White Papers

15 Dell Storage PS Series Architecture: Load Balancers | TR1070
Reduction of worst-case-scenario purchasing: By working continually, the APLB can detect and act on
cyclical business processes, such as increased end-of-month activity by the finance group enabling the
resources of the SAN to be leveraged in near-real-time. This may enable IT management to purchase fewer
resources since each application can better leverage the storage when it needs it most.
Future-proofed load-balancing: By using latency as the primary criteria, the APLB does not need to
explicitly evaluate any other details of the storage, such as disk type (SAS or SATA), spindle speed, number
of disks, or PS Series controller type. This makes the APLB a very simple and robust mechanism that does
not need to be re-trained when new hardware configurations are introduced to the PS Series product line.
This also ensures that when unplanned events occur that may influence the ability of certain arrays to serve
their workload (for example, a RAID rebuild or bad NIC), the system automatically compensates.