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JANUARY 2008 3
DELL PS SERIES ARCHITECTURE
3
introDuction
Consolidated storage promises many benefits: virtualization, reliability, high availability and centralized
management. Although these promises have yielded interesting technologies, they do not meet the need
today for affordable, easy-to-use products and are impractical for most environments.
To solve the business problems associated with storage configuration, scaling and management, the
EqualLogic PS Series was architected to provide a cost-effective, self-managing alternative to expensive
and complex offerings — bringing the benefits of consolidated storage to a broad range of markets.
The PS Series Architecture fundamentally alters the economic and management landscape for consolidated
storage by combining proven operating system, storage, and networking technologies with patented,
intelligent automation for a true state-of-the-art storage system.
This blend of technologies makes consolidated storage a cost-effective reality for all operating systems
and applications. The PS Series Architecture uses page-based volume management between arrays and
incorporates high-speed, standards-based technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet, iSCSI, Serial Attached
SCSI, and Serial ATA. The result is an affordable, scalable storage solution that grows easily from less than
a terabyte to more than 100 terabytes, while management stays minimal and constant.
While the industry talks about “next-generation storage,” EqualLogic PS Series is already there.
The PS Series Architecture was designed to meet several goals:
• Provide a single, shared storage service to hosts and applications
• Scale seamlessly from small to very large congurations
• Automate repetitive management tasks:
> Perform RAID configuration and sparing
> Provision new resources in the most efficient manner
> Allocate resources to meet changing workload demands
• Comply with industry standards
• Require no special host software for access and management
• Deliver uncompromised availability and serviceability
• Offer a full set of features, including capabilities that are usually available only as expensive add-ons,
like snapshot and volume replication capabilities
• Provide a cost-effective, easy-to-use replacement for direct-attached storage (DAS)
This whitepaper gives a brief overview of the technologies that make the PS Series Architecture uniquely
able to address the issues associated with consolidated storage.
PS SEriES architEcturE FunDamEntaLS
To achieve the goal of providing an affordable, self-managing consolidated storage solution, the PS Series
Architecture employs three essential elements: the PS Series array, the PS Series group and volumes.
PS Series Array
The foundation of the PS Series Architecture is a PS Series array — a high-performance block storage device
that is ideal for departmental or enterprise storage. Each array is a commonly configured fully-redundant
storage unit containing disks, multiple high-performance network interfaces, controllers with mirrored