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Storage buyer’s choice (or when buying storage..)

I happened to read the "Brocade SAN Design and Best Practices Version 2.0" recently. Two quotes from first section caught me straight.

"most SANs tend to stick around for a long time before they get renewed, take the future into account as SANs are difficult to re-architect"

"A fabric design should take into account requirements and plan for a 6 to 8 year life cycle"

Yes, this is even true for storage subsystems.

Unlike you tend to change the compute (servers) as server clustering and server virtualizing technologies allow you to decommission or shuffle servers while applications running. It is still pretty difficult to do that with storage systems unless you use storage clustering, storage virtualization or some sort of federation limited to certain vendor solutions like Hitachi controller level virtualization, EMC Vplex, HP peer motion… etc. These technologies are very different from many perspectives like cost, product maturity, ease of use, market acceptance… etc.

So Storage purchasing decision is still complex. One thing I know for sure when buying storage,

• Take into account today and tomorrow requirements and plan for a 5 year life cycle. Buy the latest technology blend in all forms (hardware – front end capabilities, backend capabilities, controller capabilities, cache capabilities and software – provisioning capabilities, replication and app aware copy capabilities, virtualization and migration capabilities)

VSP proposal conclusion - (another) storage virtualization solution

Customer Case:- 90% applications on VMware, Currently running on two data center (asynchronous replication) dual controller midrange storage.

Problem:- Primary site storage is full, recent painful outage due to a controller failure and replacement agony in the primary array, limited replication capacity, limited performance, lack of features (thin provisioning, VAAI support, storage tiering). These midrange arrays are first GA in 2007, purchased in 2009 with 5 years support.

Extract from the proposal conclusion:-

Availability (Never goes down):-

• 100% Availability system design specification with minimal component failure impact (6.25% as 16 blades / directors)
• We recommend RAID-6 in order to safeguard our customers with the lowest risk of data loss for large capacity drives (2TB). This is particularly important with large provisioning pools of large capacity drives.
• VSP is Hitachi’s fifth-generation enterprise storage product, proven in the industry for 5 generations of evolution and many mission critical customers across the globe. Hitachi reports strong adoption worldwide with more than 1,400 Virtual Storage Platforms shipped in first 10 months.

Scalability (Future-proof):-

• VSP is cache oriented (scale out to 1024GB cache) compared to the existing **** midrange storage system is disk oriented (max. 16GB cache).
• Primary site VSP can scale out to 2048 internal drives (can scale deep to total 247PB by virtualizing disk oriented arrays), DR site VSP is today diskless virtualizing existing array assets (can scale out to 2048 internal drives).

Simplicity (Ease of Management):-

• Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning simplifies provisioning and helps in capacity planning. Recommend pool designs allow storage administrators to keep adding drives into the pools in the future. They can easily provision to host platforms for performance.
• Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning transparently spread individual I/O workloads across multiple physical disks to balance workloads, eliminate bottlenecks and reduce costs of managing performance and capacity.
• Hitachi Dynamic Tiering simply eliminates the need for time consuming manual data classification and data movement to significantly improve tiered storage efficiencies.

Investment protection (Latest technology for next 5 years):-

• We propose SAS 2.5’ Small Form Factor drives (tier-1: 146GB, tier-2: 600GB) and SAS 3.5’ drives (tier-3: 2TB).
• The large form factor 2TB 7.2K RPM SAS 3.5 inch disk drive has a significant write performance advantage over the SATA drive. In addition, SAS has dual port redundancy and point to point connectivity which ensures better system availability and fault isolation than SATA.

Feature rich:-

• Unique integration with VMware hypervisor : - A Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, when coupled with VMware VAAI primitives, allows you to build and maintain more scalable and efficient virtual environments. When using the Virtual Storage Platform, the VAAI primitives are extended to external virtualized storage, whether the external storage supports or does not support VAAI. When you use these primitives with the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform’ and Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning, you create a robust and highly available infrastructure to support high density virtual machine workloads. DR site diskless VSP enables you to use all VMware storage primitives on your existing midrange disk arrays / capacities.

Data at Rest Encryption - Storage Arrays

Three methods:-

1. Hardware (Back-end) encryption on all types of disks – HDS VSP (and HP P9500) and EMC VMAX can only do this today.

2. Fabric based data encryption – Brocade Encryption Switch (or DCX encryption blade) with external key management (Thales Key Manager, Tivoli KeyLifecycle Manager, HP Secure Key Manager, RSA) or Cisco MDS 9000 Storage Media Encryption solution.

3. Self-Encrypted drives (SED) – Encryption in-built drives from Seagate, Hitachi... (IBM DS, NetApp FAS, EMC VNX, HDS AMS, …, SEDs are popular in midrange models)

Interesting to note, Only HDS VSP (and HP P9500) and EMC VMAX can do Encryption on all the supported disk drives in the array (not limited to a drive type or model).

3PAR (P10000), I could not find any public document on Encryption in the array or support for SED drives.

DS8800 red book specifies the drive types supported for encryption and key management and applicable limitations of using encryption on drives.

FAS6200, I could not find any public document on Encryption in the array (ONTAP) or support for SED drives. But I have seen NetApp has claimed/quoted SED drives for FAS6200. Other FAS models support SED, Fair assumption FAS6200 supports SEDs.

What is this Chunk of IT?

Interesting talk from IDC - http://bit.ly/orwuXM

Essentially, the IT architecture evolves and transforms. (Problems create solutions, new solution create new problems).

Quick thought on new terminology - Chunk of IT

IT side of a data center consists of Chunk of IT

1. computing (servers)
2. connectivity (network)
3. capacity (storage)

Data Center consumes power & produces business transactions?

Does it consumes Power (kWh) & produces a service (Business transactions / hour)? I hope some vendor will (m)architect such a consumption model or ROI sheet for us :)

Both consumption and outcome of a data center are still subjective and a complex topic.

Customers used to buy servers, storage systems and network equipment. Will they buy chunk of IT instead?

Some options we have today,

• Oracle Exadata, Exalogic
• HP Converged Infrastructure
• EMC and Cisco Vblock / EMC, Cisco VMware - VCE
• Hitachi Converged Data Center Solutions - UCP
• IBM CloudBurst
• DELL vStart
• Symantec is coming up with chunk of IT for backup space
• ….

Interesting & new market dynamics, how do we really measure Chunk of IT?

How can customers compare such and make a purchasing decision?

Are we heading for simplification or complication? Perhaps, after the purchasing complication, it is simplification. Perhaps not ! :)

“Relationship” “Technicality” “Price” in IT

Pre-sales & technical sales… too sensitive to write about real life experience ?

It was really fun to fight & beat the so-called number one storage player to begin the last quarter. To begin this quarter, it is the first VSP.

Always happy to see deep technical debates.. why ? how ? what ? approach becoming more common.

“Relationship” “Technicality” “Price”, It is worth looking at their % contribution in each sale.

(Personal) Good Pastime – 1

Truthful talks to listen while free.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BuddhistSocietyWA

Hitachi makes storage kit, server kit & networking kit!

Interesting post by Nigel Poulton - http://blog.nigelpoulton.com/hitachi-makes-networking-kit-does-it-matter

Storage kit - http://www.hds.com

Server kit - http://www.bladesymphony.com
Networking kit - http://www.alaxala.com/en

Not all available in all the regions yet. Hope it will be

Hitachi Data Systems Geek Day 0.9

http://www.hds.com/go/geekday/index.html

It is all about talking and talking about the greatness of Hitachi storage innovations.

the next Hitachi Data Systems' USP refresh

SearchStorage.com: So what can we expect HDS to focus on with the next big USP refresh?

Yoshida: Well, I'll give you a hint. We've announced ourdynamic provisioning capability. When we implemented dynamic provisioning, we created the concept of a page — you get a pool of RAID groups and divide them up into pages, and do thin provisioning based on the page dynamically because it's all pre-formatted. This page concept is game-changing for us. Now we will manage storage based upon pages rather than volumes and files. That, I think, will be a focus on future products.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1415232,00.html

Oracle and Informix I/O profiling - 1

This is an interesting subject in database and storage industry. Today number of I/O auto optimization techniques are evolving such as Oracle ASM at the database front and Dynamic/Thin provisioning at the storage front. Manual I/O designing and optimization for database are already a legacy subject?

Sometimes, we have to cope with the legacy. So I start listing the possible physical storage structure of Oracle and Informix.

Trick is the design of LUN (or volume)? Size, RAID level, Number of spindles … for different I/O profiles of database structures. Theory knowledge on database product and experience may come in handy here.

List of High-End/Enterprise storage systems

One of my customers asked me a list of enterprise storage systems. Interestingly I could list only five :-) This is the full list.

• 3PAR InServ T400
• 3PAR InServ T800
• EMC Symmetrix DMX-4
• EMC Symmetrix V-Max
• HDS USP VM
• HDS USP V
• HP StorageWorks XP20000
• HP StorageWorks XP24000
• IBM DS8100 Turbo
• IBM DS8300 Turbo
• IBM DS8700 Turbo
• NetApp (FAS Series) FAS6040
• NetApp (FAS Series) FAS6080
• Sun StorageTek 9985V
• Sun StorageTek 9990V

IT Infrastructure Solution Evaluation

Selecting an IT infrastructure solution is always a challenge. I was listing some of the possible criteria to differentiate solutions. I have seen many such solution selections, some of them are decided on personal/organizational relationships, political reasons :-). Whichever the key decision criteria, some technical backing is mandatory. May be this list (I will keep on adding/modifying it) would help someone in some way.

1. System Requirements and Compliance – Answers are binary type – (Yes/No)

Sample criteria:-

• Need a certified Unix OS?
• Need to comply with regulations for digital records (Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Securities and Exchange Commission rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA))?
• Need to comply with "EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers”?
• Need to comply with "TIA-942 Datacenter Infrastructure Standard”?

2. Solution Architecture Features – Answers are descriptive – (% marks can be given)

Sample criteria:-

• How far solution logically tired?
• How far solution physically tired?
• How far horizontally scalable?
• How far vertically scalable?
• How far inter-dependencies between building blocks (servers, VMs, storage arrays/trays ...etc) avoided?
• How easy to manage the solution?
• How much control and tracking enabled for the solution?

3. Solution Acceptance (How Well-known, proven)

Sample criteria:-

• How many professionals/customers approved/implemented?
• Presence of similar solution implementations?

Typical model of a Data Center - local mid/enterprise customer

Above diagram is a typical model of a data center - local mid/enterprise customer.

Local SMB customers developing data center for production and DR sites are indecisive with the network design. Once they decide routers, switches and cabling arrangements, it is hard to change the network architecture here and there.

When it comes to a new installation, customer needs to plan the correct place for the new infrastructure in his data center model.

Installation engineer has three repetitive network related questions for any customer.

- What is your Management network IPs for the new servers/storage?

- What is your User Access LAN IPs (hostnames, gateways, network ...etc) ?

- What is your Private Data (inter server/nodes) network IPs (cluster interconnects …etc)?

Essentially, any data center should have above three Ethernet networks with required expandability, isolation and access control (security).

This is one of the simple facts in data center architecting and there are many more such as edge/core design, end of the rack / top of the rack and list goes on.