6 Tips for Improving Storage System Performance

1. Connectivity – Make sure bottlenecks to do not exist within your SAN fabric. or Storage array. Often clients who have 4Gbps Storage systems connecting to 2Gbps SAN switches or HBA's. A smart idea is to quickly review all pieces of your SAN fabric  and the Storage controller ports to identify potential bottlenecks and eliminate them right away.
2. Drive Count – Storage array performance can be often fixed by adding additional disk drives to the storage configuration within the RAID group. The reason this fix works is that by spreading out the workload with the newly added disks, you gain the advantage of having more drives/arms/spindles accessing and retrieving data, and feeding that data to the storage controller to deliver faster I/O.
3. Drive Size – By using smaller & faster drives for high performance environments such as Oracle, you avoid disk drive contention(s). Contention can manifest itself when too much data is placed on larger drives. An example would be trying to place 4TB of data on 1 shelf of 14x 300GB drives or 1 shelf of 14X450GB drives.
4. Drive Type – SATA drives are an excellent format for archive or low I/O applications such as file servers or imaging, but become less ideal for larger VMWare, Oracle,  Exchange or high intensive I/O environments. Make sure you invest in the right technology according to application/workload & follow the best practices effort for implementation.
5. Controller Segregation – As storage requirements continue to grow, small storage shops can eventually grow into large storage shops. If multiple high performance applications are placed on a single modular array it may overwhelm the system. Consider a second array or a tiered architecture should your array have a high combination of performance-oriented application.
6. RAID Level – Raid 10, Raid 1, Raid 6, RAID-DP, Raid5 and other parity combination's all have their strength and limitations. Do your research to make sure the RAID configuration you are considering will support and maintain application performance for the long term.

Disk + Array + Host + Workload CALCULATOR

This tool is used for estimating the efficiency and capacity of disks and disk arrays. The results will appear automatically when you type the value of the required parameters.

Disk and Disk array calculator

NetApp Deduplication

NetApp deduplication is a fundamental component of core operating architecture - Data ONTAP®. NetApp deduplication is the first that can be used broadly across many applications, including primary data, backup data, and archival data.

Key Points:

• Utilize minimal system resources - primary data, backup data, and archival data can all be deduplicated with nominal impact on data center operations.
• Schedule deduplication to occur during off-peak times, applications can sustain critical performance but still realize significantly reduced storage capacity requirements.
• Install NetApp's simple, command-based deduplication feature in minutes. Once deduplication is enabled and scheduled, no other action is required.
• Select which datasets to deduplicate with our tools to evaluate those datasets and help point out the areas that will provide the greatest return.

• Perform a full byte-for-byte validation before removing any duplicate data for worry-free deduplication.

Deduplication Calculator

Storage Efficiency Calculator

2010 Top 10 Storage Vendor Blogs

1. Chuck Hollis (EMC) - http://chucksblog.emc.com/
2. Mark Twomey / Storagezilla (EMC) - http://storagezilla.typepad.com/
3. Barry Burke (EMC) - http://thestorageanarchist.typepad.com
4. Dave Graham (EMC) - http://flickerdown.com/
5. Val Bercovici (NetApp) - http://blogs.netapp.com/exposed/
6. Vaughn Stewart (NetApp) - http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy
7. HP StorageWorks Blog - http://www.hp.com/storage/blog
8. Dave Hitz (NetApp) - http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/
9. Hu Yoshida (HDS) - http://blogs.hds.com/hu/
10. Marc Farley (3Par) - http://www.storagerap.com/