Slide 1
~1 minute
Welcome to the Dell EMC Unity Solution Architect training. In this module, we will discuss
Dell EMC Unity flash solutions.
Slide 2
~1 minute
Are there any questions on the objectives? Is there anything you want to cover in this
module that’s not contained in the objectives?”
The instructor may create a parking lot to jot down any additional topics the students want
to cover.
Ideally, the parking lot would be on a white board or a flip chart located where students can
see it. The parking lot could also just be a sheet of paper.
Slide 3
~1 minute
Slide 4
~5 minutes
The trainer will start the discussion by asking the class “What technology has transformed
the cost and performance of storage solutions?”
Depending on the class response, the trainer may wish to present the next several slides
that outline the importance of flash.
Slide 5
~1 minute
Slide 6
~1 minute
Depending on the classroom setup, the instructor will play a brief video about Dell EMC
Unity flash storage.
Slide 7
~2 minutes
INCLUDES ANIMATION (automated)
Since its introduction on May 2, 2016, Dell EMC Unity has constantly delivered leading-
edge flash technology to our customers and continues to do so. Intelligent wear
management will be discussed later in this module.
Slide 8
~1 minute
Slide 9
~2 minutes
INCLUDES ANIMATION
The market has crossed a point where financial viability shifts from mechanical drives in a
storage system to arrays that are 100% flash. In most cases, it is now more economical to
deploy primary storage systems with 100% flash, thus moving to the economic curve of
flash.
Slide 10
~3 minutes
INCLUDES ANIMATION (4 clicks)
Imagine that your customer had a storage infrastructure that was not a bottleneck. Not only
that, it actually helped rather than hurt their business agility, by:
• (click) Allowing full consolidation of all workloads by removing the siloes created by
numerous applications. In fact, stored data from non-production systems can be mixed
with production systems (more on this later).
• (click) Meeting performance SLAs for databases, applications and business processes,
and improving user experience and productivity
• (click) Simplifying database operations whenever storage is involved, like creating,
updating, copying, or deleting a DB
• (click) Deploying critical applications sooner by reducing infrastructure setup time, and
accelerating development and QA processes
• Saving money on hardware, and in some cases, on software and on administration of
storage and databases
Slide 11
~5 minutes
INCLUDES ANIMATION (2 clicks)
(click) Databases using traditional storage often experience performance constraints
resulting from high I/O latency at the storage array. When the database server must wait
on slow storage, the result is underutilized server CPUs.
Based on Dell EMC analysis, customers will often have 60% or more idle, but licensed,
CPU cores. This can mean millions of wasted license dollars, as database vendors
typically charge per “processor” which is based on the number of CPU cores.
(click) Deploying flash can reduce storage I/O latency and free up idle CPU processing
power. Database customers who have purchased database software on a per-CPU-basis,
have made that investment and want their CPU cores well utilized, to increase database
server productivity. Many customers using Dell EMC flash storage technology have been
able to reduce storage I/O latency and increase per CPU utilization, which in turn,
increases utilization of their database license investment.
Slide 12
~5 minutes
INCLUDES ANIMATION (6 clicks)
Putting a larger SSD in an array is the easy part. The harder part is making sure you are
monitoring and managing the drives’ wear.
(click) Cells can endure a certain number of erase/write cycles before they become
unreliable in storing data.
(click) Flash cells wear out over time as data is written to the drive.
(click) Dell EMC Unity wear leveling ensures flash drives do not prematurely wear out
before the end of the warranty period. The mechanism that does the wear analysis and
movement is the same software code used in FAST VP. Instead of looking at frequency of
use and usage pattern, the software looks at flash cell wear.
Wear leveling overview
• Wear information of flash drives is propagated up the software stack to other Dell EMC
Unity OE software components.
• Wear information is also propagated at the RAID group level for each storage resource.
• Wear leveling software decides which RAID group to allocate new slices to, balancing
wear across other RAID groups.
• Information is not visible to the user.
• (click) Wear alerts are generated at 180, 90, and 30 days.
• (click) Proactive copy-out (PACO) is automatically initiated at 30 days to a spare drive.
• (click) Drive health is updated to show a faulted state and when the drive is no longer
usable by the system.
Slide 13
~5 minutes
INCLUDES ANIMATION (2 clicks)
Wear leveling is implemented to extend the life of flash drives, and the algorithm ensures
that the flash drives within a private RAID group wear evenly.
(click) Dell EMC Unity will also proactively replace drives, one at a time, prior to drive
failure while getting maximum use from each flash drive. The system has an internal
algorithm for each flash drive to determine when the drive has reached (click) 100% of the
P/E (Program/Erase) cycle.
Slide 14
~1 minute
As you can see, Dell EMC Unity Hybrid systems have several drive options from which to
choose.
• Mixing different flash drive types in the same all-flash pool is supported.
• The same drive sparing rules still apply.
• Example: 15.36 TB TLC SSD is a SAS flash 4 type drive and requires a SAS
flash 4 type drive as a spare.
• SAS and NL-SAS drives use the new 4K block size.
• SSDs will continue to use the 520 block size schema to remain optimized with our multi-
core architecture, which uses 520 bytes per block in its software.
• The back-end interface for Dell EMC Unity is 12Gbps SAS.
Slide 15
~5 minutes
INCLUDES ANIMATION (click to reveal each of the answers)
Write the answers from class below.
Why has the use of flash drives become more common in recent years?
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
What storage technology enables Dell EMC Unity to consolidate and simplify workloads,
increase performance and reduce costs?
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Name the Dell EMC Unity feature that ensures the life span of flash drives is maximized.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Slide 16
~1 minute
This is a recap of what we covered in this module.
What questions do you have?
