assure the return on your investments in tiered disk infrastructures.
• Simplicity and Ease of Use – SANRAD's easy grouping of storage volumes into high and low priority groups allows deploying this powerful feature with ease.
• Online Prioritization and Tuning – Change volume prioritizations and tune bandwidth allocation online while the applications are running. Deploy and tune SANRAD SLA without downtime to your applications.
• Dynamic Optimization – Bandwidth limitations on lower priority volumes dynamically expand and retract, adjusting to higher priority applications. This assures lower priority applications receive the maximum bandwidth available without interfering with the higher priority applications.
• Unlimited Usage License  -  SLA licensing is included with the purchase of the V-STOR and V-Switch product lines without licensing limitations on the number of protected volumes or their bandwidth usage.

Demo

SANRAD Storage Level Assurance (SLA) protects Oracle performance in virtualized environments