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.