Category: Storage availability

EMCWorld day 2

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Data, data access, Data availability, Data integrity, data logistics, Data search, Ethernet, FCoE, Networking, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage availability, Storage Features

Day 2 saw releases for new VMAX  and VPLEX capabilities hinted at yesterday in Joe’s keynote. Namely,

VMAX announcements

VMAX now supports

  • Native FCoE with 10GbE support now VMAX supports directly FCoE, 10GbE iSCSI and SRDF
  • Enhanced Federated Live Migration supports other multi-pathing software, specifically it now adds MPIO to PowerPath and soon to come more multi-pathing solutions
  • Support for RSA’s external key management (RSA DPM) for their internal VMAX data security/encryption capability.

It was mentioned more than once that the latest Enginuity release 5875 is being adopted at almost 4x the rate of the prior generation code.  The latest release came out earlier this year and provided a number of key enhancements to VMAX capabilities not the least of which was sub-LUN migration across up to 3 storage tiers called FAST VP.

Another item of interest was that FAST VP was driving a lot of flash sales.  It seems its leading to another level of flash adoption. According to EMC they feel that almost 80-90% of customers can get by with 3% of their capacity in flash and still gain all the benefits of flash performance at significantly less cost.

VPLEX announcements

VPLEX announcements included:

  • VPLEX Geo – a new asynchronous VPLEX cluster-to-cluster communications methodology which can have the alternate active VPLEX cluster up to 50msec latency away
  • VPLEX Witness –  a virtual machine which provides adjudication between the two VPLEX clusters just in case the two clusters had some sort of communications breakdown.  Witness can run anywhere with access to both VPLEX clusters and is intended to be outside the two fault domains where the VPLEX clusters reside.
  • VPLEX new hardware – using the latest Intel microprocessors,
  • VPLEX now supports NetApp ALUA storage – the latest generation of NetApp storage.
  • VPLEX now supports thin-to-thin volume migration- previously VPLEX had to re-inflate thinly provisioned volumes but with this release there is no need to re-inflate prior to migration.

VPLEX Geo

The new Geo product in conjuncton with VMware and Hyper V allows for quick migration of VMs across distances that support up to 50msec of latency.  There are some current limitations with respect to specific VMware VM migration types that can be supported but Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration support is readily available at full 50msec latencies.  Note,  we are not talking about distance here but latency as the limiting factor to how far the VPLEX clusters can be apart.

Recall that VPLEX has three distinct use cases:

  • Infrastructure availability which proides fault tolerance for your storage and system infrastructure
  • Application and data mobility which means that applications can move from data center to data center and still access the same data/LUNs from both sites.  VPLEX maintains cache and storage coherency across the two clusters automatically.
  • Distributed data collaboration which means that data can be shared and accessed across vast distances. I have discussed this extensively in my post on Data-at-a-Distance (DaaD) post, VPLEX surfaces at EMCWorld.

Geo is the third product version for VPLEX, from VPLEX Local that supports within data center virtualization, to Vplex Metro which supports two VPLEX clusters which are up to 10msec latency away which generally is up to metropolitan wide distances apart, and Geo which moves to asynchronous cache coherence technologies. Finally coming sometime later is VPLEX Global which eliminates the restriction of two VPLEX clusters or data centers and can support 3-way or more VPLEX clusters.

Along with Geo, EMC showed some new partnerships such as with SilverPeak, Cienna and others used to reduce bandwidth requirements and cost for their Geo asynchronous solution.  Also announced and at the show were some new VPLEX partnerships with Quantum StorNext and others which addresses DaaD solutions

Other announcements today

  • Cloud tiering appliance – The new appliance is a renewed RainFinity solution which provides policy based migration to and from the cloud for unstructured data. Presumably the user identifies file aging criteria which can be used to trigger cloud migration for Atmos supported cloud storage.  Also the new appliance can support archiving file data to the Data Domain Archiver product.
  • Google enterprise search connector to VNX – Showing a Google search appliance (GSA) to index VNX stored data. Thus bringing enterprise class and scaleable search capabilities for VNX storage.

A bunch of other announcements today at EMCWorld but these seemed most important to me.

Comments?

Enterprise data storage defined and why 3PAR?

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Data growth, File Storage, Storage availability, Storage Features, Storage performance, Storage reliability
More SNW hall servers and storage
More SNW hall servers and storage

Recent press reports about a bidding war for 3PAR bring into focus the expanding need for enterprise class data storage subsystems.  What exactly is enterprise storage?

Defining enterprise storage is frought with problems but I will take a shot.  Enterprise class data storage has:

  • Enhanced reliability, high availability and serviceability – meaning it hardly ever fails, it keeps operating (on redundant components) when it does fail, and repairing the storage when the rare failure occurs can be accomplished without disrupting ongoing storage services
  • Extreme data integrity – goes beyond just RAID storage, meaning that these systems lose data very infrequently, provide the latest data written to a location when read and will tell you when data cannot be accessed.
  • Automated I/O performance – meaning sophisticated caching algorithms that try to keep ahead of sequential I/O streams, buffer actively read data, and buffer write data in non-volatile cache before destaging to disk or other media.
  • Multiple types of storage – meaning the system supports SATA, SAS and/or FC disk drives and SSDs or Flash storage
  • PBs of storage – meaning behind one enterprise class storage (sub-)system one can support over 1PB of storage
  • Sophisticated functionality – meaning the system supports multiple forms of offsite replication, thin provisioning, storage tiering, point-in-time copies, data cloning, administration GUIs/CLIs, etc.
  • Compatibility with all enterprise O/Ss – meaning the storage has been tested and is on hardware compatibility lists for every major operating system in use by the enterprise today.

As for storage protocol, it seems best to leave this off the list.  I wanted to just add block storage, but enterprises today probably have as much if not more external file storage (CIFS or NFS) as they have block storage (FC or iSCSI).  And the proportion in file systems seems to be growing (see IDC report referenced below).

In addition, while I don’t like the non-determinism of iSCSI or file access protocols, this doesn’t seem to stop such storage from putting up pretty impressive performance numbers (see our performance dispatches).  Anything that can crack 100K I/O or file operations per second probably deserves to call themselves enterprise storage as long as they meet the other requirements.  So, maybe I should add high-performance storage to the list above.

Why the sudden interest in enterprise storage?

Enterprise storage has been around arguably since the 2nd half of last century (for mainframe systems) but lately has become even more interesting as applications deploy to the cloud and server virtualization (from VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and others) takes over the data center.

Cloud storage and cloud computing services are lowering the entry points for storage and processing, enabling application deployments which were heretofore unaffordable.  These new cloud applications consume storage at increasing rates and don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.  Arguably, some cloud storage is not enterprise storage but as service levels go up for these applications, providers must ultimately turn to enterprise storage.

In addition, server virtualization transforms the enterprise data center from a single application per server to easily 5 or more applications per physical server.  This trend is raising server utilization, driving more I/O, and requiring higher capacity.  Such “multi-application” storage almost always requires high availability, reliability and performance to work well, generating even more demand for enterprise data storage systems.

Despite all the demand, world wide external storage revenues dropped 12% last year according to IDC.  Now the economy had a lot to do with this decline but another factor reducing external storage revenue is the ongoing drop in the price of storage on a $/GB basis.  To this point, that same IDC report stated that external storage capacity increased 33% last year.

Why Dell & HP wants 3PAR storage?

Margins on enterprise storage are good, some would say very good.  While raw disk storage can be had at under $0.50/GB, enterprise class storage is often 10 or more times that price.  Now that has to cover redundant hardware, software/firmware engineering and other characteristics, but this still leaves pretty good margins.

In my mind, Dell would see enterprise storage as a natural extension of their current enterprise server business.  They already sell and support these customers, including enterprise class storage just adds another product to the mix.  Developing enterprise storage from scratch is probably a 4-7 year journey with the right people, buying 3PAR puts them in the market today with a competitive product.

HP is already in the enterprise storage market today, with their XP and EVA storage subsystems.  However, having their own 3PAR enterprise class storage may get them better margins than their current XP storage OEMed from HDS.  But I think Chuck Hollis’s post on HP’s counter bid for 3PAR may have revealed another side to this discussion – sometime M&A is as much about constraining your competition as it is about adding new capabilities to a company.

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What do you think?

IBM Scale out NAS (SONAS) v1.1.1

Posted on by Ray in File Storage, Storage, Storage availability, Storage performance
IBM SONAS from IBM's Flickr stream (c) IBM
IBM SONAS from IBM's Flickr stream (c) IBM

We have discussed other scale out NAS products on the market such as Symantec’s FileStore, IBRIX reborn as HP networked storage, and why SO/CFS, why now (scale out/cluster file systems) in previous posts but haven’t talked about IBM’s highend scale out NAS (SONAS) product before. There was an announcement yesterday of a new SONAS version so thought it an appropriate time to cover it.

As you may know SONAS packages up IBM’s well known GPFS system services and surrounds it with pre-packaged hardware and clustering software that supports a high availability cluster of nodes serving native CIFS and NFS clients.

One can see SONAS is not much to look at from the outside but internally it comes with three different server components:

  • Interface nodes – which provide native CIFS, NFS and now with v1.1.1 HTTP interface protocols to the file store.
  • Storage nodes – which supply backend storage device services.
  • Management nodes – which provide for administration of the SONAS storage system.

The standard SONAS system starts with a fully integrated hardware package within one rack with 2-management nodes, 2- to 6-interface nodes, 2-storage pods (one storage pod consists of of 2-storage nodes and 60 to 240 attached disk drives).  The starter system can then be expanded with either a single interface rack with up to 30 interface nodes and/or multiple storage racks with 2 storage pods in each rack.

With v1.1.1, a new hardware option has been provided, specifically the new IBM SONAS gateway for IBM’s XIV storage.  With this new capability SONAS storage nodes can now be connected to an IBM XIV storage subsystem using 8GFC interfaces through a SAN switch.

Some other new functionality released in SONAS V1.1.1 include:

  • New policy engine – used for internal storage tiering and for external/hierarchical storage through IBM’s Tivoli Storage Managere (TSM) product. Recall that SONAS supports both SAS and SATA disk drives and now one can use policy management to migrate files between internal storage tiers.  Also, with the new TSM interface, data can now be migrated out of SONAS and onto tape or any of the other over 600 storage devices supported by TSM’s Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) product.
  • Asynch replication – used for disaster recovery/business continuance.  SONAS uses standard Linux based RSYNC capabilities to replicate file systems from one SONAS cluster to another cluster.  SONAS replication only copies changed portions of files within file systems being replicated and uses SSH data transfer to encrypt data-in-flight between the two SONAS systems.

There were some other minor enhancements for this announcement namely, higher capacity SAS drive support (now 600GB), using NIS authentication, increased cache per interface node (now up to 128GB), and the already mentioned new HTTP support.

In addition, IBM stated that a single interface node can pump out 900MB/sec (out of cache) and 6 interface nodes can sustain over 5GB/sec (presumably also from cache).  SONAS can currently scale up to 30 interface nodes but this doesn’t appear to be an architectural limitation but rather just what has been validated by IBM.

Can’t wait to see this product show up in SPECsfs 2008 performance benchmarks to see how it compares to other SO and non-SA file system products.