Storage Nation

There are three new white papers available on the site that may be of interest.  They are: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet24 Availability and the Cloud http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet22/ The Economic Impact of File Virtualization: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet09/ As usual I welcome any feedback as to whether this part of the site is useful. Disclaimer:  For each subscription I receive a payment which goes to fund the running of this site and www.thevirtualisationarchitect.com.  This includes covering the costs of trial subscriptions to cloud services.

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.

I’ve added a new section to the site, which you can find at the top of the navigation bar – “ Storage White Papers “.  The selections are free, specifically storage orientated and here are a few examples to get you started: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy Availability and the Cloud The Economic Impact of File Virtualisation: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage These are vendor sponsored and you’ll need to register (which is the tradeoff for them being free).  Please let me know what you think if you download any of these white papers. Disclaimer: I receive a small fee for whitepaper subscriptions as part of this service.  This will go towards running the site, which, due to traffic is now increasing in expense.

There is a growing need for specialized storage servers to provide functions like Network Attached Storage (NAS) over Internet protocols, Content Archives, enterprise document management, Virtual tape Libraries (VTL), deduplication, low cost modular storage, high availability enterprise storage, etc. While storage servers provide benefits for the management and preservation of certain types of data, it can create storage/server sprawl and increase the fragmentation of data center resources if these services are delivered as standalone storage and server bundles

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%

This is a series of posts on the Promise SmartStor NS4600 home storage server.  Previous posts: Hardware Review: Promise SmartStor NS4600 – Part I Hardware Review: Promise SmartStor NS4600 – Part II In this post, we will discuss file layout, formats and protocols available on the NS4600.  The previous post (above) discussed how RAID is constructed across physical disks.  Multiple volumes can be constructed from the disks available in the system (subject to a disk being dedicated to only one volume).  Above this layer sits the file system and logical iSCSI devices. Filesystem Status The first screen shot shows the normal status of a file system.  In this example there are two drives paired together in a RAID-1 mirror, providing approximately 1675GB of storage space.  At present only around 1442GB of space as been allocated to the file system, with some 187GB of free capacity still available.  At first it may not seem obvious why all the available space shouldn’t be allocated to the file system, however the answer is simple; standard NAS file space and iSCSI LUNs sit beside each other together on the RAID volume.  Therefore as a file system is created, it can be sized as required, allowing future expansion as either additional file space or as iSCSI LUNs.  The creation of the iSCSI LUN is shown in subsequent screen shots, highlighting the initial available 187GB of space, followed by the creation of two 50GB iSCSI LUNs, reducing the available space to 87GB. Mixing data types on the same RAID set would not necessarily be best practice on a medium-tier or enterprise-class array; fortunately the ability to create multiple volumes enables some disks to be dedicated to file and others to block-level access, simply by creating multiple volumes.  Of course the main restriction is only having 4 drives to play with, however the underlying architecture enables multiple configurations to be created and potentially in the future, should Promise choose to create larger devices, would offer the fundamentals for sensible data segregation.  In any event, for single CPU, single NIC devices like the NS4600, high performance isn’t likely to be the main purchasing consideration and mixing file and block data on the same RAID group shouldn’t pose a problem. Protocols For file data, the NS4600 provides Windows, Mac, FTP and Unix connectivity.  See screenshot 9 in the gallery at the end of this post.  Protocols can be turned on/off system-wide or specified for each file share.  For Windows, the server is able to connect to an Active Directory domain.  This may not be everyone’s first choice but in a small office, centralising security is an essential requirement – I always look for Active Directory support as it simplifies my home lab setup.  Mac settings are pretty simple; on or off, with the ability to issue a message to connecting systems.  FTP is similarly simply specified and for Unix/Linux connectivity, the NS4600 can be connected to a NIS domain.  It also seems possible to connect a share to both a NIS domain and AD at the same time.  Now, unfortunately I don’t run NIS so couldn’t test this; however specifying two security domains does throw up issues of consistency and questions around which security model “wins” in the event of a conflict.  There doesn’t appear to be any way to specify userid translation as there is in Data ONTAP for example

Derek Seaman posted in his blog yesterday about capacity thinning, zero reclamation technologies and included a test of 3PAR's Thin Persistence software. In his post he lists the steps he took to run the test, including the setup and final results.

Yesterday I posted a demo of our new, updated InForm Management Console 4.1 and so I thought today I'd re-post a two-part video showing our VMware vCenter plug-in that was made by 3PAR architect Maneesh Jain.  Make sure to pay attention to the Recovery Manager section of the demo that shows how easy it is to recover VMs, directories and files. Virtualized storage from 3PAR flexibly adapts to mid-range up through enterprise VMware environments because our single software architecture runs the same code on both platforms.  The skills used to manage one platform are preserved when switching to the other

London Cycle Locations Transport for London today unveiled their new bicycle hire scheme, hopefully making it easier and cheaper to get around London on short journeys.  You can find details of the scheme here .  The concept is pretty simple; at various locations around central London you can hire a bicycle, collecting and dropping it off at one of a number of dedicated stations, placed at strategic locations such as railway stations.  Have a look at the image; it shows where the stations are located across London.

This week I’ve been catching up with the folks at Hitachi in Japan, including a visit with the Storage Division.  Unfortunately that part of the week was under NDA and so can’t be discussed.  What I can say is what was discussed was extremely interesting and I look forward to what we get to see in the future.  However, back to things we can talk about.  On Thursday myself and the other attendees paid a visit to the annual Hitachi uValue conference, this year celebrating 100 years of Hitachi as a company. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this event, as the website (which is Japanese only) isn’t too helpful.  Google Translate does a reasonable job on most of the content but it doesn’t really give you a clue about the event itself and the benefits from attending.