Your data is exploding! You need more disk space now! You have a disk system that is over-priced because your disk vendor knows it’s more trouble to migrate your data than to pay the extra cost… you should be mad that someone prices their product based on how trapped you are with your data on their disk system. Sound familiar? Do they have you convinced you have to pay that much money for a reliable disk system? This is a marketing strategy and is designed to maximize their profits, not ease your pain.

I have your answer, arm yourself with disk virtualization system that can service enable most other disk systems on the market today and provide a wide range of data services that are needed in today’s exploding data environments. Actually this model makes the pain go away all together and makes data migrations a snap. The best part for the bean counters is it gives you all the leverage you need to cut costs on future disk purchases without sacrificing the reliability of your disk systems or the integrity of your data. So IT is happy and accounting is happy. How is this possible? Service enable existing production luns using a disk independent storage virtualization platform. Here is how it works:

Say there are luns from a current disk system presented directly to servers. Data needs to be migrated but you cannot afford down time during production and you cannot have a prolonged outage to migrate data. (To another tier of disk that’s faster or to another vendor’s disk) Here is where the storage virtualization platform comes in. To implement, the entire process would take about 15 minutes of downtime per server.  Just shut one server down at a time. Present the target luns from the server you shut down to a new storage gateway  that will now control the disk. In the new storage gateway a resource will be created (small in size) to house the new virtual headers for each lun that will be created in this process. The storage gateway  will become the server’s new disk target. In the new storage gateway the disk will be discovered and seen as a raw disk device. A process can then be performed that will import the existing disk, the existing header on the disk will be read and retained while the new header is written to new disk resource that was created and assigned for housing the virtual headers. Once this process is performed the existing disk is ready to be presented back to the server through the new storage gateway. A fibre channel or ISCSI client can then be created in the storage gateway and the server assigned as that client. As long as the luns are assigned with the same lun numbers the server will boot up and see no change whatsoever in the disk or the data on that disk. That lun now becomes a service enabled device and all services offered by the storage gateway can be performed against that device.

Some of the capabilities of the storage gateway should be as follows:

1. Mirroring to new storage (can be most any 3^rd party disk you wish to purchase)
2. Snapshots
3. DR replication
4. Create production ready devices from existing snapshots

And there’s many more…

The most interesting option is the mirroring. In some storage gateways you can choose to mirror a service enabled device to another disk system and since it is all controlled by the storage gateway you can mirror while the server is up and running production, swap the mirror without taking anything down and then break and delete the mirror that’s on the disk being replaced. Data was just migrated to a new disk subsystem without downtime (except for a single server reboot to service enable the disk) and no interruption in production.

Here are some advantages of this model:

1. Install two highly available storage gateway s that failover – High availability (HA)
2. Install a second lower tier disk subsystem to mirror data to and be used as production in case of a primary disk subsystem failure – the failover would be automatic and mirrors would swap back and synchronize automatically when the main disk subsystem comes back on-line. (That should be the functionality requirement for automated failover)
3. Disk becomes a commodity and you can save a lot of money that way…..far more than the cost of the storage gateway system. Great return on investment and a way to cut ongoing costs.
4. The storage gateway can also be used as a shared storage platform for virtualization further validating the initial investment and providing a substantial ROI.
5. Different tiers of disk can be presented to the storage gateway and data mirrored between the tiers without downtime or interruption of service.

To discuss, tell me I am completely insane, or otherwise give me a rough time feel free to call or email me:

Jeff Sabella, Sr. Storage Engineer
(440) 498-2300
Email:  jsabella@chicorporation.com

No related posts.

Over the past couple of years the terms Backup and DeDuplication have become synonomous.  The vast majority of organizations today, regardless of size, have either implemented DeDuplication within their environment, are considering implementing it, or at a minimum wondering if they would benefit from DeDuplication.  This is in large part due to the fact that the industry as a whole has been force feeding the need for DeDuplication in an effort to grab a piece of the pie.  Heck, the term DeDupe itself has all but become a household name.  Believe me; I’d be sitting on goldmine in the Caribbean enjoying an endless supply of margaritas if I had an algorithm that would allow me to “dedupe” my wife’s shoe collection.  But are the shoes really the problem?

The industry in general has conditioned everyone to believe that DeDuplication is THE ANSWER.  The fact is what DeDuplication really addresses is the result of the problem, not the problem itself.   Don’t get me wrong, DeDuplication is a very powerful technology and can offer some significant benefits to many organizations.  But DeDuplication was designed to target a very specific set of requirements.  For instance:

• Historically, it was always very difficult and for most companies impossible to replicate backup data offsite.  DeDuplication now enables a very efficient way to accomplish this by analyzing the data at a block level.  (Now keep in mind it’s not necessarily the “data” itself that made this task difficult in the past, it was the proprietary format that backup applications used that was the issue)
• Many companies now want to minimize the use of tape, or “redefine” the role of tape within their environment.  The role of tape has been changing from that of a routine backup role, to more of a dedicated long term archive role.  With the evolution of DeDuplication and disk based backups in general, companies can now utilize DeDuplication to store more near term copies of backup on disk, and then leverage tape exclusively to satisfy long term retention requirements.

If your objective is to achieve longer retention of backup data on disk, reduce dependence upon tape, and gain the ability to more efficiently move backup data offsite then DeDuplication alone can certainly enable this.  However, the truth is there is so much more we can be doing to address the root problems around backup that are causing the need to even consider a technology such as DeDuplication.

Intelligent active archiving is a good example.  When you look at the data in your production environment, it is very common to see 60% – 80% of that data is either not active data or is redundant data.  Archiving can intelligently and transparently remove “static” and duplicate data from the production environment while keeping this data fully accessible.  As a result, this archived data no longer has to be backed up on a regular basis.  This single function alone could eliminate 60% – 80% (if not more) of your daily, weekly, and monthly backup requirements.  Now ask yourself, if I reduced my backup requirements by 80% do I still need DeDuplication?

Recovery is another issue that archiving can help address.  Most would agree that the restore process using traditional backup applications is unacceptable for the competitive nature of business operations today.  Sure, we can now restore from disk, but your data is still held hostage by some proprietary format that requires some restore “process” just to be able to access your own data.  During this process you reaffirm your faith by praying to the backup gods for the tapes to be good, or that the data is not corrupted.  By leveraging an archive system as part of your backup strategy the data is immediately available in its native format to the end users and applications, completely eliminating the drudging restore process we have all come to regretfully accept as a part of life.

Part of the reason archiving is grossly underutilized by companies today is fear.  There is a perception (and to some degree, lack of knowledge) that implementing an archive solution is complex and very costly.  The fact that everyone has also become so accepting of the normal “backup” process has also made it very difficult for many to grasp the concept and benefits that archiving can bring to the table.  For those who are considering or evaluating an archive solution, there are 5 key components that should be carefully considered.  These are as follows:

True Active Archive

True active archive solutions provide the ability to maintain an online and/ or nearline active archive of data.  A true active archive solution can act as the primary device and enable direct access to the data from within the archive repository, making it immediately available, without the need to stage the data back to primary disk.  Many companies have self branded their solutions as an active archive but do not provide this capability.

Active Content Validation and Self Healing

This should be an absolute essential when evaluating any archive technology.  Content validation and self healing enables the solution to automatically and transparently perform file integrity audits and perform advanced features such as block level file repair on disk or tape, block level digital fingerprinting, as well as individual file deletion on disk or tape with media reclamation capabilities.

Metadata Content Aware

This is a key component for any company that wants to or needs to maintain a history of related content (I.e., medical industry with years of patient information, law firm with client data, manufacturing with years of drawings and product data).  This function provides the ability to analyze metadata and transparently consolidate related data and files into groups.  For example, a manufacturer may have year’s worth of design data for a given product.  This function can consolidate all of that data (based upon metadata characteristics) down to 2, 3, or X number of LTO tape cartridges, rather than having this data spread across hundreds of LTO-2, LTO-3, and LTO-4 tapes that the company has used over the years.

Application Support

Many archive solutions today are designed specifically for email only, or standard file data.  The vast majority of companies however are also running some form of OBDC applications such as SQL, Oracle, SAP, Sybase, etc, and those applications often times present the most challenges when it comes to performance, database maintenance, etc.  The ability for a solution to transparently analyze and archive data at the row and column level within an application is extremely powerful.  Take SQL for instance.  Any technical person who understands SQL will tell you that as the database grows the performance degrades substantially and the ongoing maintenance becomes a real burden.  By archiving the static row and column data out of the database, and into an “active archive”, you substantially improve the performance and manageability of the database while ensuring that all of the archive data is still 100% visible to the application and end users.

Storage Virtualization and Intelligent Tiering

A key consideration of any archive solution should be the ability to virtualize various types of storage and manage different tiers of storage, including disk and tape.  Many solutions today can do this.  However, taking this a step further the archive solution should be able to provide intelligent management of the storage tiers based upon conditions around performance, priority requests, as well as the type of physical storage being used such as MAID disk and others.  For example, a good archive solution should be able to use disk performance buffers to provide fast access to the most frequently accessed data, as well as perform pre-emptive priority processing for transaction based data.  Additionally, these solutions should be able to take advantage of the energy savings benefits that MAID disk can provide by managing the spin cycles of the disk to optimize performance.

There are many additional benefits that a good archive solution can provide to compliment an organization’s backup strategy, such as Replication, File-based DeDuplication, data availability “during” a recovery, 100% hardware “freedom”, compliance, as well as transparent migration support to protect against technology obsolescence.  More and more organizations of all shapes and sizes will begin to recognize the value around archiving, and the industry as a whole will have no choice but to adopt archiving as a necessity (rather than a luxury) to get control of the real issue, THE DATA.

To discuss any specific requirements, solutions, or if you simply need a shoulder to cry upon over last night’s backup feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2300 x225.

-Rob Oddo

Related posts:

1. Faster AS/400 (iSeries) Backup and Disaster Recovery
2. Extending the Value of Data DeDuplication

Somewhere in the server room near you lurks the sometimes ominous OS/400 system running on iSeries server hardware. Typically, company “lifeblood” accounting applications such as those from JDE (J.D. Edwards) are running on these systems.  Perhaps I am being a little biased here by my chosen profession but the words “lifeblood”, mission critical, and even accounting all put the brain on automatic with the following questions:

• If the system goes down what are the consequences?
• How will workflow be interrupted?
• What percentage of the company will be affected?
• Ultimately, what are the dollars associated with downtime?
• How do we address the above and ensure that the inevitable downtime has a minimal impact on the corporation and its customers?

Of course, as with any application or system we first turn to the corporate backup team.  In a modern implementation it is likely that the backup team is using BRMS (Backup Recovery and Media Services) to backup to physical tape.  Typically, the physical tape infrastructure consists of one or multiple IBM 3584 libraries with one or multiple IBM-Ultrium-TD tape drives (LTO-1, LTO-2, LTO-3, or LTO-4).  These technologies do provide some peace of mind but they are only a piece of the bigger picture.

1. The full picture for disaster recovery includes several items (examples below):
2. How long does the backup take to complete?
3. What type of backups are used and how often are they run?
4. When do tape(s) go off-site in relation to when the backup runs?
5. How fast is the disaster identified?
6. How fast can the tapes be retrieved to the DR location?
7. How long does it take to restore?
8. How long does it take to make the application accessible to the corporation?

Every step above directly or indirectly corresponds to one element in the disaster recovery equation and ultimately feed the two most important factors for validating (or invalidating) your current backup scheme RPO and RTO.

For our purposes we’ll define the recovery point objective (RPO) as the point in time to which data must (or can) be restored to successfully resume processing of business application data.  In other words, after the disaster, what is the age of the data available when business functions and applications are brought into operational state?

For our purposes we’ll define the recovery time objective (RTO) as the time within which business functions or applications must (or can) be restored including the time before a disaster is declared and the time it takes to perform tasks to restore business functions.  In other words, after the disaster, how long will it take to bring business functions and applications to an operational state?

If you’re looking for an RPO of 36 hours it could feasibly be addressed by a simple tape backup of one full backup per day.  Suppose that the backup takes 2 hours to complete and the tapes are taken off-site within 4 hours.  The ideal disaster (oxymoron?) would happen moments after the 2 hour backup and allow you to restore directly to the production system using the tapes (before they go offsite) or the local tape copy.  Worst case, the disaster is identified soon after the occurrence and for some reason your production system is not available for the restore. The disaster recovery process now kicks in and your backup team makes the appropriate phone calls to retrieve tapes to the off-site location. Having practiced the disaster recovery process many times (sarcasm) they bring the system online as it existed from 2 (ideal but dreaming) to 36 (desired) hours ago.  The time it takes from identifying the disaster to the application once again servicing the organization is the “RTA” (recovery time achieved) and hopefully that matches the business needs for RTO or better (RTA <= RTO).

Drumroll…

What if, soon after the backup completed (with a small delay for transfer) your backup data was already off-site at the same site where your DR iSeries hardware waits?

What if the backup replica is already sitting in a library pre-attached to the DR iSeries?

What if,  you could simply recover the iSeries LIC directly from the backup replica?  (“boot from SAN” or in this case “boot from tape” iSeries nomentclature is “IPL” “initial program load”)

To meet these “what if” scenarios you would need a virtual tape library (VTL) system that could emulate one or multiple IBM 3584 libraries with one or multiple IBM-Ultrium-TD tape drives (LTO-1, LTO-2, LTO-3, or LTO-4).  The VTL would need to provide a means to replicate virtual tapes to an off-site VTL.  Additionally, this VTL would need to allow the presentation of a tape set over fibre channel to the awaiting DR iSeries hardware and allow for LIC recovery directly from the replica backup.

Chi Corporation can make this VTL design a reality and allow you to drastically cut backup times, tape-handling logistics, human error, RPO and RTO for your company’s iSeries implementation.

Have more questions about OS/400 and iSeries Backup and Disaster Recovery? Feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2300 x232.

-Rob Kinney

Related posts:

1. Think “Outside the DeDuplication Box” for Backup

The modern SAN (Storage Area Network) manufacturer is contending in a brutally competitive world. Every manufacturer has a list of bells and whistles. This checkbox of feature haves and feature have-nots is the starting point for any comparison shoppers’ entry into the research, recommendation and purchase process. This, of course, is nothing new and is accompanied by the usual tactics which (unfortunately) include FUDD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, and Disinformation) as well as features that are otherwise useless and looking for a market.

Nearly all manufacturers to-date have adopted the new “standard” feature set for the modern SAN which include:

• Snapshot technology (and quiescence technology by extension)
• Mirroring and Replication technology
• Thin provisioning

With any feature war the business fiefdom’s develop quickly. For snapshots, the copy-on-write crowd will lob grenades at the redirect-on-write crowd and vice versa. For now however, I would like to concentrate on The Myth of Thin Provisioning.

Thin provisioning is the over-allocation of storage to the host. As an example, let’s say that you provision 1TB of thin-provisioned storage from your new, modern SAN and write only 200GB of data to it. With standard, fat or true provisioning 1TB of physical disk would be utilized.  With thin provisioning only the 200GB of disk space would be utilized initially (and typically a small amount of overhead). However, with operating systems such as MS Windows this benefit is quickly negated due to the nature of the NTFS file system.

This over-simplified diagram depicts the net used disk space on a thin provisioned LUN after the following operations:

1. 200GB file written
2. 100GB file written
3. Original 200GB file deleted
4. Additional 100GB file written

Logically, you might expect that last operation “4. Additional 100GB file written” to write to the first section of the disk which is now free space due to the third operation “3. Original 200GB file deleted”.  However, this is not the tendency for an NTFS file system.  Instead, it starts where it left off.

In the case described above, if thin provisioning was a perfect feature only 300GB of disk space would have been used. Instead, 400GB of disk space is used. For NTFS at least, it all comes down to the amount of “flux” or data write, delete, re-write that occurs as well as the size of these data sets written. For example, if you are storing your Ghost or Acronis images on a thin provisioned volume The Myth would be revealed quickly. Like any feature of any product these features cannot be utilized effectively without first understanding how and why the work with other variables in your environment:  NTFS versus ext3 for example!

The Danger Zone

The prevalence of MS Windows operating systems globally, and the NTFS file system by extension, ensure that without a solution, most IT shops using thin provisioning will eventually (and quickly in some cases) eliminate the value and enter a danger zone.  There are three things to consider here:

• A:  How much data “flux” has occurred (your hard usage)?
• B:  How much disk did you buy (your hard ceiling)?
• C:  How much disk did you provide to your systems through thin provisioning (your soft ceiling)?

The question:  If A hits B and your systems request additional net-new disk space to write to, what happens?  The answer:  Your IT staff has a very bad day.

Avoiding the Danger Zone

First, watch Top Gun on mute, sorry…had to add the reference.  Second, or rather “really-first”, deploy your SAN feature set intelligently. Use thin provisioning where it makes sense:

• The boot drive of the system (assuming boot from SAN and your page file is elsewhere)
• Generally static data sets – archive targets

Or, at the least, don’t use it where it does not make sense:

• Generally dynamic data sets – temporary storage areas, development build locations, etc.

Third, deploy an enterprise wide intelligent defragmentation tool that consolidates data to the first sectors of the disk. True, running defragmentation once takes a long time however nightly, it should be acceptably fast (something like Diskeeper).

Conclusion

Deploy your SAN feature set in the most appropriate way. When sizing for a future purchase don’t count on marketing numbers for thin-provisioned savings.  Instead, think about your actual environment and make an educated guess where thin-provisioning will be an asset.

To discuss, tell me I am completely insane, or otherwise give me a rough time feel free to call/email/skype:

Rob Kinney

(440) 498-2300 x232

Email:  rkinney@chicorporation.com

Skype:  rkinney

Related posts:

1. The New Overland SnapServer SAN S2000
2. Drobo – A Glimpse into the Future of Storage
3. What’s After RAID?

Some may disagree (or refuse to admit) that today we are dead in the midst of a significant paradigm shift as it relates to data storage.  What I am referring to primarily is “general purpose” data storage, the type of storage that 60% – 70% of the data at any given company could reside upon.

For years the storage industry was driven by the manufacturers.  As drive technologies improved, capacities increased, and companies began listening to the iSCSI story, storage manufacturers engaged in a bloody battle to develop and bring to market more intelligent, user friendly storage solutions.  We then had the SCSI and Fibre Channel drive guys touting that SATA is not reliable enough as primary storage, so more advanced levels of RAID were introduced to offer increased protection against disk failures.  Then along came the “feature set” wars over whose technology has better snapshots, more efficient thin provisioning, dynamic expansion, replication, etc.  This was coupled with the arguments around which protocol was “faster”, Fibre Channel or iSCSI.

Well, as the dust settled what did we learned?  We learned that there is multi-billion dollars worth of end users who are tired of paying premiums for overkill storage solutions and want lower cost, more simplistic storage.  And the evolution of iSCSI and ATA/SATA drive technology had offered that, somewhat.  After all, bundled in that “low cost, all inclusive” iSCSI SAN array you purchased back 2005 were inexpensive $2,000 500GB SATA disk drives.

Today, there are two significant events quietly developing within the industry:

1. Storage manufacturers are losing their control to the end user
2. As disk drives continue to get larger and larger, the concept and benefits around traditional raid as we know it today are diminishing.

End users, more than ever are demanding lower cost storage.  They are beginning to recognize that the big picture is more about the management of the data, rather than the storage itself.  Because of this, manufacturers have lost the control they once had and companies are paying less for storage.  This has resulted in storage becoming a commodity.

The other significant event that is occurring is that with drive capacities already as large as 2TB, and with 3TB and 4TB drives just around the corner, traditional RAID is presenting some great challenges for storage administrators.

Take a typical 14-drive RAID set for instance.  With 3TB drives you are looking at 42TB of storage.  Can you imagine how long it would take to rebuild that 42TB RAID set?  A week, maybe two?  And you haven’t even begun to restore data yet!

With the size of a disk drive today, the benefits of traditional RAID are going away.  This is why it’s an absolute must for companies to begin taking a closer look at the management of data, and depend less upon the reliability of the storage itself.

For example:  if you are running an active archive solution such as FileTek’s StorHouse, that enables functions such as transparent file integrity audits and block level file repair, you don’t have to rely as heavily upon RAID because StorHouse is protecting the data.  Furthermore, if a production disk should fail you have immediate access to a copy of the data directly from within the active archive; therefore you completely eliminate the need to rebuild the RAID and then perform a restore procedure just so you can access the data.  The data is available for immediate access while you rebuild the system.

DROBO

The industry buzz (or perhaps better defined as rage) over Data Robotics DroboElite exemplifies this change in the storage landscape, and offers a glimpse into where storage technologies are heading.

When I talked to one of my customers who was interested the Drobo I really knew nothing about the product.  He saw the system at a trade show the a few days later called me up wanting to purchase one.  So to be truthful, I was a bit of a skeptic.  It was actually somewhat odd because here I am talking to a customer and he is selling me on the box that I am about to sell him!

As I started talking with other customers I learned that there is this huge cult-like following of this Drobo appliance.  I started learning more about this system and took a look at it myself, and I immediately “got it”.  Here is a closer look…

First, let’s get the important stuff out of the way.  A fully loaded 16TB DroboElite has an MSRP of less than $6,300.  No, that is not a mistake!  For that price, there isn’t a company in the world that doesn’t have some sort of use case for a DroboElite, whether it’s departmental use, cheap D2D backup, public file storage, archive, vmware, video storage, and many others for sure.

The DroboElite is an 8-bay storage device that can be rackmount or desktop and has dual iSCSI interface ports.  This system supports up to 16 iSCSI clients and up to 255 volumes (Smart Volumes).  The Smart Volumes can pull storage from the common pool of disk rather than specific physical drives.  This eliminates the need for features such as Thin Provisioning (mentioned above) because you no longer need to manage capacity at the volume level.

The system is designed upon their BeyondRAID technology.  This is the “secret sauce”.  BeyondRAID eliminates many of the inherent shortcomings of traditional RAID that I mentioned earlier by taking standard RAID algorithms and applying them on top of a flexible storage virtualization architecture.  For instance, with BeyondRAID you can mix/match various drive capacities in the same system and the Drobo utilizes the full capacity.  With traditional RAID this is impossible.  All of the drives would be formatted to the smallest drive size in the group.

The DroboElite also has self-healing technology built in.  The Drobo will monitor and repair bad drive blocks transparently without any performance degradation.  Additionally, if a drive should fail the Drobo automatically redistributes the data across the available drives at that time to maintain the highest level of protection and performance.  NOTE: This was very cool.  I was watching a movie and pulled a drive out right in the middle of it and didn’t miss a beat.  In fact the only difference was the flashing LED’s that indicate the drive went bad and the data was being redistributed on the fly.

Another cool feature is the “on-the-fly” expansion.  You can insert a new drive, or even replace a drive with higher capacity, and the system automatically expands the available storage and redistributes the data across the available drives.  Not even a single mouse click!

BeyondRAID supports single or dual drive redundancy (equivalent to RAID 5 and RAID 6).  However, unlike traditional RAID where you need to reformat the array to change parity levels, the DroboElite allows you to switch between single and dual drive redundancy with the data in tact by the click of a button.

The bottom line is the DroboElite is a very cool product at an unbelievable price point.  I realize it may sound as though I’m blowing some smoke (or perhaps inhaling).  Don’t get me wrong.  Like any other storage device, the DroboElite has its target market and I’m certainly not suggesting that you go out and replace your tier one primary SAN with a bunch of DroboElite’s.  However, the concept around the Drobo technology is very appealing and the simplistic approach to the technology is what the future holds for general purpose storage solutions.   If you don’t believe me, call me and I would be happy to send you out a free demo system to evaluate for yourself.

For the record, I would bet the farm you have some data that is taking up disk space on your expensive tier one storage that can absolutely be “Drobo’d”!

Rob Oddo

(800) 828-0599 Ext 225

Email: roddo@chicorporation.com

Skype: rob.oddo

No related posts.

If you haven’t already, right now is the time to virtualize your storage environment. If you’re still unsure aboutthe value of storage virtualization, consider the following advantages:

1. Better Storage Utilization - With a virtual storage environment, you can get much better performance out of your disk sub systems by combining all those spindles that were previously dedicated to each server. Second, when you have all those resources combined, you can better allocate your capacity across your environment in addition to benefiting from technologies like dynamic capacity expansion and thin provisioning.
2. Easier to Manage Your Storage - When you combine all your storage resources into a virtualized SAN, it is much easier to manage those resources because you now have the benefit of managing your storage resources from one single pane of glass and the great advantage of having just one reporting engine to monitor.
3. Improve Your Backup and Recovery Process - Another big benefit to a virtualized SAN is backup and recovery. I have had several customers implement a SAN simply to help fix their backup problems. Most SANS today have Snap Shot technology which allows you to take an almost instantaneous backup of a particular storage resource. These Snap Shots can be scheduled, giving you the ability to recover to just about any particular point and time. Snap shots can also be mounted directly to your backup server, allowing these resources to be backed up directly from the SAN to your backup device. This maximizes the performance of your backup device.
4. Provide Higher Availability of Your Data - A virtualized SAN should be deployed in a completely redundant fashion, with multiple host connections, redundant controllers, redundant power supplies and ideally active – active controllers. With that in place, an application running on a particular server is no longer dependant on the availability of that host. If that server experiences a failure, its storage resources can be mounted to another server while that resource is repaired or replaced.
5. Data Replication for Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery - Another benefit of SAN technology that has benefited many organizations is replication. When you have all your storage resources in a single pool, it is much easier to replicate that data to another device at another location. Many organizations are even putting their backup device at the DR location, eliminating the need to have backups taken off site on a daily or weekly basis.
6. Storage Virtualization Works Hand-in-Hand with Server Virtualization - Storage virtualization also works hand-in-hand with server virtualization. Most organizations today are facing the challenges of server, power, and cooling restrictions in their data centers. With VMWare, Microsoft HyperV, or XenServer, today’s server administrators can take advantage of the processing power of the quad core (or better) processors and low-cost server memory while virtualizing their servers across a cluster of servers. Just like your storage, your server resources can now be completely redundant and load balanced, allowing your applications to run across the entire pool of resources and eliminating the dependency on any single resource.

In short, a virtualized storage and server environment eliminates the dependencies on any single hardware resource, allowing IT departments to deliver better availability to their applications and data.

Have more questions about storage virtualization? Feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2300 x223.

-John Thome

Related posts:

1. Real World Return on Investment for Storage Virtualization

The data storage market is about to enjoy one of the largest bursts in growth ever seen. Until today data growth and retention have been overlooked and ignored at several corporate levels. Many organizations lack any data retention policies. Documentation is needed to prove anything in court. It is also needed to protect companies that operate in risky industries. What about Governments, law firms and financial institutions how long should they keep data? Individuals and businesses alike are becoming “e-based” with everything they do including things as simple as sharing files and photographs. Data is getting larger and must be protected. Now is the time for SSD technology to be aggressive in the market if it truly is a ready for prime time player.

Solid state storage sounds like a great thing. Faster, quieter, fragmentation does not really affect performance, twice the data storage density, ability to endure more differences in environment like heat, altitude, vibration etc. but is it really a “ready for prime time player” and how long before it is? Will SSD make a large entry into the market playing another role other than main line storage? I believe there are still too many proprietary back end processes needed to make SSD in the enterprise a reality. Until the storage industry can adopt industry standards for Solid State data storage technology it will not live up to it’s potential.

There is a great deal of confusion in the SSD market and that will continue through 2010. As stated on storagesearch.com.

Advantages of SSDs outweigh any challenges that impact their practical implementation in enterprise storage systems. HDD manufacturers and enterprise storage system providers have already begun to offer SSD-based storage systems, but now they are beginning to deliver systems that use commodity flash, which is denser, and has higher error rates. To ensure that MLC flash-based enterprise SSDs deliver the same or better data integrity protection as HDDs, designers must take into account the differences in the way data is written, changed, and retrieved from these devices, and they must ensure that the SSD controller has appropriate data integrity protection techniques in place.

This is where the industry standards are needed in order to create confidence in the reliability and stability of SSD in the Enterprise. Until that happens and SSD research and development costs are recovered SSD will not live up to its potential in the storage industry. I believe widely adopted use of SSD in the enterprise is still 5-7 years away and the migration to solid state storage technology will take even longer. So for now I do not think there will be any substantial reduction in the use or sale of current HDD technology for the next 3-5 years in fact it will continue to increase rapidly.

Even when it does start to take hold it will be on an application by application basis and it will be the performance HDD segment that will be impacted not the mass storage segment. Conventional low cost storage may never be replaced by SSD technology based on value and cost. After all after a disk spins up there is practically no wear as long as it remains spinning.

Have more questions about SSDs or tiered storage? Feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2300 x243.

-Jeff Sabella, Systems Engineer

No related posts.

In the storage industry, we have come to accept the concept of RAID. We started with striped and mirrored drives and have evolved to striped drives with parity or dual parity. RAID6, the latest version of RAID to take over the thinking in the storage industry is not exactly a ground breaking storage revelation; we have merely added a second parity stripe to RAID5. While we now have the ability to survive a dual drive fault, we still face the rapidly growing issue of rebuild times.

One terabyte drives with rebuild times of anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days were a little frightening because as we increase the rebuild times, we increase our vulnerability to a second drive fault. The drives in a system are typically from the same production batch of drives, and have been spinning in the system for about the same amount of time. With the failure of another drive in the storage array, we have added stress to the remaining drives as they read their parity to rebuild the failed drive while still receiving production I/O. With RAID6, we were fairly confident that in a 24 hour window we could rebuild our array before 3 drives failed. Enter 2TB drives with 10 and 20TB drives on the horizon. What’s the rebuild time of 2TB and greater drives going to be? 48 hours? 56 hours? A week? 2 weeks? And how are we going to protect the data when it takes 80 hours to rebuild an array? RAID7? RAID56.3? I don’t think just adding parity stripes is really going to cut it. There’s a limit that we will hit, at some point we might as well go back to RAID1 or RAID10, and give up half of our capacity so we can have failure on half of our drives.

Where to now? Just adding parity is an option (not perfect, but an answer none the less). Triple Parity, a.k.a RAID TP (yeah, I snickered too), implements three independent parities by extending RAID6 algorithms to tolerate three-disk failures. While impressive engineering, I’m not convinced that it solves the issue. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes, a.k.a. RAIN, presents an interesting approach. With RAIN, we have multiple copies of our data distributed across servers and arrays with “extra” storage. These “nodes” just have to be on the network and are managed by software that tracks where data has been stored. This solution provides the additional benefit of increasing performance by spreading the load across the network. The underlying disk is protected with traditional RAID, but the multiple copies allow for multiple drive failures and even failure of complete nodes. RAIN can take advantage of otherwise unused storage in server and arrays, while this is amazing, what’s the real disk usage overhead. I don’t know, but I have to believe that it is higher than traditional RAID. Again, I’m impressed, but not convinced. Then there’s data dispersion. This claims half hour rebuild times with 1TB drives by randomly spreading data across multiple arrays in 1MB chunks. Data dispersion answers our rebuild issue, but we only have single drive failure protection and we have increased the number of drives in the array. Every additional disk included in an array increases the likelihood that an additional drive will fail during rebuild. With data dispersion, the number of disks increases our vulnerability to multiple disk failures during any given moment of time. So, while solving one problem, we have created another.

What’s the answer to data and drive protection as we move into larger and larger drives? I’m not sure the storage industry has figured that out yet. As the price per terabyte continues to drop, maybe one of these technologies will become more viable or, as I hope, a new technology will be developed that will bring rebuild times under control while lowering the traditional RAID storage space overhead.

Every additional disk included in an array increases the likelihood that one will fail, but by using error checking and/or mirroring, the array as a whole can be made more reliable by the ability to survive and recover from a failure.

Have more questions about RAID or disk storage? Feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2300 x242.

-Alex Fleming, Systems Engineer

Related posts:

1. Drobo – A Glimpse into the Future of Storage
2. Extending the Value of Data DeDuplication

Most IT departments understand the value of data deduplication but we’ll recap them here:

Less Disk - Data de-duplication reduces disk utilization by 90 percent or more.

Less Cost – With less disk, logically you spend less on disk but the savings extends to reduced power, space, and cooling requirements… and backup administrators spend less time managing backups

Faster backup, faster recovery, less media failures – For backups and virtualized environments, deduplication reaps huge, obvious benefits as backups and VMDK files are typically copies of data already. Since writing and reading from disk is faster than tape, backup windows shrink and recovery is much faster.

Faster replication – deduplication reduces data locally so your replication will also be faster since you are sending less data.

These are the common benefits of deduplication no matter which vendor you choose. Now consider how you can extend the benefits of deduplication and further reduce cost and complexity:

AutoMAID: For most backup to disk environments, the backup window is no more than 8 – 12 hours. Does it make sense to spin that disk at full power for 24 hours a day? AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) energy saving technology (which is included at no extra cost with the Nexsan DeDupe SG) transparently places disk drives into an idle state to vastly reduce power and cooling costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-effecdtive benefits of MAID 2.0 without the limitations of slow access times and special host software.

Global DeDuplication: Many IT environments have demanding backup schedules with narrow backup windows. The leading backup deduplication vendors address this by simply adding more deduplication appliances to handle the greater throughput. The problem with this approach is that these appliances are only aware of their own data  and are not aware of the data in the other appliances. If you add more appliances, each one is an independent silo of deduped data and the consequence is a dramatically reduced deduplication ratio. For instance, if your effective deduplication ratio on a single appliance is 20:1 and you add a second appliance, your potential total dedupe ratio could be 10:1.  Add a third appliance and your total deduplication ratio could be 6.6:1. Global DeDuplication is a feature included with the Nexsan DeDupe SG that addresses this challenge. Each node is aware of the data in the other which provides true global deduplication.

Have more questions about deduplication? Feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2300 x223.

-John Thome, Jr.

Related posts:

1. Think “Outside the DeDuplication Box” for Backup

Email has become a data storage warehouse for many organizations. The size of email stores are growing exponentially. With a number of different regulations trying to cover email and data retention it’s important for an organization to adopt an appropriate archiving strategy. When adopting an archiving strategy there is one main question (and the most important question) that needs answered: Do you go with Software as a Service (SAAS) or an on-premise solution. Below are the four questions I would consider:

1. IT Staff – Does your organization have a good in house IT staff to support in house archiving or do you have a trusted VAR like Chi Corporation that can be contracted to keep your in house archiving solution maintained and up to date? If so no problem.
2. Customer/Client data – Are there any privacy issues with sending your data off site – how comfortable is your organization keeping their Client/Customer data off site? What happens to your leverage? What’s the intangible worth of that leverage?
3. How much will it cost if the organization ever wants all their data back or wants to change archiving solutions?
4. Are there any other future considerations to think about?

Many CIOs are buying off on the SAAS (software as a service, cloud model). Sometimes I wonder if it’s just because it’s the current fad. Don’t fool yourself. Even though it is a more balance sheet friendly solution NOW (that’s only smoke in mirrors) consider the following: Once they have all your data you have lost your single most important leverage….your data. Don’t think they have not planned higher revenue after everyone ingests their data! I am not sure if I were a CIO I could sleep at night after putting my company in a position to lose the leverage associated with their most valuable asset, their client and customer data!

After you have turned over all your Customer and Client data it can now be used as leverage against you. What happens when you get 4-5 or more years’ worth of data ingested into their system? They know what costs are, investors and stock holders push for more revenue year after year. If the cost to forklift data from an off-site solution gets high enough (The solution provider controls that) they can charge up to that amount for their off-site storage and archiving rental. The cost could now theoretically exceed that of implementing an in-house solution and it would cost far more to change the model! After all it’s a 3 year contract. What happens after that?

I have found that costs eventually level out and are the same for in house or hosted solutions over the long haul but what you lose is CONTROL! Control over your own Customer and Client data! Sure it’s still yours but how much will it cost to get it back and how secure is it…really? Take a look at what happened to Carbonite.

Chi Corporation can assist in determining which solution is right for you and estimating the costs of implementing an on premise archiving solution.

The bottom line is, if you implement an in-house solution one can always move to an off-site model very easily…..how easily can one switch from a hosted solution to an in-house solution with Petabytes of data? Very expensively! So be sure before you go off-site!

The cost of low end archival storage has been coming down and is now at the lowest cost per Tb ever seen. The costs to implement an on premise archival solutions are lower today than ever before! So if you have the IT staff or trusted VAR and an IT budget why not bring it in house. Creative financing can make any in-house implementation look like OPEX rather than CAPEX on the balance sheet. Every argument for moving to a SAAS archiving model can also exist within that SAAS model. They also have to maintain and upgrade their systems as well. Not to mention ingestion rates will be based on your internet connection, better have a big one.

Have more questions about email archiving? Feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2300 x243.

-Jeff Sabella, Systems Engineer

Related posts:

1. The Advantages of Service Enabled Disk
2. Think “Outside the DeDuplication Box” for Backup