The StorSimple 5000 and 7000 series contain a lot of choices that need to be made. For this purpose I can ofcourse provide customers with an elaborate design document in which each design choice is thouroughly weighed, but that document seems to be an overkill in this highly pragmatic world today. Loads of customers just want it “up and running”.

One of those many choices that can be made is the choice in Volume Type. Since StorSimple can solve a lot of headaches IT managers suffer from, the StorSimple team decided to encorporate some Volume Types that suit typical supported workloads. Let me tell you, it can handle a lot of specific workloads. We have a total of seven Volume Types.

Volume types SS

Aligning volumes to data:

  1. Select the correct volume type that most closely aligns with the intended use of the volume. For example, a volume intended to store SharePoint BLOB data should use the volume type ‘Sharepoint BLOBs.  By doing this the device can achieve better deduplication and compression ratios as well as performance. This enables you to effectively utilize your on premise capacity.
  2. If you’re not sure about what kind of data will be stored on the volume, or the data you’re storing does not have a corresponding volume type, it’s advised to use the Custom volume type, select normal, and set the fingerprint size to 64KB.
    PLEASE NOTE: Generally people are advised to get in touch with the StorSimple technical support team and do the sizing of your data before you get into this.
  3. For data sets that don’t benefit from deduplication and compression, such as media, JPEG and PDF files, use the Custom volume type and set the fingerprint size to 512KB.

Now you know how to choose the right volume, right? WRONG!

This isn’t all you need to know before selecting the right Volume Type, since there are two different on-premise retention options, named “Volume Priorities”.  This has everything to do with data tiering. The two types are “Normal” and “Local Preffered”. The volume types that benefit from the “Normal” Volume Priority are:

  1. Generic Volume
  2. SharePoint Database Volume
  3. SharePoint BLOBs Volume
  4. File Server Volume
  5. Archive and Backup Volume
  6. Virtual Machine Data Volume

When a Volume is marked for “Local Preferred” the device will try to keep the data on the volume on-premise as long as possible. But since StorSimple is a Hybrid Cloud Storage Solution, there is no garuantee will remain locally all the time. Once your on-premise storage capacity reaches the tier levels, even the local preferred volume data will be pushed out to the cloud

The volumes supporting the Local Preferred Priority are:

  1. Virtual Machine OS Volume
  2. Cluster Quorum Volume
  3. SharePoint Transaction Logs Volume

I hope this small blog helps you to make the most of your StorSimple endeavour.

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