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24 BP1038| Best Practices and Guidelines for Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 into an Existing SAN
9 Summary
The Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 can be deployed as part of a new installation or into an existing
EqualLogic iSCSI SAN to provide a unified block and file storage solution. When deploying into an existing
SAN, administrators should monitor the existing SAN to understand the availability of not only data storage
capacity, but also of I/O capacity. Once the existing environment is well understood, the data presented in
this paper can then be used to help determine the following:
• How many network ports are required?
• Is there is a need for additional storage resources before deploying an FS Series NAS?
• Will a shared storage pool or separate storage pools perform better?
• Will the addition of an FS Series NAS affect performance of existing systems?
These decisions will help guide the design and deployment of the FS Series NAS Appliance and
accompanying EqualLogic iSCSI SAN to achieve optimal performance. Depending on the type of I/O from
network clients, the use of the FS Series NAS Appliance may even enable an increase in overall
performance capacity for the SAN through caching of network client requests, thus reducing the
performance requirement from the storage arrays.