Storage Nation

Lots of activity at VMworld this week, plus the predictable flurry of vendor announcements.

So – today RSA, the security division of EMC announced a very cool capability – a simple VMware security dashboard that integrates with vCenter, ESX/ESXi, with vCenter, RSA Data Loss Prevention suite, VMware’s vShield family (more on that soon), VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager, EMC Ionix portfolsio, and HyTrust appliancevShield family of products (along with other partners).  It brings everything up to a high level dashboard which continuously assess state – and helps remediate (aka “fix”) problems.   It’s a solution for Cloud Security and Compliance. We also showed the next step of the evolution of “Project Roswell” – an ongoing effort between VMware/RSA/Intel to bring an unbelievable set of compliance capabilities to public clouds, enforced in a hardware root of trust. There will also be an RSA Securebook on Cloud Security published in October that covers these topics for people who are in the security business… Ok a bit of background… So – I asked in the open “VirtualGeek 2010 Survey” (full results here ) 2 basic questions.   “Is security an issue for you”.  Of the 121 respondents to that question – it turns out it is (to varying degress) to 71% of the people. Then I asked people to be a bit more specific about degree of “security pain”.

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

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

Those of you who subscribe to Gartner reports may have seen their recent report: “ Choosing Between Monolithic Versus Modular Storage: Robustness, Scalability and Price Are the Tiebreakers ” While I agree with some of their definitions of monolithic and modular storage, it is no longer a question of one versus the other. With the Hitachi USP V/VM we combine the best of both worlds, by providing a “monolithic” or enterprise tier 1 front-end with lower cost modular back-end storage. I agree with their description of monolithic storage as having many controllers that share direct access to a large, high performance, global cache, supporting a large number of host connections, including mainframes, and providing redundancy to ensure high availability and reliability. I also agree with their definition of modular storage, which contains two variants, a dual controller architecture with separate cache memory and a scale out architecture that can have many nodes with separate caches in each node.

I have been heads down building out a couple of websites.  In addition to adding a lot of new content to C4Project.org (fresh interviews with Fujifilm, CA, and Xiotech), I am re-doing IT-Sense.org and will shortly tackle my main homepage and the Data Management Institute site.  The objective is to freshen content and update code that has proven hacker-porous.  Stand

This is the second post in my series on data center transformation. In my first post , I offered up several warning signs that indicate why it is time to take action and transform your data center to be agile, sustainable, and business-oriented.

Hamlet was depressed when he posed the question, “to be to not to be”. There was no questions in Barry Burk’s mind when StorageNerve asked Michael Hay “ Where is the Hitachi BINfile” and Michael answered “Hitachi doesn’t have the concept of a ‘BINfile’.” Barry’s immediate response was that “EVERY intelligent storage array has the equivalent of a Binfile”. Barry also makes the correction that the correct name is .BIN file.

There is an increasing interest in storage virtualization as seen an the increasing number of articles and blog posts on storage virtualization. In the last few days Rick Vanover posted a very balanced overview of storage virtualization for Datamation where he reviewed some of the many options.   Carol Sliwa posted a Storage Pro Guide to block-based storage virtualization for SearchStorage which cited some use cases. One of the use cases was the City of Coquitlan (Canada) who is a 2010 Computerworld Honors Laureate award winners in IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program and a customer of Hitachi.