Storage Nation

In my series on data center transformation I started with Server transformation and the closer integration of server and storage virtualization through the use of VAAI or vStorage APIs for storage arrays. These APIs were introduced at VMworld in 2008 when VMware announced their vStorage initiatives. When VMware released these APIs on July 13, 2010, Hitachi jointly released support for these APIs on our AMS 2000 storage arrays . A lot of effort went into this integration as it is a massive technology enhancement for the transformation of the data center. The testing that we have done with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning volumes on an AMS 2300 with VAAI has shown the following results: Full copy – 18% performance improvement (speed to copy VM’s) Write same – 85% performance improvement (speed to clone VM’s) Hardware Assisted Locking – 25% to 35% performance improvement including the removal of SCSI reserves (powering on 1400 VM’s on 4 x Servers simultaneously) See what VMware CTO Steve Herrod says about these enhancements in his executive blog.

As I have stated in my previous posts on data center transformation , virtualization plays an important role in creating a dynamic pool of server and storage resources and masking the physical infrastructure from the application, so that the provisioning, movement, and refresh of the infrastructure can be done without disruption to the business. While we are masking the physical resources, however, we still need to provide the applications with transparency into the virtual infrastructure to ensure that their service level objectives are being met

After my last post on Data Center Transformation Part 4: Dynamic Provisioning, where I talked about the benefits of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning, Lucas Mearian published a Computerworld Article “ A waste of Space: Bulk of drive capacity still underutilized – Most companies can reclaim as much as 60% of their storage Capacity with Monitoring and thin provisioning tool ” In this article he observed that the low utilization of storage capacity is still a rampant problem even though tools like thin provisioning are available today to monitor usage and thin provision storage. While a recent survey from TheInfoPro showed as many as 50% of Fortune 1000 companies were using thin provisioning or were planning to do so, other analysts like Forrester’s Andrew Reichman contend that companies are not using these tools and utilization of storage is still between 20 to 40%. While he did say that thin provisioning was not being used for thin provisioning he did observe that it was being used for striping performance which is a result of writing data in chunks across many disk drives. According to this article thin provisioning can reclaim up to 60%

Andy Kyte from Gartner was been sounding the alarm for data center modernization for a number of years. He warns that the data center is headed for a train wreck