Dell EMC Unity XT Hardware Overview and Provisioning

I'm Brian Beeler and welcome inside the storage of you lab in front of you today we're working with the Dell EMC unit ext which is their mid-range storage platform now back in January 2018 we reviewed the original unity the 450 F and gave it an Editors Choice Award for its excellent blend of performance manageability and integration with VMware the unity xt takes the original unity story up a notch Dell EMC promises up to a 2x performance gain over the predecessors this is thanks in large part to software optimizations so a much refreshed codebase and Intel skylake CPUs the unity xt is also innovating me ready which means that within a few months there'll be a software update out that will enable the nvme capabilities of unity xt data reduction has also been improved in the unit EXT deli MC is quoting a five to one data reduction rate an 85 percent system efficiency now of course this is for most workloads in your data reduction rate will vary like the previous models the unities xt is available in hybrid and all flash configurations the unity chassis is a 2-u enclosure with support for 25 drives across the front and out of the gate unity xt supports several capacities of SAS SSDs ranging from 800 gig all the way up to fifteen point three six gigabytes for those that need more expansion than the 25 drives provided in the main chassis Dell EMC offers a number of disk array enclosures ranging from a similar form factor of 2-u 25 bays up to an 80 drive enclosure now our system under test is the unit ext for ATF and this one's capable of supporting up to 750 drives and an IEEE ops count of one point six eight million and you can see in our chassis we've got the 800 gig SSDs these are a Samsung SSD we see these a lot in Delhi MC products they've been a tremendous workhorse over the years and should be able to hit these AI ops targets this system supports up to 750 drives we've got 190 gig of ram across the two controllers and overall capacity up to four petabytes Dell EMC offers three other systems in the unity xt line the 380 the 680 and the 880 both available in flash and disk and hybrid configurations if you think about scalability at the top end what this means is that the unity xt 8 atf can support up to 1500 drives 16 petabytes and over 2 and a half million i ops so let's go ahead and take a look at the back side of the unit and provide you with a little more detail on the controllers and the i/o modules alright so we've rotated the Dell EMC unit exe around to the back and you can see that there are two controllers each one taking up 1u of space and the 2u chassis now what we've got configured for i/o are 8 16 gig fiber ports per controller this is going to give us the fastest performance available out of this unit ext as will be looking to peg its eye ops and throughput capabilities if you wanted however Dell EMC supports several different i/o modules this one's a 25 Gigabit Ethernet module and that would be something you could swap out for one of the fiber channel modules if you want more Ethernet expansion on the back of this as we go across the top of this you see the management cluster here with Ethernet USB and serial connections there also the SAS expander ports available here and then Dell EMC also includes 10 gig standard on the back of this unit which we actually used for replication to the faction cloud as part of our disaster recovery as a service project so plenty of i/o modules lots of capabilities and flexibility when you configure a Dell EMC unity xt system now what we're going to do is pull out one of the controllers and give you a deeper dive into the components that are available there so we've gone ahead and pulled out one of the controllers from our adel unity xt and as you probably can't see in the back though there's a little sticker here they've got stickers everywhere on this thing and that this one's to remind you that the controller is heavy indeed it is if you're pulling it out by yourself you want to make sure to not drop it on your foot it is the full length of the chassis pretty much if we go ahead and eject the top cover here we get a great view inside the controller of the DRAM the CPUs fans everything else that's going on in here one of my favorite things is if we pull this little shroud off here is the lithium ion backup battery unit assembly that's in here which is great for things like unplanned power failure but also if you accidentally remove a power cord to the system it'll provide enough power to hold up the data and make sure everything's secure and speaking of such there's also a little guy that looks a little different from the rest of the dims inside and this card has two SSDs on it there's a 960 gig nvme Drive and there's a 240 gig SATA Drive and these are going to be used for booting the system and to be destination for RAM flush in the event of an unforeseen power failure so we're gonna put him back in and put the lid back on and get this system operational and we'll do a quick walkthrough on how to get the unity XT online and available for provisioning we've put the unity xt back into the rack kevin's reak abled it and powered it back on and once you access the management screen via browser window you log in and get to this initial configuration wizard so Kevin's gonna walk us through these steps to finish the setup of the unity XT and get us to the point where we can provision storage and begin testing thank you so here we work through a lot of the high level settings that the platform's generally require when they are first provision a datacenter things like DNS servers NTP servers in our case since we're leveraging just fibre channel and working in a test lab environment we will be skipping these and then here we've already applied our license but this is an area where you get to provision the services that the array is going to be licensed for and also you get to select are you gonna be enabling data at rest encryption which you can't change after storage arrays been provisioned you'd have to fully reinitialize it in that process of applying the license does take it a minute or two so we've done that ahead of time - to save time for this video next we'll create our pool that will give us the storage this week a good name would just raid and here we'll be using their extreme performance to your profile which will give us a little bit over 18 terabytes of storage or 15 terabytes after raid provisioning and then this will run for a little bit in the background we can close this window and continue along in our configuration next you can select how lurtz are sent out and configure its up on SMTP server you can give it proxy server settings here is where you would give it your MMC support credentials to phone home so you can monitor things remotely and as well as enable the AMC secure remote services and then connect I scuzzy interface settings for block over IP Yorn a servers and then your final configuration and then from there we are done and this is the screen that you're met with that will be the main landing point for you going forward and as you add systems as you add different hosts and environments into here they'll start to populate with in your system health window so you'll see the number of hosts they're connected these will either be green or red depending on hosts that are disconnected or not and then you'll get to see or assist a capacity as well as the overall efficiency as data reduction and compression work in the background and to connect VMware host is pretty easy the unity provides a lot of in-depth access into different plugins and here after we type in our V Center credentials you'll pull in the hosts that are inside V Center and allows just our provisioning data stores directly on those hosts now we do have a number of hosts that are not running our environment so they'll be a couple that are more than a couple that will be not shown but here this might be stirring Apollonia so here's one of our primary core lab host that runs in our lower data center and here we can see the number of initiators they can that's visible and we're able to start giving it storage so since we've already created our storage pool we can actually create data stores on it so here we will provision a VMFS six data store and we'll give it a name of unity one well in this example is 200 gigabytes and enabled data reduction the access will be provision to the host that the array can already see and you can enable or not enable replication this can also be added in after the fact if you've setup a remote connection and now it is creating the data store on the host itself which is actually pretty nice since most storage rays you'd provision your block storage out you'd do a rescan on the host to find your block storage and then you'd have to go on and create your data store on that block device in this case though Unisphere is able to go talk to that host scan the storage or kick off a script that scans the storage and then create the data store with the name that you've given it which for a single data store might not save a lot of time but when you're configuring tens or hundreds of data stores across multiple hosts this can be a huge time-saver and as any of the tasks are running you were able to close out the windows to have a go in the background so you're not stuck at a particular screen while activities are running in the background but overall the interface is really nice compared to the older Compellent or EqualLogic environments that required either additional software or additional hosts that needs to run the management software here it's html5 based and we could be running this on an iPad for all matter it's just it's really easy in a really nice interface to work through so from here you'll go and provision the rest of your hosts and get going from a testing perspective yeah okay well we'll be back with the full performance review of our unit ext but for now this gives you a flavor for what it takes to get the system online and available and just what the general capabilities are from an interface standpoint we'll be back soon with a full review

Channel: StorageReview

Views: 13,927

Rating: 4.9359999 out of 5

Keywords: Dell emc, Dell emc unity, Dell EMC unity XT hardware, hardware overview, tech, tech news, technology, Hands on, review, walkthrough, installation, guide, how-to

Id: vxxJoIgp8pU

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2020