Entre administradores de entornos de almacenamiento en fibra es conocido el problema que hay con la compatibilidad entre dispositivos de proveedores diferentes, por ejemplo, al añadir una cabina de discos  a una SAN y que no funcione con el failover (multipath) ya existente en el servidor porque no están en la matriz de interoperatividad de fabricantes. Dejaré en este post unas notas relativas a estos problemas.

Primeramente definiré Interoperatividad:

La Interoperatividad es la condición mediante la cual sistemas heterogéneos pueden intercambiar procesos o datos ( procedente de la Wikipedia ) o la capacidad de los productos de diferentes fabricantes puedan operar conjuntamente ( procedente de BNET).

En entornos de almacenamiento en fibra la Interoperatividad es bastante compleja, cumpliéndose que si toda una red SAN no está en la lista de compatibilidad de hardware de los vendedores no operará de la forma esperada. Hace algunos años, el acceder a información de interoperatividad era un trabajo frustante debido a que esta información no era pública por parte de la mayoría de fabricantes y por lástima en muchos casos usada de forma interesada comercialmente. En la actualidad se ha realizado un gran esfuerzo por la mayoría de ellos, creándose una tendencia cada vez más recia en comunicar esta información, al mismo tiempo que los grandes proveedores de soluciones de almacenamiento se ajustan a estándares para universalizar sus productos y flexibilizar una mayor integración en cualquier entorno heterogéneo cada vez más común.

En almacenamiento hay diferentes organismos para mejorar estos grandes problemas de incompatibilidades entre diferentes proveedores, de forma que establecen estándares y protocolos para una mejor comunicación e integración de dispositivos de almacenamiento. Entre todas ellas es destacable es el trabajajo que realiza SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) cuyo proposito es encabezar en la industria el desarrollo y promoción de estándares, tecnologías y servicios educacionales para apoderar la gestión de información. Todos los grandes fabricantes de almacenamiento son miembros de la SNIA y de forma paulatina va creciendo un marco de interoperatividad entre todos ellos. Aún así, debido al proceso lento de salida y aceptación de estos estándares se realizan de forma independiente muchas alianzas tecnológicas entre diferentes fabricantes que es su mayoría pretenden impulsar propios productos de avanzada tecnología consiguiendo en gran cantidad de casos ser pioneros y mejorar su cartera de productos y especificaciones y por consiguiente competir comercialmente, forzando que el resto de competidores tecnológicos acepten e integren estas nuevas especificaciones aún no estandarizadas, por esta necesidad de compatibilidad en entornos heterogéneos y para que no penalice su imagen comercial.

A continuación se aportará  información junto con enlaces de  los proveedores de almacenamiento para el conocimiento de la Interoperabilidad de sus productos con las de otros fabricantes.

Algunas Tablas de Interoperatividad y HCL ( Listas de compatibilidad Hardware )

Fabricantes

Emulex

Emulex es unos de los líderes en interoperatividad en SAN, su reputación “It Just Works” se basa en un compromiso con los estándares, abierto al soporte de software y hardware, y al testeo extensivo de interoperatividad.

A continuación se listan sus Tablas de Interoperatividad con los siguientes fabricantes :

Información y enlaces procedente de Emulex.

QLogic

QLogic presenta un magnífico trabajo disponible en su web de interoperatividad al igual que de su historia altamente recomendable disponible en su web, que recopila sus productos, soluciones y servicios que proporcionan, al igual que su certificaciones con distintos proveedores de soluciones SAN. Un documento nada habitual en esta tecnología.

A continuación se listan las Tablas de Interoperatividad con los siguientes fabricantes :

3PAR | AC&NC | Apple | ATTO Technology | BlueArc | Compellent | Dell | Dell EqualLogic | DNF | Dot Hill | EMC | Enhance Technology | Fujitsu Computer Products of America | Fujitsu Computer Systems | Hewlett-Packard | Hitachi Data Systems | Hitachi Global StorageTechnologies | HP LeftHand SAN (aka LeftHand Networks) | IBM | Infortrend | Intransa | iQstor | iStor | LSI | Matrox | NEC | NetApp | Nexsan | Overland | Pillar | Promise | Qualstar | Quantum | RELDATA | Seagra | SEPATON | Spectra Logic | StoneFly | StoreVault | Sun Microsystems | Symantec | Tandberg Data | Texas Memory Systems | Thales nCipher | Winchester Systems | Xiotech | Xyratex

Información y enlaces procedentes de QLogic.

Brocade – McData

Brocade pone a disposición un documento con la compatibilidad/interoperatividad de sus productos en la sección de compatibilidad enlazable aquí llamado Brocade Data Center Ready.

Sun Microsystems

Proporciona un listado de soluciones de almacenamiento certificadas con Microsoft en el siguiente documento:

http://www.sun.com/software/windows/storage_cert.pdf

En su sección de almacenamiento y servidores individualmente es completada con tablas de soportabilidad/certificación/interoperatividad de cada dispositivo, y una sección genérica a la Interoperatividad de todos sus productos.

IBM

Presenta una sección de productos para SAN:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/uk/storage/san/index.html

Cada dispositivo va acompañado de un documento de Interoperatividad llamado Interoperability Matrix.

EMC

Proporcionan un documento con las matrices de interoperatividad en la sección de Interoperatividad de su portal. Sus  clientes  pueden utilizar una herramienta de navegación para la interoperatividad en Powerlink.

HP

Sección de almacenamiento en su portal:

http://welcome.hp.com/country/es/es/leb/storage.html

NETAPP

Sección de Interoperatividad en su portal:

http://www.netapp.com/us/technology/interop.html

VMWARE

Dispone uns sección para consultas de compatibilidad desde su web con distintos proveedores:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?action=base&deviceCategory=san

Proporciona un documento con las matrices de compatibilidad completa Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide.

….  sólo son algunos proveedores de fibra.

Passend zur VISIT09 in München veröffentlichten Fujitsu und NetApp Ihre Verlautbarung zur zukünftig engeren Zusammenarbeit. Fujitsu und NetApp werden demnach ihre Partnerschaft weltweit ausbauen, um noch besser aufeinander abgestimmte und automatisierte Speicher- und Datenmanagementlösungen anbieten zu können. Dazu sollen auch gemeinsam integrierte Produkte und Lösungen entwickelt werden – insbesondere in den Bereichen Virtualisierung, Speicher- und Datenmanagement sowie Speicherlösungen und -Services.

There’s an old expression I like: “Different isn’t better, it’s just different.”

When it comes to SSDs based around a SATA or SAS format — that’s pretty much the case in my view. Yes there are exceptional products suited for enterprise like Pliant and STEC. And, yes — there are more conventional items for consumers like Intel and OCZ (and about 20 others).  And yes, the standard pacakge 3.5″ form factor for these devices make them suitable for shared storage as well as for integration into hetreogenous and homogenous storage environments like you might find in a typical data center.  Embracing these SSDs you will find the usual manufacturers like EMC, NetApp, SUN, and others.  Their use of SSD is evolutionary, easy to digest.

PCIe-based SSDs are very different.  For one thing, they sit on the server system bus right next to the CPU.  This is a direct attached (DAS) model that has numerous advantages for certain types of processing.  We agree that not all PCIe-based SSDs are suitable for all applications — but in terms of applications that can take advantage of bandwidth, throughput, and latency enhancements, these devices are indeed a superior architecture.

There are some challenges:

1)  Not all servers are created equal.  PCIe-based devices require strict adherance to the PCIe specifications at the server level.  Ping if you want to learn more about why this is critical.

2)  Many servers do not have enough PCIe slots configure appropriately for PCIe devices.  This is especially true when creating HIGH AVAILABILITY (or HA) environments.

3)  Only a very few servers have enough of the right type of slots to be meaningful from a value perspective.  It makes no sense to refresh a server for a PCIe-based SSD if you have to spend 2x or 3x to get the right slots, power, etc.

4)  Applications may not be optimized for SSD DAS.  No kidding.  OLTP or DBMS applications that can take the most advantage of SSD DAS are optimized for high latency disk access over networks such as NAS.  These applications are totally comfortable sending out 1000s or 10s of 1000s of transaction requests to build up a queue depth for the CPUs.  The net result of this is that the CPUs appear very busy but in fact aren’t doing very much.  These limitations are known and well defined.  Over time, application vendors such as SUN, Oracle, and Microsoft will implement fixes to optimize PCIe-based storage.

Aside from these items, there is a discussion regarding suitability of NAND flash devices in the data center as well as the MLC/SLC issue.  I’ll tackle those in another post.  In my veiw, MySpace and Wine.com are leading the way — and there are many others who have not come forward publicly preferring to keep the ROI and GREEN advantages all to themselves.

The latest announcements from Fusion-io, Texas Memory Systems, Micron and others point out these differences.  FULL DISCLOSURE:  I am a former employe of Fusion-io.

The market for SSD-based or at least SSD-inclusive storage appliances is broadening from purpose-built devices in support of specific applications to a more generic layer some call TierZero supporting basic compute operations that require low latency, fast throughput, higher bandwidth.  Below is a list of manufacturers; I’m pulling together some notes and will publish a brief chart in a future post.

• 3Par
• Avere
• Compellant
• Data Direct Networks
• DataRam
• DELL
• DolphinICS
• EMC
• Gear6
• HP
• Hitachi Data Systems
• IBM
• NetApp
• Nimbus
• Schooner Information Technology
• Solid Access
• SUN
• Teradata
• Texas Memory Systems
• Violin Memory
• WhipTail

I’m interested in published specifications, use-cases, and sales strategy.  Hopefully this will help you cut through some of the clutter.

You can pickup a free copy of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V by going here. Thanks to NetApp for putting on this promotion, you must register by November 20th, 2009.

Zu dem Thema Monitoring von NetApp Speichergeräten schreibe ich ab sofort in einem eigenen Blog weiter …

blog.netapp-monitoring.info

A comment about HDS’s Zero Page Reclaim on one of my previous posts got me thinking about the effectiveness of thin provisioning in general.  In that previous post, I talked about the trade-offs between increased storage utilization through the use of thin-provisioning and the potential performance problems associated with it.

There are intrinsic benefits that come with the use of thin provisioning.  First, new storage can be provisioned for applications without nearly as much planning.  Next, application owners get what they want, while storage admins can show they are utilizing the storage systems effectively.  Also, rather than managing the growth of data in individual applications, storage admins are able to manage the growth of data across the enterprise as a whole.

Thin provisioning can also provide performance benefits…  For example, consider a set of virtual Windows servers running across several LUNs contained in the same RAID group.  Each Windows VM stores its OS files in the first few GB of their respective VMDK files.  Each VMDK file is stored in order in each LUN, with some free space at the end.  In essence, we have a whole bunch of OS sections separated by gaps of no data.  If all VMs were booting at approximately the same time, the disk heads would have to move continuously across the entire disk, increasing disk latency.

Now take the same disks, configured as a thin pool, and create the same LUNs (as thin LUNs) and the same VMs.  Because thin-provisioning in general only writes data to the physical disks as it’s being written by the application, starting from the beginning of the disk, all of those Windows VMs’ OS files will be placed at the beginning of the disks.  This increased data locality will reduce IO latency across all of the VMs.  The effect is probably minor, but reduced disk latency translates to possibly higher IOPS from the same set of physical disks.  And the only change is the use of thin-provisioning.

So back to HDS Zero Page Reclaim.  The biggest problem with thin provisioning is that it doesn’t stay thin for long.  Windows NTFS, for example, is particularly NOT thin-friendly since it favors previously untouched disk space for new writes rather than overwriting deleted files.  This activity eventually causes a thin-LUN to grow to it’s maximum size over time, even though the actual amount of data stored in the LUN may not change.  And Windows isn’t the only one with the problem.  This means that thin provisioning may make provisioning easier, or possibly improve IO latency, but it might not actually save you any money on disk.  This is where HDS’s Zero Page Reclaim can help.  Hitachi’s Dynamic Provisioning (with ZPR) can scan a LUN for sections where all the bytes are zero and reclaim that space for other thin LUNs.  This is particularly useful for converting thick LUNs into thin LUNs.  But, it can only see blocks of zeros, and so it won’t necessarily see space freed up by deleting files.  Hitachi’s own documentation points out that many file systems are not-thin friendly, and ZPR won’t help with long-term growth of thin LUNs caused by actively writing and then deleting data.

Although there are ways to script the writing of zeros to free space on a server so that ZPI can reclaim that space, you would need to run that script on all of your servers, requiring a unique tool for each operating system in your environment.  The script would also have to run periodically, since the file system will grow again afterward.

NetApp’s SnapDrive tool for Windows can scan an NTFS file system, detect deleted files, then report the associated blocks back to the Filer to be added back to the aggregate for use by other volumes/LUNs.  The Space Reclamation scan can be run as needed, and I believe it can be scheduled; but, it appears to be Windows only.  Again, this will have to be done periodically.

But what if you could solve the problem across most or all of your systems, regardless of operating system, regardless of application, with real-time reclamation?  And what if you could simultaneously solve other problems?  Enter Symantec’s Storage Foundation with Thin-Reclamation API.  Storage Foundation consists of VxFS, VxVM, DMP, and some other tools that together provide dynamic grow/shrink, snapshots, replication, thin-friendly volume usage, and dynamic SAN multipathing across multiple operating systems.  Storage Foundation’s Thin-Reclamation API is to thin-provisioning what OST is to Backup Deduplication.  Storage vendors can now add near-real-time zero page reclaim for customers that are willing to deploy VxFS/VxVM on their servers.  For EMC customers, DMP can replace PowerPath, thereby offsetting the cost.

As far as I know, 3PAR is the first and only storage vendor to write to Symantec’s thin-API, which means they now have the most dynamic, non-disruptive, zero-page-reclaim feature set on the market.  As a storage engineer myself, I have often wondered if VxVM/VxFS could make management of application data storage in our diverse environment easier and more dynamic.  Adding Thin-Reclamation to the mix makes it even more attractive.  I’d like to see more storage vendors follow 3PAR’s lead and write to Symantec’s API.  I’d also like to see Symantec open up both OST and the Thin-Reclamation API for others to use, but I doubt that will happen.

In the last post, I talked about a project I am involved in right now to deploy NetApp storage alongside EMC for SAN and NAS.  Today, I’m going to talk about my first impressions of the NetApp during deployment and initial configuration.

First Impressions

I’m going to be pretty blunt — I have been working with EMC hardware and software for a while now, and I’m generally happy with the usability of their GUIs.  Over that time, I’ve used several major revisions of Navisphere Manager and Celerra Manager, and even more minor revisions, and I’ve never actually found a UI bug.  To be clear, EMC, IBM, NetApp, HDS, and every other vendor have bugs in their software, and they all do what they can to find and fix them quickly, but I just haven’t personally seen one in the EMC UIs despite using every feature offered by those systems. (I have come across bugs in the firmware)

Contrast that with the first day using the new NetApp, running the latest 7.3.1.1L1 code, where we discovered a UI problem in the first 10 minutes.  When attempting to add disks to an aggregate in FilerView, we could not select FC disk to add.  We could, however, add SATA disk to the FC aggregate.  The only way to get around the issue was to use the CLI via SSH.  As I mentioned in my previous post, our NetApp is actually an IBM nSeries, and IBM claims they perform additional QC before their customers get new NetApp code.

Shortly after that, we found a second UI issue in FilerView.  When creating a new Initiator group, FilerView populates the initiator list with the WWNs that have logged in to it.  Auto-populating is nice but the problem is that FilerView was incorrectly parsing the WWN of the server HBAs and populating the list with NodeWWNs rather than PortWWNs.  We spent several hours trying to figure out why the ESX servers didn’t see any LUNs before we realized that the WWNs in the Initiator group were incorrect.  Editing the 2nd digit on each one fixed the problem.

I find it interesting that these issues, which seemed easy to discover, made it through the QC process of two organizations.  ONTap 7.3.2RC1 is available now, but I don’t know if these issues were addressed.

Manageability

As far as FilerView goes, it is generally easy to use once you know how NetApp systems are provisioned.  The biggest drawback in an HA-Filer setup is the fact you have to open FilerView separately for each Filer and configure each one as a separate storage system.  Two HA-Filer pairs? Four FilerView windows.  If you include the initial launch page that comes up before you get to the actual FilerView window, you double the number of browser windows open to manage your systems.  NetApp likes to mention that they have unified management for NAS and SAN where EMC has two separate platforms, each with their own management tools. EMC treats the two storage processors (SPs) in a Clariion in a much more unified manner, and provisioning is done against the entire Clariion, not per SP.  Further, Navisphere can manage many Clariions in the same UI.  Celerra Manager acts similarly for EMC NAS.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other some say, except that I find that I generally provision NAS storage and SAN storage at different times, and I’d rather have all of the controllers/filers in the same window than NAS and SAN in the same window.  Just my preference.

I should mention, NetApp recently released System Manager 1.0 as a free download.  This new admin tool does present all of the controllers in one view and may end up being a much better tool than FilerView.  For now, it’s missing too many features to be used 100% of the time and it’s Windows only since it’s based on MMC.  Which brings me to my other problem with managing the NetApp.  Neither FilerView nor System Manager can actually do everything you might need to do, and that means you end up in the CLI, FREQUENTLY.  I’m comfortable with CLIs and they are extremely powerful for troubleshooting problems, and especially for scripting batch changes, but I don’t like to be forced into the CLI for general administration.  GUI based management helps prevent possibly crippling typos and can make visualizing your environment easier.  During deployment, we kept going back and forth between FilerView and CLI to configure different things.  Further, since we were using MultiStore (vFilers) for CIFS shares and disaster recovery, we were stuck in the CLI almost entirely because System Manager can’t even see vFilers, and FilerView can only create them and attach volumes.

Had I not been managing Celerra and Clariion for so long, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the above problems.  After several years of configuring CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, Virtual DataMovers, IP Interfaces, Snapshots, Replication, and DR Failover, etc. on Celerra, as well as literally thousands of LUNs for hundreds of servers on Clariion, I don’t recall EVER being forced to use the CLI.  CelerraCLI and NaviCLI are very powerful, and I have written many scripts leveraging them, and I’ll use CLI when troubleshooting an issue.  But for every single feature I’ve ever used on the Celerra or Clarrion, I was able to completely configure from start to finish using the GUI.  Installing a Celerra from scratch even uses a GUI based installation wizard.  Comparing Clariion Storage Groups with NetApp Initiator groups and LUN maps isn’t even fair.  For MS Exchange, I mapped about 50 LUNs to the ESX cluster, which took about 30 minutes in FilerView.  On the Clariion, the same operation is done by just editing the Storage Group and checking each LUN, taking only a couple minutes for the entire process.

Now, all of the above commentary has to do with the management tools, UIs, and to some degree personal preferences, and does not have any bearing on the equipment or underlying functionality.  There are, of course, optional management tools like Operations Manager, Provisioning Manager, and Protection Manager available from NetApp, just as there is Control Center from EMC (which incidentally can monitor the NetApp) or Command Central from Symantec.  Depending on your overall needs, you may want to look at optional management tools; or, FilerView may be perfectly fine.

In the next post,  I’ll get into more specifics about how the Exchange 2007 CCR cluster turned out in this new environment, along with some notes on making CCR truly redundant.  I’ve also been working on the NAS side of the project, so I’ll also post about that some time soon.

• Thinking about desktop virtualization? 
• Wondering how to better deliver and secure applications to mobile users? 
• Questions about vSphere or Intel’s Nehalem Chipset? 

1. Delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments
2. Provides uncompromised control over application service levels
3. Preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting 

NetApp, VM and Star Wars.

Mrs. PL and I have a somewhat unhealthy obsession with Ray Mears.

If you have no knowledge of Ray Mears, or are reading this blog from outside the UK, Ray Mears is a ‘master of bushcraft’ …not the ‘I know everything about the former president of the USA’ kind but, rather, a wilderness survival expert. Ray knows an awful lot more about surviving in the wilderness than I ever will …even after having been a Boy Scout when I was much younger I respect Ray’s vast knowledge and experience …and has had several television series on the BBC.

Now, when I say that we have a somewhat unhealthy obsession with Ray in Casa PL, I mean that he is known affectionately as ‘the guy who lashes stuff together’ …although we tend to substitute another word for ‘stuff’, but this is a family blog …as Ray always seems to be taking vines or bark or whatever to lash the daylights out of something to make a tool. To say that Ray ‘overcomplicates’ survival would be an understatement and therein lies our obsession. We watch not because we have any desire to become survival experts …Mrs. PL’s idea of ‘roughing it’ is a hotel without twenty four hour room service …but to see what new bit of overcomplicated nonsense Ray will try to convince us we need to survive in the wild.

Before we had PL Junior, Mrs. PL and I were known to actually go out for a meal *gasp!* and perhaps a bottle of our favourite wine …or two …and it was the morning after one of these outings when we happened upon a Ray Mears omnibus. Too knackered to bother with changing the channel, we were quickly sucked into the warped world that it Ray Mear’s overcomplicated world of survival and ended up turning it into a game …the one who couldn’t accurately guess the next piece of Ray ridiculousness had to run the next errand for the good of the order. I lost and had to go make the tea when I didn’t guess that Ray was cutting down a small tree and planing it down to make a bread board. Yep, you read that right campers …my man Ray decided that, what one really needs when lost in the wilderness after having sourced the ingredients to make bread is …a breadboard. Complexity, thy name is Ray.

What does this have to do with data storage and protection?

I’ve been talking a lot recently about the Computacenter Sharpen Your Business programme and I’ll share a secret with you. We’re not manufacturing secret Sharpen Your Business drugs in Hatfield, nor does Sharpen Your Business represent some kind of magic silver bullet that we’ve discovered and decided to brand for the good of all mankind. If we were manufacturing drugs in Hatfield, I’ve no doubts that folks would be asking me if I’m taking them by the pallet full …no, dear readers, this is an all natural technoweenie storage induced sometimes Starbucks assisted high!

At its core, Sharpen Your Business is about …simplicity. Whilst Ray Mears is introducing ever more intricate ways to make breadboards in the wild, we’re advocating our customers remove as much complexity as is possible from their IT infrastructures to reduce costs and optimise their business. If there is a secret to Sharpen Your Business, it is that it is our expertise and demonstrable breadth of experience with a broad spectrum of technologies within Computacenter allow us to introduce the reduction of complexity of IT into a customer without a disruption to their production business.

The seeds of the simplification movement within IT can be found in multiple places, and the race to remove complexity across the board carries on at pace.

VMware and related hypervisors have become ubiquitous within the technology market, and I believe it is just a matter of time until we see the death of the physical instance …everything will be virtual instance, from servers to desktops to software packages. It is this virtualisation of everything, including storage which will enable customers to make real use of cloud computing and remove major amounts of complexity from their environments.

Within storage we see vendors introducing simplicity in different ways.

IBM acquired XiV to give them a simple yet very effective massively parallel SATA array which no longer requires disk groups, RAID groups, and other barriers to simplified storage allocation and consumption. The use of thin provisioning and self healing algorithms in the array help to extend and amplify this simplicity. We were able to setup automated storage provisioning in a little under fours hours …on our very first try. Testament to how simple yet effective XiV can be.

EMC have introduced VMax and are currently working on a ‘unified storage’ platform with the CLARiiON with both platforms introducing a reduction in complexity. VMax, the EMC enterprise storage platform developed around CLARiiON controllers, allows a customer to scale out almost ad infinitum without adding the complexity of managing multiple arrays by hand. A unified storage platform within the CLARiiON range will introduce a ‘Swiss army knife’ approach to storage whereby a customer will have the ability to use NAS, SAN, virtual tape library, and archiving functions ….all within the same array.

NetApp were born of a mantra to remove complexity from storage and this philosophy remains very much part of their DNA. We have seen NetApp NAS devices become increasingly sophisticated in their approach to simplicity, and I would argue that their approach to NetApp storage platform’s tight integration with virtual environments [read VMware and/or virtual desktops] is wholly unique in the storage market and sets them apart from their competitors. When one adds the easy application integration with Oracle and Microsoft Exchange …admins who know nothing of storage can make backup ‘snapshots’ in no time at all using the NetApp integration …you could make an argument that NetApp understands the need for simplicity much better than most.

HDS introduce simplicity by allowing for storage virtualisation …that is to say, creating a storage ‘pool’ by virtualisation of other storage vendor arrays. IBM, EMC, HP, and other SAN attached storage vendor products traditionally don’t like talking to one another so you have to manage them separately. And if you have space on one vendor array, you can’t easily ‘share’ that space with another vendor product. Not so with HDS USPV which allows you to make a storage pool with just about any vendor product you can think of …simplicity in the form of a storage Babelfish! Throw in Zero Page Reclamation [ZPR] whereby we can reclaim unused space from traditional storage arrays as we migrate into the pool and you’re into simplicity amplified.

Not to leave out our friends at HP, I have seen time motion studies which clearly show that HP servers attached to HP storage can have storage provisioned in far fewer mouse ‘clicks’ and in about a third the time required for other products. Not to be outdone in the simplicity stakes, I am watching HP as they may ‘crack the code’ by introducing a massively parallel server/storage infrastructure in the future. Watch this space!

Each vendor introduces the reduction of complexity in a slightly different way, and who is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is purely a matter of what the business problem is that we’re trying to solve.

In other words, how we apply this simplicity to demonstrably reduce costs and optimise a customer’s business is what Sharpen Your Business is all about.

Hacking down trees so you can make a flippin’ breadboard whilst lost in the great beyond isn’t.

Have a great weekend,

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

Today Symantec are announcing their scalable NAS product called FileStore.  This simple appliance claims to offer linear scaling for up to 2PB of storage per cluster, leveraging all the benefits of the Veritas storage products we’ve come to know and love over the years.  But what chance has this competitor in a crowded market?

Have a look a the graphic on the right.  This pretty much sums up what FileStore is about – it’s an appliance serving standard file system protocols (NFS/CIFS/FTP/HTTP) using whatever storage you choose to place at the back end.  Up to 16 ‘nodes’ can be clustered together, working as a single load-balanced entity.  Each node uses commodity x86 hardware.

OK, so these features offer nothing special so far.  However, Symantec are using their Veritas heritage to provide some useful functionality into the product.  Firstly, nodes can be added and removed transparently, including the addition of nodes at higher specifications and O/S levels.  This means the technology can easily be refreshed over time; a painful scenario that most storage admins don’t like to have to go through.  Replacing storage is also simple as FileStore uses the Veritas File System under the covers.  Think of how a ‘plex’ can be replaced on a VFS today – add a new plex from the new storage, mirror these up and remove the old plex – voila!, transparent migration.

There’s also the option of tiering storage at the file level, another benefit of using VFS.  Individual files can be mapped to tiers of storage based on customer-defined policies, which provides the exact level of granularity needed.

What about scale?  Well, Symantec claim linear scalability and a SPEC SFS rating that will exceed the ones posted by Netapp.  These figures aren’t available yet but when they are will make interesting reading.  Finally there’s the thorny subject of the existing customer base.  Symantec claim to have been using FileStore to support their SaaS online backup service for the last 3 years.  This stores around 40PB of data for 9 million users.  In addition, there are large customers around the world already using FileStore, including TaoBao in China.

OK, it can’t all be good news.  What marketing slides tend not to show are the little details that matter, such as management interfaces and feature sets.  I’ve not seen details on what other functionality is available with FileStore - snapshots, replication, de-duplication, compression, encryption all come to mind.  However with a starting price of $6995 for a 2-node 2-socket system, do many of those features matter?

I wrote some time ago …24 April 2009, to be exact …about my challenges with weight and new initiatives using to lose four and a half stone to get to a slim new me by 09 September 2009. I won’t go into further depth about how and why I wanted to do this, although you can click here to read the archived Weekly View discussing this if you wish.

By way of an update, as 09 September has well and truly come and gone,I have had very mixed results. I had a full medical workup prior to starting and, whilst no specific problems were noted at the time by my doctor, it was observed that my blood pressure was a bit higher than it should be and …I should lose weight. I thanked him for his sage advice and got on with it. Five months on and my test results are marginally better, I feel a bit better than I did …but my clothes don’t feel significantly looser, I still have my dreaded moobs, and I haven’t lost anything like the amount of weight I set out to.

I won’t deny that I am somewhat frustrated by this, but I’m not one to sit idly by without analysing how I got here …or didn’t, in this case… and what to do to get back on track.

In its simplest terms, what does one have to do to actually lose weight? Well, wouldn’t it be a great excuse for not losing any weight if this were a complicated equation, but it really ain’t …[Reduce Caloric Intake] + [Increase Metabolic Output] = Lose Weight. Put even more simply …eat less, exercise more, shed the pounds. Whilst I have at times considered a ‘radical’ diet, such as a liquid diet for a few weeks or even months, I know that this isn’t really the answer. Given the equation above, simply cutting out the odd Krispy Kreme I’ve eaten …mmmmm, Krispy Kreme!… and reducing the odd gin and slimline or glasses of wine will reduce the caloric intake even further. But that isn’t the part of the equation with the problem, so loading that up isn’t really going to help. Nope, I need to increase my metabolic output …or, put simply again… get off my lardy backside and get into the gym as, the last time I checked, geeking out on my MacBook Air and creating home NAS devices with 802.11n weren’t considered contact sports.

What does this have to do with Data Storage & Protection?

I have been a member of a gym for almost eighteen months now, so the hardest bit …joining… is already done. The real challenge lies in actually going to the gym or, more to the point …making time in my diary to do so. In what I suspect is not an uncommon or isolated challenge for me alone, finding time to the gym when one works and has a family can be very challenging indeed. However, the gym doesn’t really care if I show up or not and will continue to take £50 from my account each month. Given I’ve been to the gym about three times in the last six months, I make that almost £100 a trip. Ouch. On the other hand, if I went three times a week as the doctor has suggested …that would work out to £4.16 a trip. And I would be healthier. And I probably wouldn’t have moobs any longer. And I would likely be around a lot longer for PL Junior as well as Mrs. PL getting to dress me in new slimmer togs.

So what we have here is a low utilisation problem and I am paying way too much for my gym. This is a challenge that our customers face as well, and I have yet to meet a customer who is completely happy with their storage utilisation. We know that, on average, a customer reaps just 40% utilisation out of their storage yet, just as I have to pay full whack for my gym membership, so they have to pay for 100% of their storage infrastructure whether they are using it all or not.

What to do? I won’t wax lyrical about how great data deduplication is …although it is and works a treat in backup environments …nor will I bore you silly talking about thin provisioning, zero page reclamation, universal connectivity, or grid storage. They are all fantastic solutions …nay, features… which warrant Weekly Views in their own right and do play a major part in solving the challenge of low storage utilisation.

It can certainly be a fairly complicated discussion, but, just as I know that balancing an equation will help me lose weight, one of the surest ways I know in helping a customer work through this potential minefield is by using the Computacenter consultative equation. [ROI] + [CBA] + [DPB] = Composite Solution Score …Return on Investment + Cost Benefit Analysis + Disruption to Production Business = Composite Solution Score. How quickly will I recoup my investment, how much money will I save, can I implement in a ‘cost neutral’ manner are but some of the questions that this equation helps us to solve.

Before I talk about one place where we’re using this equation today, I should mention that we employ this equation when working with all of our Tier One vendor partners and use both the Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Model and IDC Storage v3.0 criteria to help reach accurate scores …in other words, what I’m about to say would also work with HDS, EMC, IBM, or HP given different customer criteria.

That said, one of the more interesting projects on the go right now using this equation is a campaign and project we are running with NetApp and F5 for a major customer in Scotland. This customer already knows the great ROI and CBA they can reap from server virtualisation, but with a storage infrastructure stretching into the petabytes the next question was how to achieve the same with storage. We are currently executing a storage assessment and analysing the environment to show how, by consolidating a majority of their servers and much of the existing storage supporting these servers to a NetApp NAS environment, we will save ££ by reducing power, cooling, storage management and so on. And you may be thinking, why NetApp and not someone else? Well, to be fair, we did the initial indicative analysis using this customer’s specific issues and a comparative vendor matrix derived from the [ROI] + [CBA] + [DPB] and NetApp consistently came out on top as their technology which includes thin provisioning, universal connectivity, et al which result in particularly high ROI and CBA scores for this customer.

Put simply, we have been able to show our customer how we can help them increase their storage utilisation to save money both now and for the life of the storage deployment.

And as for me, I’m off to review my diary and make sure I get to the gym and increase my utilisation to lose weight.

Have a great weekend and, as always, please contact me if you feel we can help you save money with your storage.

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

Il data center dinamico virtualizzato
Scoprite come il cloud computing può semplificare il lavoro

Ok, so I swiped that off from the original “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink” Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” in which sailors on board a ship where without water to drink despite the fact they were surrounded by a sea of water.

In the same token, companies have successfully figured out how to capture as much data as they could ever need. The problem is interpreting the data to mean something.

One industry that is trying to cope with this issue is the “legal” industry where until recently the fight in the ediscovery solution suite was pretty much among small niche layers.

As many should know by now storage gargantuan EMC took a bite of the ediscovery market with the acquisition of Kazeon. EMC said the acquisition gives it an “end-to-end, in-house d-discovery and litigation readiness solution”.

This is bad news for Kazeon competitors, Iron Mountain, Autonomy, Clearwell Systems and StoredIQ. The latter because it is an OEM partner to EMC.

The two competitor that just might have to start shopping for an OEM partner in this space is NetApp, which partnered with Kazeon in October 2005.

Is there a pattern here?

What means to your business, run a restore operation of a database and get it back in a few minutes?

It is possible with NetApp Snapshot Technology, but the question is: “How it works?”. Let me help you to understand the NetApp Snapshot concept.

A snapshot works like a picture. When you take a picture, you want to stor everything that is happening in that moment. The definition of snapshot is:

A Snapshot copy is a frozen, read-only image of a traditional volume, a FlexVol volume, or an aggregate that captures the state of the file system at a point in time.

Ok, now you know what a snapshot is, suppose you have a volume called ntapvol1 and into this volume a LUN called disk01. The disk01 has two blocks – A and B as the image shows below.

figure 1

At this point, the Storage Administrator guy takes a snapshot of the volume ntapvol1 and calls it ss1. Now, look at the image below to understand the trick.

figure 2

The blue things in the figure above are the structures of the snapshot ss1. Look, we haven’t spent any block to create the ss1 snapshot — in the figure 1 we have 4 (four) free blocks and here in the figure 2 we have the same free blocks.

Now, someone writes something in the disk01 and it changes our Active Filesystem, suppose it overwrite the B block of our LUN. The WAFL cannot overwrite the B block because it was frozen by the ss1 snapshot, so it allocates a new free block from the volume to do this write operation, removes the pointer to the B block and creates a new one to the B1 block.

Now, the disk01 is made by A and B1 blocks and the ss1 snapshot is made by A and B blocks.

figure 3

At this moment, our snapshot consumes space from the volume, and this space is that block allocated to do the “overwrite” of the B block. Here we have 3 (three) free blocks in the volume instead of 4 (four).

In the case of a restore operation, the ONTAP just need to tell to the WAFL to turn the ss1 snapshot our new Active Filesystem.

In the next post, I’ll talk about Space Reservations. See you !!!

Useful commands:

Create a snapshot from a volume:

> snap create <volume name> <snapshot name>

List snapshots from a volume:

> snap list <volume name>

Delete a snapshot from a volume:

> snap delete <volume name> <snapshot name>

Delete all snapshots from a volume:

> snap delete -a <volume name>

Snapshot restore from a volume:

> snap restore -t vol -s <snapshot name> <volume name>

Multi-support et multi-protocole, les dernières baies NAS d’HDS forment des pools de disques SATA, SAS ou Fibre Channel pour mieux répondre aux accès simultanés des postes de travail sollicitant des serveurs virtualisés sous VMware. Pour la refonte du Data centre, elles affrontent directement la gamme FAS de NetApp qui vient de mettre à niveau son OS DataOnTap. En effet, HDS propose un accès SAN, une interface iSCSI (4096 LUNs), une volumétrie évolutive jusqu’à 256 To et un système de fichiers intelligent à base de classes de stockage pour un prix moyen de 70 KE.

Des clusters NAS habilement répartis
Entre autres points de frottement entre HDS et NetApp, l’agrégation des baies en grappe permet de réunir jusqu’à 8 têtes NAS chez HDS, réparties dans plusieurs salles distantes le cas échéant. Cette granularité compte selon les plans de reprise d’activités, en particulier lorsqu’ils sont fondés sur deux ou plusieurs sites répartis géographiquement et lorsqu’ils intègrent des plateformes virtualisées (lire l’article HDS interface les environnements virtuels).

« L’évolutivité de nos baies est plus importante et nous évitons les silos de stockage de NetApp grâce à l’usage d’un nom commun dans un cluster multinoeud, ce qui permet à tous les nœuds d’être vus comme une seule et même unité réseau », explique Michel Alliel, directeur des solutions d’HDS France. Pour en savoir plus sur les fonctionnalités des baies 3080/3090 Hitachi Data Systems, lisez l’article HDS lance deux baies NAS de milieu de gamme.

Source : ZDNet

A propos de la solution TooFAX® :

TooFAX® est une solution moderne et innovante de Fax dématérialisé, vous permettant l’envoi, la réception, et la sauvegarde de Fax par Internet et ou par e-mail. Depuis votre ordinateur de bureau ou portable, votre PDA, etc, TooFAX® vous permet de faxer par mail sur les 5 continents.

TooFAX® est la synthèse entre les atouts du Fax (rapidité, valeur juridique) et l’aspect pratique de l’e-mail.

Actualité de TooFAX® :

- Site internet : http://www.toofax.com

- Site du service : http://www.service.toofax.com

- Vidéos de démonstration : http://www.video.toofax.com

- Groupe Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/toofax

- Club des utilisateurs de la solution : http://www.club.toofax.com

- Actualités en ligne des services TooFAX® :  http://twitter.com/toofax

- Blog  officiel de la gamme de services TooFAX® : http://toofax.wordpress.com/

- Base de données gratuite de n° de fax pour vos opérations de faxing : http://www.toofaxdata.com

This week we announced a partnership with Hitachi Data Systems  (HDS) to offer our real-time compression solutions to HDS customers.  This partnership is further validation that real-time compression has emerged as the right technology for online (non-backup) data reduction where there is limited redundant data and file access is typically random.

Storwize and HDS offer a great combination of performance and data reduction.  Storwize has been tested and validated with the Hitachi NAS Platform including the existing Hitachi NAS 3100 and 3200 as well as the recently announced Hitachi NAS 3080 and 3090 models.  According to Marc Trimuschat, Senior Director, Worlwide Technology Alliances at HDS:

“Hitachi Data Systems customers want to better utilize their storage capacity across multiple tiers and applications to meet the continued growth of file-base data.  Storwize’s real time compression technology complements the scalability and unique tiering capabilities of the Hitachi NAS Platform. Together, we enable customers to lower their storage TCO by maximizing the utilization across storage tiers.”

That’s a terrific endorsement and we’re excited to have HDS as one of our strategic partners.  Together, Storwize and HDS are addressing the rapidly emerging market for online data reduction by offering an unbeatable combination of industry-leading storage performance, scalability, and real-time data reduction that delivers capital and operational savings across all online storage tiers without compromising application performance.

Our collaboration with HDS adds to our already significant activities with our strategic partners.  Check out what we’re up to at www.storwize.com.

Source : ZDNet

A propos de la solution TooFAX® :

TooFAX® est une solution moderne et innovante de Fax dématérialisé, vous permettant l’envoi, la réception, et la sauvegarde de Fax par Internet et ou par e-mail. Depuis votre ordinateur de bureau ou portable, votre PDA, etc, TooFAX® vous permet de faxer par mail sur les 5 continents.

TooFAX® est la synthèse entre les atouts du Fax (rapidité, valeur juridique) et l’aspect pratique de l’e-mail.

Actualité de TooFAX® :

- Site internet : http://www.toofax.com

- Site du service : http://www.service.toofax.com

- Vidéos de démonstration : http://www.video.toofax.com

- Groupe Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/toofax

- Club des utilisateurs de la solution : http://www.club.toofax.com

- Actualités en ligne des services TooFAX® :  http://twitter.com/toofax

- Blog  officiel de la gamme de services TooFAX® : http://toofax.wordpress.com/

- Base de données gratuite de n° de fax pour vos opérations de faxing : http://www.toofaxdata.com

Okay, now that I’ve talked about backing up the datacenter with NetBackup and DataDomain, and backing up remote sites with NetBackup and PureDisk, it’s time to discuss how to get all that data offsite to protect against a catastrophic event at the datacenter.

As mentioned before we have a primary datacenter with the majority of our systems including the backup environment, and a secondary “disaster recovery” datacenter to which we replicate tier 1 applications for business continuity purposes.  Since we really wanted to get away from using tapes and instead store the backups on disk in our datacenter we have a second backup environment in the DR datacenter and we replicate the backup data there.

There are several ways to replicate backup data between two sites but most of them have drawbacks..

1.) Duplicate the backup data from disk to tape and ship the tapes to the remote site to be ready for restore.  This is the easiest and probably cheapest way.  But there’s that pesky tape yet again with it’s media handling and shipping.  And restore could take a while since you have to deal with restoring the catalog from tape, then importing the media, etc.

2.) Duplicate the backup data directly from the local disk to the disk in the second location across the WAN.  This is not very feasible with any significant amount of data because every byte of data that is backed up in the datacenter has to be copied across the much slower WAN.  It could take many days to duplicate a single nights’ backup.  You’d also need a special Catalog backup job that wrote to a storage device across the WAN.  The good here is that the backup application knows there is a second copy of the data and knows how to find it.

3.) Replicate the data with the backup storage devices’s native replication.  Whether it’s PureDisk, Avamar, or DataDomain, pretty much every source-based or target-based deduplication solution has replication built in that leverages the deduplication to reduce the amount of data that traverses the WAN.  The advantage here is that you can have a copy of all of your backup data in a second location in a much shorter time than a traditional copy process.  If your deduplication device stores the data with 10:1 compression, then your WAN usage is reduced by 90%.  The savings in practice is actually better than that.  The drawback is that the backup application (hence the catalog) has no knowledge that there is a second copy of the backup data and after recovering the catalog, you would need to import all of the disk-based media which could take a long time.

4.) Leverage NetBackup Lifecycle Policies with Symantec OpenSTorage (OST) and an OST-capable backup storage system like DataDomain or PureDisk(with PDDO).  Basically this has all the advantages of option #2, where it is a catalog-aware duplication, combined with the advantages of WAN bandwidth savings from option #3.  Time to copy the data offsite is much shorter due to deduplication, and time to restore is very fast since the data is already in the catalog and available on the disk.

OpenSTorage (OST) is a network protocol that Symantec developed to interface with disk-based backup storage systems and DataDomain was an early adopter of OST.  OST allows Netbackup to control replication between OST-capable storage systems and keep track of the replicated copies of backups in the Catalog just as if Netbackup had made both copies itself.  OST is also used as the protocol to send the backup data to the storage device as opposed to CIFS/NFS or VTL.  DataDomain appliances support OST as does PureDisk when used in conjunction with the PDDO option discussed earlier.   In NetBackup, replication controlled by OST is called “optimized duplication” and is controlled primarily through Lifecycle Policies.

Traditionally, when creating NetBackup job policies, the administrator will specify a Storage Unit (either a disk storage unit or a tape library or drive) that the job policy will send backups to.  Lifecycle Policies are treated like Storage Units as far as the Job Policy is concerned but the Lifecycle Policy includes a list of storage units, each with it’s own data retention, that the backup data must be stored onto in order for NetBackup to consider the data fully protected.  Typically there is a “Backup” target which is where the actual data coming from the client is stored, followed by one or more “Duplication” targets.  After the backup job completes, NetBackup will copy the backup data from the “backup” location to all of the “duplication” locations.  This works with pretty much any type of storage and you can mix and match tape and disk in the same policy.  Since these are duplication operations, NetBackup will read ALL of the data from the backup location, and write ALL of the data to each duplication location.  This can take a long time even on the local network and trying to offsite a lot of data over the WAN is not very feasible.

With OST, the lifecycle policy operates exactly the same except that it uses “optimized duplication”, instructing the storage device to copy the file rather than performing the copy through a media server.  So in the case of DataDomain, OST issues the command to the DDR, the DDR then copies the file to the second DDR in the remote site and gets all the benefits of deduplication and compression between the two.  The media server doesn’t actually do any work.  Once the duplication is complete, the DDR notifies NetBackup and the catalog is updated with a record of the second copy of the backup.  Lifecycle Policies are fully automated, you can’t even restart a failed duplication, so in the event of a transient failure like a WAN hiccup NetBackup will retry a duplication job forever until it succeeds in order to satisfy the lifecycle policy.

As you can probably surmise, this is REALLY nice for a tape-less backup environment.  Our DD690 offsites over 9TB of data every night DURING the backup window.  When the last backup job completes, the offsite copies are complete within 30 minutes.  And there is absolutely no management of the offsite process or duplication jobs besides configuring the lifecycle policies up front.  The drawback to regular Netbackup lifecycle policies is that all duplications are taken from the initial backup copy which limits what you can do with the copies.

Enter NetBackup 6.5.4…  Despite the small 6.5.3 -> 6.5.4 version number change, the 6.5.4 release had quite a few new features added.  The biggest one was a revamping of the Lifecycle Policy engine to allow for nested duplications.  Now you can create a copy of a backup, then create multiple copies from the copy, then create copies from the other copies.  Why is this useful?

Remember when I discussed using NetBackup with PDDO to backup remote sites?  Well the data backed up from the remote site is all stored in the primary datacenter and we need to get the second copy to the DR datacenter.  Plus, we wanted to have a small cache of recently backed up data sitting on the remote media server for fast restore.  Well, nested lifecycle’s are the key.  The lifecycle writes the initial backup copy onto the media server’s local disk which is configured as a capacity-managed staging area (ie: it stores as much as it can and expires data when it needs more space for new backups).  The lifecycle then creates a duplicate of the backup onto the PureDisk storage unit in the primary datacenter.  Since bandwidth to the remote site is very limited we don’t want to copy it from the remote site twice so the lifecycle has a second duplication nested under the first to copy it to the DR datacenter.  The source of the second copy is the primary datacenter copy, NOT the remote media server copy.

Where else can we use this?  Let’s consider our tape-less datacenter backups..  We backup the clients to the DataDomain in our primary datacenter, then using a lifecycle policy and OST, create a copy on the DataDomain in the DR datacenter.  If we also wanted to have a tape copy for long term archive or vaulting we could create a nested duplication to make a copy to a tape library in the DR datacenter from the disk copy that is also in the DR datacenter.  Without nested lifecycle’s the only workable solution would be to create the tape in the primary datacenter.  Every copy of the backup made via the lifecycle policy whether it is using OST or not is maintained by the catalog and easily used for restore.  Furthermore, using OST as the protocol between Netbackup and DataDomain actually increases throughput to the DataDomain DDR systems by approximately 2X vs VTL/CIFS/NFS.

Now to the caveats.. Optimized duplication via OST is only available when you are using OST as the protocol between the media server and the storage unit.  This means it doesn’t work with VTL even when the DataDomain IS the VTL.  OST only works over an ethernet network which is why we skipped VTL completely and used 10gbps networks for the DDR connections.  We even skipped VTL/Tape for the NAS systems, connected them directly to the 10gbps network and use 3-way NDMP to backup them up over the network, through the media servers, to the DataDomain.  We get the benefit of lifecycle policies, optimized duplication, and I may have mentioned before–no pesky tape even with NDMP/NAS backups.  And the interesting thing is that with the 10gbps connection, the NDMP dumps are faster than direct fiber to tape.

There were other enhancements to NetBackup 6.5.4 centered around OST functionality but the lifecycle policy improvements were huge in my opinion.

To cover the catalog replication, we run Netbackup hot catalog backups to a CIFS share that is hosted by the DataDomain.  The DDR replicates that share using DataDomain native replication to the DDR in the DR datacenter where the same data is available via a similar CIFS share.  Our standby Netbackup master server is already connected to the CIFS share for catalog restore and connected to the DDR via OST.  A single operation restores the catalog from the replicated copy.  In a real disaster we can begin restoring user data within 30 minutes from the DR datacenter.

On 1st September, Netapp announced a programme to give away $1,000,000 of hardware and services to a non-Netapp customer in order to “prove” their Virtualisation Guarantee – save 50% of your storage in virtualised environments.  Now that challenge is available to UK customers – and this time it’s for a cool £1 million.

The concept is pretty simple; Netapp are confident that customers who utilise certain features of their hardware (and software) can use technologies such as snapshot and de-duplication to reduce their overall raw storage utilisation by 50% or greater (using Netapp hardware) or 35% or greater with external hardware on a v-series.  The technologies required to be deployed must include:

• De-duplication
• RAID-DP
• Thin Provisioning
• Netapp Snapshot

It’s not hard to see how the savings will be achieved, after all most, if not all, virtual environments will benefit from thin provisioning and the use of snapshots.  The use of de-duplication on cloned virtual hosts will improve the savings even further.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch however and the apparent savings do come at the cost of risk and performance.  The increase in risk arises because more virtual machines are sharing the same physical storage, so the impact of a failure in a RAID group is more widely spread and more impactful.  This explains why RAID-DP is also a requirement in this scenario.  Obviously risk can be minimised by not cloning all virtual machines from the same gold master and I’m sure in some environments this may be restricted to test/development setups.

Performance also is likely to be impacted as all of the virtual machines contend to read the same shared blocks of code.  With the Netapp architecture, writes aren’t a problem as each write generates a new unique block, however there’s the risk of bottlenecks on reads.

I spoke to John Rollason, EMEA Solutions Marketing with Netapp about the challenge.  He emphasised the independent nature of the validation of the results of the challenge, however he also indicated that Netapp would be choosing the participant from the entrants by the closing date of 21st September 2009.  This is where things get interesting.  What is the correct way to benchmark a virtualised environment?  Is there an optimum environment which would benefit he most in this challenge?  For instance, if cloning isn’t available with your current storage vendor, should clones be considered fair in the target Netapp solution?  I guess only time will tell.  Netapp will announce the name of an independent third-party who will benchmark and audit the results.  This is expected to be a trusted name in the industry.

Whatever the outcome, it will be interesting to see how other vendors choose to counter Netapp’s challenge.  If you’re thinking of entering, you can find the link here.

So, EMC, IBM, HDS, 3Par, do you think you can beat 50%?