Storage Nation

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management.  Previous posts: The Four Pillars of Storage Management Four Pillars: Service Four Pillars: The Service Catalogue Four Pillars – Service: Chargeback In the previous article I discussed the subject of Billing and Chargeback.  This entry discusses some of the issues raised in that post as additional considerations.

This is part of a series of posts with video recorded at the HP Blades Day in Houston, February 2010. Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 1 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 2 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 3 In this final post from the Lab Session, James Singer discusses more about airflow and the chassis design.  The video doesn’t always follow the subject (due to my quality videoing techniques; in fact I was trying to pay attention), however the soundtrack is accurate

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management.  Previous posts: The Four Pillars of Storage Management Four Pillars: Service Four Pillars: The Service Catalogue In any system, resources are finite.  There is always a limitation to what is available.  However there’s also a truism that states if resources are free then they will be consumed at an infinite rate.  So it is with storage.  Someone has to pay for the storage resources that are placed on the floor.  If customers are not charged in some way for their consumption of storage, then they will continue to consume resources ad infinitum.  The solution is to implement chargeback or, to be more precise, billing. Definition It’s worth pausing for a moment and discussing the terms Chargeback and Billing .  When computing was first made available as timesharing, customers were billed for their usage of the shared system.  The billing unit may have been time, CPU resources or some combination of metrics that represented utilisation.  Mainframe resources were so expensive that there had to be an efficient charging mechanism.   The concept of billing is something that was intrisically built into the mainframe design and even to this day, resources can be tracked using records produced by SMF ( System Management Facility ) and reported on through RMF ( Resource Measurement Facility ).  So billing represented a method of charging for usage that wasn’t directly related to the underlying hardware

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management.  Previous posts: http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/05/04/enterprise-computing-the-four-pillars-of-storage-management/ http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/05/14/enterprise-computing-4-pillars-service/ As discussed previously, the Service Catalogue is a key component of delivering storage as a service.

This post is the second of a series of video posts from the HP Blades Day in February 2010.  Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session – Part I In this video, James Singer talks about power supplies.  This may not seem like the most interesting subject in the world, however as you will see, HP have thought in detail about the important features of PSU design.  The interesting ones for me are: Efficiency – the latest power supplies run at 90% or more efficiency at just 8% load, so there’s very little wastage in terms of power when the chassis is experiencing variable load.  In addition, using a feature called DPS (Dynamic Power Saver), PSUs are powered up and down on-demand in order to keep efficiency in that optimal 25-40% range.

You may have assumed from my previous post on VPLEX that I am negative towards the concept of storage federation.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  In fact, ever since I was involved in deploying ESX onto enterprise storage infrastructure (some 4 years ago), I’ve been waiting for the day true federation would arrive.  Here’s why. Static Configurations Think back to the time before server virtualisation (yes, there was one).  Physically static servers failed over to other physically static servers located in remote data centres.  Once deployed, servers very rarely moved unless there were major physical data centre issues or an upgrade was being performed.  In fact, even when server upgrades occurred, it was typical to acquire a new server and rebuild the application and data on that new hardware to remove any issues with new server drivers, hardware firmware and so on

I’m about to start a new series of posts discussing the whole process of Storage Management.  I’m calling it the Four Pillars of Storage Management as there are 4 main components:   SERVICE – Offering of services to business customers via a service catalog and measuring the ability to deliver to the business through KPIs and Service Level Agreements.

Not being a blades person “per-se”, I was looking forward to the lab session at HP Blades Day where we’d get to understand the physical hardware in more detail.  The video here shows James Singer taking us through the hardware and explaining the basic concepts of how the it is constructed.  What shows through this video is the passion these guys have.  You can tell they live and breathe blade technology.  I really enjoyed this session as I saw it as the starting of my personal vision on where HP are headed in their converged architecture.  Enjoy.  More to come (oh and apologies for James going out of shot – I wasn’t paying attention . Click here to view the embedded video.

The next Gestalt IT Field Day will be held in Boston between 8-9 April 2010.  Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend, however lots of great people will, including the following already confirmed:   Jason Boche – boche.net Carlo Costanzo – VMware Info David Davis – VMwareVideos Greg Ferro – EtherealMind & Gestalt IT Edward Haletky – The Virtualisation Practice Greg Knieriemen – iKnerd & StorageMonkeys Simon Long – The SLOG & Gestalt IT John Obeto – Absolutely Windows Devang Panchigar – StorageNerve & GestaltIT Bas Raayman – Technical Diatribe Simon Seagrave – TechHead Matt Simmons – Standalone Sysadmin Gabrie van Zanten – Gabe’s Virtual World I see a high bias towards virtualisation with this lineup; looking at the presenting sponsors I think the topics and output could be fantastic: Cisco Systems Data Robotics EMC Corporation Hewlett-Packard Company VKernel I haven’t seen any announcement of a Twitter hashtag (I expect it will be #techfieldday), look out for an update when it’s announced.

I finally managed to attend a London CloudCamp last Thursday, which conveniently co-incided with a #storagebeers evening.  For two hours of listening to the collective wisdom of the presenters and the “unpanel” we were offered free beer and food