Tag: NetApp

PC-as-a-Service (PCaaS) using VDI

Posted on by Ray in desktop virtualization, Systems
IBM PC Computer by Mess of Pottage (cc) (from Flickr)
IBM PC Computer by Mess of Pottage (cc) (from Flickr)

Last year at VMworld, VMware was saying that 2010 was year for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), last week NetApp said that most large NY banks they talked with were looking at implementing VDI and prior to that, HP StorageWorks announced a new VDI reference platform that could support ~1600 VDI images.  It seems that VDI is gaining some serious interest.

While VDI works well for large organizations, there doesn’t seem to be any similar solution for consumers. The typical consumer today usually runs downlevel OS’s, anti-virus, office applications, etc.  and have no time, nor inclination to update such software.  These consumers would be considerably better served with something like PCaaS, if such a thing existed.

PCaaS

Essentially PCaaS would be a VDI-like service offering, using standard VDI tools or something similar with a lightweight kernel, use of local attached resources (printers, usb sticks, scanners, etc.) but running applications that were hosted elsewhere.  PCaaS could provide all the latest O/S and applications and provide enterprise class reliability, support and backup/restore services.

Broadband

One potential problem with PCaaS is the need for reliable broadband to the home. Just like other cloud services, without broadband, none of this will work.

Possibly this could be circumvented if a PCaaS viewer browser application were available (like VMware’s Viewer). With this in place, PCaaS could be supplied over any internet enabled location supporting browser access.   Such a browser based service may not support the same rich menu of local resources as a normal PCaaS client, but it would probably suffice when needed. The other nice thing about a viewer is that smart phones, iPads and other always-on web-enabled devices supporting standard browsers could provide PCaaS services from anywhere mobile data or WI-FI were available.

PCaaS business model

As for a businesses that could bring PC-as-a-Service to life, I see many potential providers:

  • Any current PC hardware vendor/supplier may want to supply PCaaS as it may defer/reduce hardware purchases or rather move such activity from the consumer to companies.
  • Many SMB hosting providers could easily offer such a service.
  • Many local IT support services could deliver better and potentially less expensive services to their customers by offering PCaaS.
  • Any web hosting company would have the networking, server infrastructure and technical know-how to easily provide PCaaS.

This list ignores any new entrants that would see this as a significant opportunity.

Google, Microsoft and others seem to be taking small steps to do this in a piecemeal fashion, with cloud enabled office/email applications. However, in my view what the consumer really wants is a complete PC, not just some select group of office applications.

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As described above, PCaaS would bring enterprise level IT desktop services to the consumer marketplace. Any substantive business in PCaaS would free up untold numbers of technically astute individuals providing un-paid, on-call support to millions, perhaps billions of technically challenged consumers.

Now if someone would just come out with Mac-as-a-Service, I could retire from supporting my family’s Apple desktops & laptops…

Building a green data center

Posted on by Ray in Energy efficiency, Systems
Diversity in the Ecological Soup by jurvetson (cc) (from Flickr)
Diversity in the Ecological Soup by jurvetson (cc) (from Flickr)

At NetApp’s Analyst Days last week David Robbins, CTO Information Technology, reported on a new highly efficient Global Dynamic Lab (GDL) data center which they built in Raleigh, North Carolina.  NetApp predicts this new data center  will have a power use effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.2.  Most data centers today do well if they can attain a PUE of 2.0.

Recall that PUE is the ratio of all power required by the data center (includes such things as IT power, chillers, fans, UPS, transformers, humidifiers, lights, etc.) over just IT power (for racks, storage, servers, and networking gear).  A PUE of 2 says that there is as much power used by IT equipment as is used to power and cool the rest of the data center.  An EPA report on Server and Data Center Efficiency said that data centers could reach a PUE of 1.4 if they used state of the art techniques outlined in the report.  A PUE of 1.2 is a dramatic improvement in data center power efficiency and reduces non-IT power in half.

There were many innovations used by NetApp to reach the power effectiveness at GDL. The most important ones were:

  • Cooling at higher temperatures which allowed for the use of ambient air
  • Cold-room, warm aisle layout which allowed finer control over cooling delivery to the racks
  • Top-down cooling which used physics to reduce fan load.

GDL was designed to accommodate higher rack power densities coming from today’s technology. GDL supports an average of 12kW per rack and can handle a peak load of 42kW per rack.  In addition, GDL uses 52U tall racks which helps reduce data center foot print.  Such high powered/high density racks requires rethinking data center cooling.

Cooling at higher temperatures

Probably the most significant factor that improved PUE was planning for the use much warmer air temperatures.  By using warmer air 70-80F/21.1-26.7C, much of the cooling could now be based on ambient air rather than chilled air.  NetApp estimates that they can use ambient air 75% of the year in Raleigh, a fairly warm and humid location.  As such, GDL chiller use is reduced significantly which generates significant energy savings from the number 2 power consumer in most data centers.

Also, NetApp is able to use ambient air for partial cooling for the much of the rest of the year when used in conjunction with chillers.  Air handlers were purchased that could use outside air, chillers or a combination of the two.  GDL chillers also operate more efficiently at the higher temperatures, reducing power requirements yet again.

Given the temperature rise of typical IT equipment cooling of ~20-25F/7.6-9.4C one potential problem is that the warm aisles can exceed 100F/37.8C which is about the upper limit for human comfort. Fortunately, by detecting lighting use in the hot aisles, GDL can increase cold room equipment cooling to bring temperatures in adjacent hot aisles down to a more comfortable level when humans are present.

One other significant advantage to using warmer temperatures is that warmer air is easier to move than colder air.  This provides savings by allowing lowered powered fans to cool the data center.

Cold rooms-warm aisles

GDL built cold rooms at the front side of racks and a relatively open warm aisle on the other side of the racks.  Such a design provides uniform cooling from the top to the bottom of a rack.  With a more open air design, hot air often accumulates and is trapped at the top of the rack which requires more cooling to compensate.  By sealing the cold room, GDL insures a more equilateral cooling of the rack and thus, more efficient use of cooling.

Another advantage provided by cold-rooms, warm aisles is that cooling activity can be regulated by pressure differentials between the two aisles rather than flow control or spot temperature sensors.  Such regulation effectiveness, allows GDL to reduce air supply to match rack requirements.  As such, GDL reduces excess cooling that is required by more open designs using flow or temperature sensors.

Top down cooling

I run into this every day at my office, cool air is dense and flows downward, hot air is light and flows upward.  NetApp designed GDL to have air handlers on top of the computer room rather than elsewhere.  This eliminates much of the ductwork which often reduces air flow efficiency requiring increased fan power to compensate.  Also by piping the cooling in from above, physics helps get that cold air to the racked equipment that needs it.  As for the hot aisles, warm air will naturally rise to the air return above the aisles and can then be vented to the outside, mixed with outside ambient air or chilled before it’s returned to the cold room.

For normal data centers cooled from below, fan power must be increased to move the cool air up to the top of the rack.  GDL’s top down cooling reduces the fan power requirements substantially from below the floor cooling.

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There were other approaches which helped GDL reduce power use such as using hot air for office heating but these seemed to be the main ones.  Much of this was presented at NetApp’s Analyst Days last week.  Robbins has written a white paper which goes into much more detail on GDL’s PUE savings and other benefits that accrued to NetApp when the built this data center.

One nice surprise was the capital cost savings generated by using GDL’s power efficient data center design.  This was also detailed in the white paper.  But at the time this post was published the paper was not available.

Now that summer’s here in the north, I think I want a cold room-warm aisle for my office…

More on data growth from NetApp analyst days customers

Posted on by Ray in Data, Data growth
Installing a power line at the Tram. Pat, Allan and Chris by bossco (cc) (from Flickr)
Installing a power line at the Tram. Pat, Allan and Chris by bossco (cc) (from Flickr)

Some customers at NetApp’s Analyst Days were discussing deployments of NetApp storage with Dave Hitz the new storage efficiency czar and others but I was more interested in their comments on storage growth issues. Jonathan Bartes of Virginia Farm Bureau mentioned the “natural growth rate of unstructured data” seemed to be about 20% per year, but some of the other customers had even higher growth rates.

Tucson Electric Power

Christopher Jeffry Rima from Tucson Electric Power is dealing with 70% CAGR in data growth per year. What’s driving this is primarily regulations (Power companies are heavily regulated utilities in USA), high resolution imagery/GIS data and power management/smart metering. It turns out imagery has increased resolution by about 10X in a matter of years and they use such images as work plan overlays for field work to fix, upgrade or retire equipment. It seems they have hi-res images of all the power equipment and lines in their jurisdiction which are updated periodically via fly overs.

The other thing that’s driving their data growth is smart metering and demand power management. I have talked about smart metering data appetite before. But demand management was new to me.

Rima said that demand management is similar to smart metering but adds a real time modeling of  demand and capacity and bi-directional transmissions to request consumers to shed demand when required. Smart meters and real time generation data feeds the load management model used to predict peak demand over the next time period which is then used to determine whether to shed demand or not.   It turns out that at ~60% utilization the power grid is much more cost effective than at 80% due the need to turn on gas generators which cost more than coal. In any case, when their prediction model shows utilization will top ~60-70% they start shunting load.

Arup

Another customer, Neil Clover from Arup (a construction/engineering firm) started talking about 3D building/site modeling and fire simulation flow dynamics modeling. Clover lamented that it’s not unusual to have a TB of data show up out of nowhere for a project they just took on.

incendio en el edificio 04 by donrenexito (cc) (from Flickr)
incendio en el edificio 04 by donrenexito (cc) (from Flickr)

Clover said the fire flow modeling’s increasing resolution and multiple iterations under varying conditions were generating lots of data. The 3D models are also causing serious data growth and need to be maintained across the design, build, operate cycle of buildings.  TB of data showing up on your data center storage with no advance notice – incredible.  All this and more is causing Clover’s data growth to average around 70% per year.

University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium

The day before at the analyst meeting Reinoud Reynders from the University Hospital Leuven, Belgium mentioned some key drivers of data growth at their hospital as digital pathology studies that generate about 100GB each but which they do about 100 times a day and DNA studies that generate about 1TB of data each and take about a week to create.  This seems higher than I predicted, almost 16X higher.  However, Reynders said the DNA studies are still pretty expensive at $15K USD each but he forecasts costs decreasing drasmatically over the coming years and a commensurate volume increase.

But the more critical current issue might be the digital pathology exams at ~10TB per day.  The saving grace for pathology exams is that such studies can be archived when completed rather than kept online. Reynders also mentioned that digital radiology and imaging studies are also creating massive amounts of data but unfortunately this data must be kept online because they are re-referenced often and has no predictability about it.

While data growth was an understated concern during much of the conference sessions, how customers dealt with such (ab?)normal growth by using NetApp storage and Ontap functionality was the main topic of their presentations.  Explanation on this NetApp functionality and how effective they were at managing data growth will need to await another day.

ESRP 1K to 5Kmbox performance – chart of the month

Posted on by Ray in ESRP, ESRPv3/Exchange 2010, Storage, Storage performance
ESRP 1001 to 5000 mailboxes, database transfers/second/spindle
ESRP 1001 to 5000 mailboxes, database transfers/second/spindle

One astute reader of our performance reports pointed out that some ESRP results could be skewed by the number of drives that are used during a run.  So, we included a database transfers per spindle chart in our latest Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) report on 1001 to 5000 mailboxes in our latest newsletter.  The chart shown here is reproduced from that report and shows the number of overall database transfers attained (total of read and write) for the top 10 storage subsystems reporting in the latest ESRP results.

This cut of the system performance shows a number of diverse systems:

  • Some storage systems had 20 disk drives and others had 4.
  • Some of these systems were FC storage (2), some were SAS attached storage (3), but most were iSCSI storage.
  • Mailbox counts supported by these subsystems ranged from 1400 to 5000 mailboxes.

What’s not shown is the speed of the disk spindles. Also none of these systems are using SSD or NAND cards to help sustain their respective workloads.

A couple of surprises here:

  • iSCSI systems should have shown up much worse than FC storage. True, the number 1 system (NetApp FAS2040) is FC while the numbers 2&3 are iSCSI, the differences are not that great.  It would seem that protocol overhead is not a large determinant in spindle performance for ESRP workloads.
  • The number of drives used also doesn’t seem to matter much.  The FAS2040 had 12 spindles while the AX4-5i only had 4.  Although this cut of the data should minimize drive count variability, one would think that more drives would result in higher overall performance for all drives.
  • Such performance approaches drive limits of just what a 15Krpm drive can sustain.  No doubt some of this is helped by system caching, but no amount of cache can hold all the database write and read data for the duration of a Jetstress run.  It’s still pretty impressive, considering typical 15Krpm drives (e.g., Seagate 15K.6) can probably do ~172 random 64Kbyte block IOs/second. The NetApp FAS2040 hit almost 182 database transfers/second/spindle, perhaps not 64Kbyte blocks and maybe not completely random, but impressive nonetheless.

The other nice thing about this metric, is that it doesn’t correlate that well with any other ESRP metrics we track, such as aggregate database transfers, database latencies, database backup throughput etc. So it seems to measure a completely different dimension of Exchange performance.

The full ESRP report went out to our newsletter subscribers last month and a copy of the report will be up on the dispatches page of our website later this month. However, you can get this information now and subscribe to future newsletters to receive future full reports even earlier, just subscribe by email.

As always, we welcome any suggestions on how to improve our analysis of ESRP or any of our other storage system performance results.  This new chart was a result of one such suggestion.

NetApp and Microsoft ink 3 year agreement

Posted on by Ray in Strategy

Microsoft logo
Microsoft logo

NetApp Logo
NetApp Logo

This week, NetApp and Microsoft announced a new agreement that increases the collaboration and integration for both their product technology and sales&marketing activities. Specifically, the new agreement covers better integration of

  • Microsoft’s virtualized infrastructure interaction with NetApp storage. This currently consists of new PRO Packs for System Center to support NetApp storage and Snap Manager for Hyper-V. Better integration such as these between these Microsoft virtualization and NetApp storage should help ease administration and maximize utilization of customer storage for Hyper-V environments.
  • Microsoft Exchange, SQL and Office SharePoint servers with NetApp Storage. This includes new support for Exchange 2010 in NetApp Snap Manager that fully provides deduplication and replication of Exchange data. Further integration along these lines should lead to even better customer utilization of storage in these environments in the near future.
  • Microsoft dynamic data center initiative and NetApp storage. This includes better testing and compatibility for using NetApp storage under Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for enterprise private clouds (DDTK-E). Better integration and support for Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Center by NetApp storage and vice versa should help customers build more storage efficient cloud infrastructure.
  • Microsoft and NetApp joint go to market activities. This will result in Microsoft and NetApp joint channel partners being better able to offer joint solutions to their customers and also, customers should see better collaboration and partnership between NetApp and Microsoft sales and support.

This agreement should be considered a deepening of NetApp and Microsoft’s ongoing alliance. How this will actually change either company’s product functionality in the future was left unsaid but one should see more of NetApp’s advanced storage features show up as being available directly from Microsoft systems and NetApp storage services tighter integration with Microsoft systems should make it easier for customers to use storage more efficiently. Exactly when these activities result in enhanced NetApp or Microsoft functionality was not stated and is no doubt subject of ongoing discussions between the two teams. Nonetheless, this agreement seems to say that NetApp and Microsoft are taking their alliance to the next level.

Full disclosure: I am currently working on a contract with NetApp on another aspect of their storage but am doing no work with Microsoft.

Latest SPECsfs2008 results – chart of the month

Posted on by Ray in File Storage, NFS throughput, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Storage, Storage performance, Storage reliability
Top 10 SPEC(R) sfs2008 NFS throughput results as of 25Sep2009
Top 10 SPEC(R) sfs2008 NFS throughput results as of 25Sep2009

The adjacent chart is from our September newsletter and shows the top 10 NFSv3 throughput results from the latest SPEC(R) sfs2008 benchmark runs published as of 25 September 2009.

There have been a number of recent announcements of newer SPECsfs2008 results in the news of late, namely Symantec’s FileStore and Avere Systems releases but these results are not covered here. In this chart, the winner is the NetApp FAS6080 with FCAL disks behind it, clocking in at 120K NFSv3 operations/second. This was accomplished with 324 disk drives using 2-10Gbe links.

PAM comes out

All that’s interesting of course but what is even more interesting is NetApp’s results with their PAM II (Performance Accelerator Module) cards. The number 3, 4 and 5 results were all with the same system (FAS3160) with different configurations of disks and PAM II cards. Specifically,

  • The #3 result had a FAS3160, running 56 FCAL disks with PAM II cards and DRAM cache of 532GBs. The system attained 60.5K NFSv3 operations per second.
  • The #4 result had a FAS3160, running 224 FCAL disks with no PAM II cards but 20GB of DRAM cache. This system attained 60.4K NFSv3 ops/second.
  • The #5 result had a FAS3160, running 96 SATA disks with PAM II cards and DRAM cache of 532GBs. This system also attained 60.4K NFSv3 ops/second.

Similar results can be seen with the FAS3140 systems at #8, 9 and 10. In this case the FAS3140 systems were using PAM I (non-NAND) cards with 41GB of cache for results #9 and 10, while #8 result had no PAM with only 9GB of Cache. The #8 result used 224 FCAL disks, #9 used 112 FCAL disks, and #10 had 112 SATA disks. They were able to achieve 40.1K, 40.1K and 40.0K NFSv3 ops/second respectively.

Don’t know how much PAM II cards cost versus FCAL or SATA disks but there is an obvious trade off here. You can use less FCAL or cheaper SATA disks but attain the same NFSv3 ops/second performance.

As I understand it, the PAM II cards come in 256GB configurations and you can have 1 or 2 cards in a FAS system configuration. PAM cards act as an extension of FAS system cache and all IO workloads can benefit from their performance.

As with all NAND flash, write access is significantly slower than read and NAND chip reliability has to be actively managed through wear leveling and other mechanisms to create a reliable storage environment. We assume either NetApp has implemented the appropriate logic to support reliable NAND storage or has purchased NAND cache with the logic already onboard. In any case, the reliability of NAND is more concerned with write activity than read and by managing the PAM cache to minimize writes, NAND reliability concerns could easily be avoided.

The full report on the latest SPECsfs2008 results will be up on my website later this week but if you want to get this information earlier and receive your own copy of our newsletter – email me at SubscribeNews@SilvertonConsulting.com?Subject=Subscribe_to_Newsletter.

Full disclosure: I currently have a contract with NetApp on another facet of their storage but it is not on PAM or NFSv3 performance.

Why SO/CFS, Why Now

Posted on by Ray in Storage, Storage Features

Why all the interest in Scale-out/Cluster File Systems (SO/CFS) and why now?

Why now is probably easiest to answer, valuations are down. NetApp is migrating GX to their main platform, IBM continues to breath life in GPFS, HP buys IBRIX, and now LSI buys ONStor. It seems every day brings some new activity with scale out/cluster file system products. Interest seems to be based on the perception that SO/CFS would make a good storage backbone/infrastructure for Cloud Computing. But this takes some discussion…

What can one do with a SO/CFS.

  • As I see it SO/CFS provides a way to quickly scale out and scale up NAS system performance. This doesn’t mean that file data can be in multiple locations/sites or that files can be supplied across the WAN but file performance can be scaled independently of file storage.
  • What seems even more appealing is the amount of data/size of the file systems supported by SO/CFS systems. It seems like PBs of storage can be supported and served up as millions of files. Now that sounds like something useful to Cloud environments if one could front end it with some Cloud enabled services.

So why aren’t they taking off because low valuations signal to me they aren’t doing well. I think today few end-users need to support millions of files, PBs of data or the performance these products could sustain. Currently, their main market is the high performance computing (HPC) labs but there are only so many physic/genomic labs out there that need this much data/performance.

That’s where the cloud enters the picture. Cloud’s promise is that it can aggregate everybody’s computing and storage demand into a service offering where 1,000s of user can login from the internet and do their work. With 1,000s of users each with 1,000s files, we now start to talk in the million file range.

Ok, so if the cloud market is coming, then maybe SO/CFS’s has some lasting/broad appeal. One can see preliminary cloud services emerging today especially in backup services such as Mozy or Norton Online Backup (see Norton Online Backup) but not many cloud services exist today with general purpose/generic capabilities, Amazon notwithstanding. If the Cloud market takes time to develop, then buying into SO/CFS technology while it’s relatively cheap and early in its adoption cycle makes sense.

There are many ways to supply cloud storage. Some companies have developed their own brand new solutions here, EMC/Atmos and DataDirect Network/WOS (see DataDirect Network WOS) seem most prominent. Many others exist, toiling away to address this very same market. Which of these solutions survive/succeed in the Cloud market is an open question that will take years to answer.

BlueArc introduces Mercury

Posted on by Ray in Storage

Tomorrow, BlueArc will open up a new front in their battle with the rest of the NAS vendors by introducing the Mercury 50 NAS head. This product is slated to address the more mid-range enterprise market that historically shunned the relatively higher priced Titan series.

Mercury 50 is only the first product in this series and other products to be released in the future will help fill out the top end of this series. Priced similar to the NetApp 3140 this product has all the support of standard BlueArc file system while only limiting the Max storage capacity to 1PB. Its NFS throughput is a little better than half the current Titan 3100.

Mercury 50 will eventually be offered by BlueArc’s OEM partner HDS. However, immediately the Mercury 50 will be sold by the BlueArc’s direct sales force as well as many new channel partners that BlueArc has acquired over this past year.

This marks a departure for BlueArc into the more mainstream enterprise storage space. Historically, BlueArc has been successful in the high performance market but the real volumes and commensurate revenue are in the standard enterprise space. The problem in the past has been the high price of the BlueArc Titan systems but now with Mercury this should no longer be an issue.

That being said, the competition is much more intense as you move down market. EMC and NetApp will not stand still while their market share is eroded. And both of these company’s have the wherewithal to compete on performance, pricing and features.

Exciting times ahead for the NAS users out there.