Since joining Pure Storage I’ve been able to work on very interesting projects but the Non-Disruptive Video Series has been one of my favorites. The goal of the Non-Disruptive video series is to showcase our upgrade and expansion simplicity along with our resiliency. For me the key point is resiliency, especially when it means upgrading a system that is running mission critical workloads.
There are three videos in the series that illustrate the following tasks:
- Performing a software upgrade
- Upgrading from a FlashArray FA-420 to new FlashArray//m20
- Replacing FlashArray FA-420 NVRAM modules with additional capacity
- Upgrading from a FlashArray//m20 to FlashArray//m50
- Adding mixed capacity in 5TB and 10TB drive packs to the FlashArray//m50
Each of the above tasks are performed while active workloads are running that include:
- One OLTP SQL Server workload simulating brokerage firm trading
- One DSS SQL Server workload servicing three different data warehouses
- One OLTP Oracle workload
- One Jetstress 2013 simulating 5,000 mailboxes with 1 IOPs per mailbox
The full setup includes the following components:
- One FlashArray FA-420
- One FlashArray//m20
- One FlashArray//m50
- Two Cisco MDS 9148 switches
- 8-Node VMware ESXi cluster
- Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise
- Oracle 11g
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Jetstress
The below screenshot of the Pure Storage Web Management interface illustrates the workloads running on the FlashArray FA-420 where we begin the Non-Disruptive upgrade tasks.
Without further ado, Chapter 1!
Cheers,
Barkz