FxV SAN Storage and the new R710 appliances
With many of the out of the box named configurations of the UEM appliances, the storage tier comes into play. These have been specifically architected to allow for the use of a SAN device, typically with the 2950 series of appliances and the addition of a fiber-based SAN NIC installed on the FxV storage appliance. Now, with the release of our new R710 appliances which have nearly 6TB of storage space, the idea of linking to a SAN might be reconsidered. Consider the following:
- FxV offers plenty of storage capacity: up to 36 archivers can be used with the current version of the product. That's 36 X 6 Terabytes...or 216TB!!! This should more than make up for the need for most external storage.
- FxV offers protected media: all FxV appliances are configured with RAID 1+0 (striping + mirroring) hard drive configuration. This ensures that if one of the drives were to fail, the data stays intact. Typically a SAN storage offers this type of protection as a benefit as well.
- FxV allows for "horizontal" additions of appliances, so as your storage requirements grow, additional storage is accomplished simply with additional hardware, and not the reprovisioning of SAN allocation or extension of a single SAN LUN.
Analysis Repository Considerations
For those WITH a storage tier in place today with installed with the 2950 appliances, you are in a special position to utilize the Analysis Repository with maximum storage capabilities. Because the FxV setup with SAN storage requires an appliance to be used for the storage tier, the local storage on that box goes unused. However, when the AR is activated, you have the ability to use the entire space on the drive of that storage box for the AR. This usually means an AR of around 350GB, a very large database for analysis purposes.