There was much to see from HP at Tech Forum in Las Vegas, but we wanted to highlight some of the smaller companies exhibiting there. Two in particular caught our attention: Silentium, with their noise-reducing server racks, and QLogic’s entry-level Fibre Channel switches.

Silentium AcoustiRACK

Israel-based Silentium brought along a server rack for small offices that was music to our ears. It incorporates a sound (if you pardon the pun) bottom-to-top and front-to-back airflow system, conventional sound-deadening baffles, and active noise cancellation to create a quiet sealed server rack. While this might not appeal to everyone, those of use who have to sit next to rack-mount servers, network gear, and storage will certainly appreciate it.

The active noise cancellation was very effective. It uses a microphone, CPU board, and speaker to inject out-of-phase sound waves to cancel out the sound of fans, servers, and anything else you might put in the rack. As you can hear in the video below, the effect was audible even on a noisy trade show floor.

QLogic

As we experiment with various SAN configurations, it becomes obvious that the industry needs a supplier of solid, inexpensive Fibre Channel switches that can grow as needs changed. That’s why the 12-port QLogic-sourced HP SN6000 switch was a nice find.

Clearly based on the QLogic 5600 product, it has a low price of entry but is easily expandable with a license unlocking four more ports, and also includes four dedicated 10 Gb FC ports for stacking multiple switches. It may not be as sexy as a Brocade 8000 or Cisco Nexus 5000, but small and cheap is welcome in the big-money world of Fibre Channel SANs.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | More From HP Tech Forum: Silentium and QLogic
Read more posts categorized as All, Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage

Do you know me?

Visitors to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) booth at Storage Networking World in Orlando were greeted by a strange symbol (pictured above). It was included in the FCIA  Fibre Channel roadmap presentation as well. The group even made identifying the symbol a requirement to enter their door prize drawing.

But what is the symbol exactly? I was amused to get some puzzled looks (and no correct answers) when I polled a number of industry insiders. One even asked about the symbol when I included it in a blog post about Microsoft’s lack of FCoE support.

I guess everything needs a symbol nowadays, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is no exception. Yes, this is the FCIA’s new FCoE symbol.

Fibre Channel plus Ethernet equals FCoE

Breaking it down, we might recognize the unofficial but widespread symbol of Ethernet (glance at the back of your PC or the box your switch or router came in) in the background with a double-ended single-bladed arrow superimposed. That arrow is apparently the new symbol for non-Ethernet Fibre Channel (FC).

Aren’t you glad you asked?

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | FCoE Symbolism
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Bought Foundry – rushed it?

Brocade paid $3.4 billion for Foundry and rushed the acquisition using a lot of cash to close the deal quickly. HP just completed the 3Com purchase for $2.7 billion. To my mind, the 3Com assets are a lot more valuable since they also have firewalls, IDS and a wide range of networking products. Foundry only has Core Ethernet switching products and no access ethernet, no service provider, no wireless.

Of course, Brocade only makes high end FibreChannel switches which are high performance, high complexity and highly proprietary so Foundry makes a nice fit to nice little corner of the market for a tidy profit. But when Cisco announced FCoE and then threw a billion dollars behind it, Brocade’s core products around FibreChannel became obsolete. Oh, I know the FibreChannel will limp along for a few more years, but there is no five year plan for growth anymore. That’s over. Ethernet is the future.

And the Data Centre has become a war zone between HP, IBM, Cisco and now HDS. Where does Brocade fit in?

Foundry Command Line is a mess

I have also worked on the Foundry Ethernet equipment and find it a confusing mess of interface, syntax and technology differences. It needs a lot of support to keep that equipment running. As a result, it’s hard to like and use the Foundry / Brocade ethernet story. I recently worked on a site that has ServerIron, FastIron and BigIron switches. Each one has a slight, but significant difference in CLI that makes them frustrating to work with (and appreciate how Cisco’s IOS interface is reasonably consistent). I had to constantly refer to the manuals to validate and cross reference every command. That’s a but annoying.

The EtherealMind View

Mistake

So I reckon Brocade made a big mistake buying Foundry at all, and certainly overpaid for what they did get. Brocade’s share price has dropped a long way, and there has been VERY little information about what they are doing with their Ethernet products. They don’t share anything about future plans or get involved with customers from what I can see.

Where’s the plan?

I’m not a Brocade customer, and unlikely to ever consider them until I know more about what they are doing. And that doesn’t mean meeting with a sales team or marketing team. I should be able to clearly perceive the future from their public presence. I don’t want closed briefings or NDA roadmaps. Just show me a coherent plan, on your website, and then I can consider you as a serious supplier.

Or is it just me? Can you see a future for Brocade beyond five years?

© Etherealmind for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Brocade – What’s Their Direction?
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How fast can iSCSI get?

“Maximizing Hyper-V iSCSI Performance with Microsoft and Intel” might sound like another “blah blah” marketing piece, but a little birdy tells me that this webcast will drop a bombshell about iSCSI performance.

Lots of storage and networking folks don’t give iSCSI and Microsoft the credit they deserve. “iSCSI is cheap and easy,” they say, “but real performance requires Fibre Channel.” Those of us who have an open mind about such things know that this is simply not the case. The fastest SAN I ever saw was based on iSCSI, and Microsoft demonstrated wire-speed iSCSI over 10 Gb Ethernet in March. I never saw a Fibre Channel SAN (even an 8 Gb/s one) push over a gigabyte per second over a single link!

Still, ask the average sysadmin and they will tell you that iSCSI isn’t for high performance applications. That’s why folks should tune in to this webcast, as Microsoft and Intel knock down another iSCSI performance myth. Note that even though Hyper-V is called out in the title and description, this discussion is really about Windows Server 2008 R2 and applies equally regardless of whether or not you use Microsoft’s hypervisor.

Watch this space for a summary of the news immediately following the announcement.

• What: Maximizing Hyper-V iSCSI Performance with Microsoft and Intel webcast
• When: Thursday, January 14, 2010 8:00 AM Pacific Time
• Where: MSEvents.Microsoft.com
• Who: Anyone interested in high-performance storage and server I/O

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. |
Microsoft and Intel Pushing iSCSI Performance Limits


This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Microsoft and Intel Pushing iSCSI Performance Limits
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage

EMC caused a major stir on April 14 as they announced the next-generation Symmetrix enterprise storage array, the V-Max. Since that time, many of the features have been discussed and dissected on various blogs at the same time as EMC moves forward with sales of the new system. But one question remains: When can end-users actually purchase and use the V-Max system as described? And in particular, When does the V-Max get the most desirable and hyped Fully-Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) and scale-out features?

So let’s say a customer decided to purchase a new V-Max system from EMC today. What would they get?

• They would get a freshly-designed cabinet, controllers, and firmware with more cache RAM, faster CPUs, larger disk drives, and support for all of their existing Symmetrix DMX features. Beta customers actually had both components late last year, and customer orders are proceeding. So it is safe to say that the V-Max clustered array itself is currently shipping. Note that the maximum configuration is 8 engines, each with a quad-core CPU, 128 GB of cache RAM, and 16 each of host and drive channels.
• Like the DMX before it, the V-Max supports a variety of disk drive types, from flash to Fibre Channel to Serial ATA. The larger so-called enterprise flash drives (EFDs) also appear to be shipping this quarter.
• Automatic provisioning with templates and management is available now as well.
• Virtual provisioning (thin provisioning and non-disruptive relocation) are enabled and shipping, but they’re mutually exclusive (see more below).
• PowerPath/VE and vSphere Storage plug-ins are shipping, even though VMware vSphere 4 was just released.

So our V-Max customer would be able to buy and deploy a solid, scalable, next-generation enterprise storage array that does everything they expect from existing systems and a little more. This is more than many new or re-engineered storage products can boast.

But our customer does not get everything that has been talked about regarding the V-Max architecture. What don’t they get?

• Future protocols like 10 GbE iSCSI and FCoE and 8 Gb Fibre Channel are not shipping yet. No surprise there.
• One of the most important components of V-Max is its fully-automated storage tiering, called FAST by EMC, which will not be fully realized for years. This technology is a major departure for the Symmetrix, which has long had the capability to manually move volumes but lacked the sub-LUN granularity needed to truly take advantage of the newest storage technologies like flash SSD. Although EMC plans to release “FAST v1″ during the second half of this year, this functionality merely automates the existing LUN relocation capability of all current Symmetrix arrays (for non-thin-provisioned LUNs) and is nowhere near the promise of FAST. Full FAST will not ship until 2010, and we suspect it might be well into that year.
• True Virtual Matrix mode, where multiple V-Max array “clusters” link together virtually to form a system larger than 8 engines. EMC has also talked about extending this mode over distances, creating a geographically dispersed array. None of this is coming any time soon.

So the answer to the core question of whether the EMC Symmetrix V-Max is shipping is yes. Customers can go out and buy one. But they will not get all of the functionality discussed and presented by EMC and its representatives last month.

Not So FAST

Fully-Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) is one of the most significant capabilities of the V-Max platform. As described, FAST will not be available for a year or more. This is not a secret or a scoop – EMC is the first to admit that FAST was pre-announced and is “Coming Next”!

V-Max's FAST technology "automates movement and placement of data based on changing needs" (illustration courtesy of EMC)

What is FAST? It is an automated tiered storage technology that can place data on different tiers of storage based on requirements. High-performance data on flash, bulk data on SATA, and so forth. EMC V-Max marketing materials, and the launch content, spent much time focusing on this technology, telling us that it automatically adjusts tiering of data, not just volumes, and reacts as needs change, rather than statically placing data. We’ve reported some confusion about just how FAST accomplishes this in the past, but we all agree that this would be an awfully nice way for an array to manage data.

At the core of FAST is EMC’s recently-introduced virtual provisioning technology. Why is FAST so much better than VP, and other competing automated storage tiering technologies? According to EMC blogger, Barry Burke, FAST has five key benefits:

1. Change RAID protection types as LUNs and volumes are relocated
2. Relocate a large number of LUNs and volumes concurrently
3. LUN and volume relocation is very quick
4. LUN and volume relocation has low performance impact on the array, and on the applications using the data being moved
5. LUN and volume relocation is done without disrupting replication

Let’s give EMC some credit for its FAST vision, as well as the pieces that have already been shipped. But we’re still quite a way off from seeing this FAST vision realized in production technology:

1. Current DMX and V-Max hardware allows customers to use multiple drive types, including flash SSD EFD, for over a year. Many other vendors are just now getting around to shipping flash disks. No one would claim that this is “FAST”.
2. Current DMX and V-Max also allows thin provisioning (a component of EMC’s Virtual Provisioning). This isn’t FAST either.
3. Current V-Max software allows customers to non-disruptively relocate volumes between disk and RAID types (another component of Virtual Provisioning). This is very nice to have. But this is not fully automated storage tiering. It’s just easier storage tiering. And it doesn’t apply to thinly-provisioned volumes.
4. FAST V1, which EMC plans to ship in the second half of 2009, will automate the selection and migration of volumes to different disk and RAID types. Although this is technically fully automated storage tiering, it does not quite live up to the promise of FAST as described by EMC at the V-Max launch. And it still won’t support thin (Virtual Provisioned) volumes!
5. Finally, EMC claims that they will fully realize the FAST vision with FAST V2, which will ship in 2010. This would enable granular (sub-volume) tiered storage for thinly-provisioned volumes.

Why does it matter that EMC won’t ship FAST V2 until next year? Simply put, anything less than FAST V2 will still not effectively utilize the expensive EFD capacity paid for by EMC customers. Even FAST V1 will take up expensive high-performance flash capacity with the entire contents of a LUN, including empty space! Customers wishing to conserve EFD capacity will use virtual provisioning to only store “used” data on flash. But these cannot be easily relocated if demand does not meet expectations, and not all of that used data requires high-speed flash storage. EMC also lacks thick-to-thin (or thin-to-thick) technology, though we suspect they’re working on that.

So customers have a choice: They can either use their EFDs more efficiently with thin volumes, or move data between EFDs and disks as needs change. They cannot have both.

An open question is how much EMC will charge for FAST V1 and V2. Assuming they are like Apple with the iPod Touch, and their history affirms this, EMC will charge for FAST as each major new capability is delivered. EMC has always charged for major new features. This is due to accounting rules which prohibit a company from charging customers ahead of releasing major features. The only way around this would be for EMC to recognize V-Max revenue as recurring over time, as in the case of the iPhone at Apple. Fat chance of that! Note that EMC is also talking about bringing FAST to CLARiiON and Celerra, but those timetables are not disclosed.

How Big Is Your Virtual Matrix?

Many have wondered about EMC’s choice of a name for this new storage system, some speculating that since the “V” stands for “virtual”, the V-Max was designed for server virtualization environments. EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s comments at the V-Max launch seemed to indicate this as well.

However, while it certainly is targeted at VMware vSphere and similar systems, the “V-Max” name actually has a very specific, and very different, meaning. “V-Max” is actually a reference to EMC’s new “Virtual Matrix” architecture, which allows V-Max engines to combine into a scale-out array with a virtual matrix of interconnects. Like FAST, the Virtual Matrix Architecture is the real vision of revolutionary storage from EMC. And like FAST, this vision is nowhere near being realized.

V-Max is so far being sold as a stand alone machine, not a scale-out cluster. At current GA, EMC is only offering 8 engines that are part of the same system cabinet (physically connected through MIBE and SIB), but there is nothing available that would connect 2 of these system cabinets, where instead of 8 engines you are now running 16 or 32 engines, forming a real V-Max. 

The V-Max name refers to the Virtual Matrix architecture of the array cluster (illustration courtesy of EMC)

EMC’s “vision” clearly extends well beyond 8 engines and a single V-Max.  EMC’s design allows for a federated set of V-Max machines that can all be managed as a single entity, and the company alluded to this in their product introduction.  They suggested that these separate V-Max machines wouldn’t even have to be in the same place, physically.  

Although the vision articulated at the product’s introduction talked about massive scaling in multiple locations, EMC’s maximum current configuration for the V-Max is 8 engines with up to 128 Xeon CPU cores, 1 TB of RAM, and 128 each front-end and back-end storage interfaces linked to 2,400 disk drives. This is no tiny system, to be sure, easily doubling the current DMX-4 array’s scalability as well as besting the competition. In fact, EMC can rightly claim that a V-Max can be configured today to be the largest integrated enterprise storage array available.

But 8 engines linked by local RapidIO connections in a single data center isn’t a revolution. The revolution happens when EMC realizes its vision of linking “dozens” of engines, thousands of ports, and tens of thousands of drives into a geographically dispersed system. Former EMC executive, Dave Donatelli, now controversially linked to HP, claimed that the V-Max can support up to 256 engines in a product launch video that has now been removed. IDC analyst, Benjamin Woo, talked about EMC’s ability to support a “single namespace” across geographies during his launch coverage. EMC’s Chuck Hollis says that “the overall architecture can eventually grow into literally thousands of ports, thousands of processing cores, tens of thousands of disks, and many terabytes of cache memory — all operating as a single, tightly-coupled array.” EMC’s Barry Burke also suggests that future revisions to the Virtual Matrix architecture could scale well beyond anything hinted here.

Again, in that same post, EMC’s Hollis tells us that the architecture delivers four key benefits in terms of scalability (bulleted for your pleasure):

1. “The difference between the two?  The V-Max can grow and grow from that modest starting point — still capturing the economics of mid-tier arrays and linear cost scaling.
2. Second, the V-Max array isn’t limited to a single cabinet with short wires.  Think in terms of multiple cabinets, separated by many meters or — in the future — longer distances using optical connections – all behaving as a single, giant array.
3. Third, the scaling is utterly linear and modular.  As more building blocks are added, the array gets bigger and bigger, and there’s no need to replace the frame, buy a bigger cabinet, etc. — nothing gets thrown away.
4. Fourth, there’s no assumption that all the building blocks are exactly the same.  Some may be big, some may be small, some may be old, some may be new.”

So a reader would look at this and think to himself, “this new V-Max starts as cheap as a competing midrange array and can scale out with different building blocks to span my entire data center, or even my entire enterprise.” This is a great promise, and awfully near to the holy grail of enterprise storage.

The problem is that none of this is possible today.

1. The V-Max starts at “about $250,000″ for a single engine. This is much, much more expensive than competing midrange arrays. It has to be, since a single V-Max engine has a lot more horsepower and componentry than any midrange array!
2. All V-Max connectivity is currently done with RapidIO connections in “a single cabinet with short wires.” Perhaps you could define “cabinet” differently and claim that the V-Max uses multiples, but no one (especially an EMCer who wants to keep his job) would suggest that the V-Max engines can be “separated by many meters or … longer distances.” When Chuck says this is “in the future” he means it!
3. V-Max scales to 8 engines, and initial reports are that scaling is indeed fairly linear. So this is a fair statement. But what if EMC replaces RapidIO with InfiniBand or datacenter Ethernet? Would there really be no need to “throw away” components?
4. There are no “big”, “small”, or “old” V-Max building blocks. They’re all new, and they’re all identical, and you can have up to eight of them. EMC says you will be able to mix and match once new building blocks come out, and we expect them to live up to this promise.

So even today’s V-Max system does use the Virtual Matrix architecture. It’s got a virtualized matrix interconnecting the engines, after all. But it’s nowhere near the scale-out promise of the Virtual Matrix concept. That’s quite a ways off still.

Conclusion: V-Max Is Not Overtaking The Future Yet

It is important to note that EMC sales literature does not claim capability beyond what’s currently on the truck. The V-Max data sheet, for example, makes no mention of FAST or scalability beyond 8 engines. And EMC’s Dave Graham is characteristically straightforward listing what’s in the box. In fact, EMC’s official web site and literature probably errs on the too-cautious side: A casual visitor might well ask himself, “where’s the beef?”

Why might an average storage buyer think there is more “beef” to be had? One only needs to watch EMC’s V-Max launch, and the surrounding coverage. Indeed, EMC’s own theme for the launch was “Overtake the Future!” EMC’s customers expected a revolution, and a revolution is what the company promised.  This isn’t anything new, unexpected, or even out of place. Companies often tout the theoretical future capabilities of their new products but don’t deliver on those promises for some time. Many have accused Microsoft of using this tactic to combat Windows competitors, for example. And let’s not forget the industry’s fascination with legendary vaporware products!

But the company’s boosters seem to want to have their cake and eat it, too. They’ve poured on the verbiage describing FAST, and used this future capability to declare victory in the battle against the likes of HDS, 3PAR, and Compellent. EMC’s Hollis tells us that “there’s nothing remotely like V-Max in the marketplace today”, and other EMC folks have made similar claims. As Wikibon points out, “EMC’s pre-announcement of Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) is an admission that without FAST the answer is essentially no, EMC can’t compete on cost.” In other words, EMC was forced to prematurely unveil their FAST vision to keep their customer base from jumping ship to competitors already offering similar functionality. The same is true of the scale-out capability of the Virtual Matrix architecture.

For now, EMC has merely introduced a solid next-generation enterprise storage array. V-Max without FAST and scale-out is a nice-to-have refresh of the Symmetrix DMX-4. EMC should be especially respected for leaving all of the core Engenuity features like TimeFinder and SRDF intact, since this must have been no small feat. V-Max with FAST V1 is a more attractive proposition, but does not go that far beyond the capabilities of Symmetrix Optimizer. The same can be said of the 8-engine V-Max limit – it’s larger, but nothing to get too excited about.

V-Max with full-on FAST V2 and multi-site heterogeneous scale-out is the real revolution in EMC storage. If everything plays out, you could have several V-Max systems in the same data center, or perhaps even different data centers, all being managed as a single entity.  Then layer FAST on top of that (at the block level), and you have something unlike pretty much anything else on the market today. The question is, when can they achieve this, and will some of the other vendors catch up in the meantime?

This is what observers, analysts, and customers were looking for. And this is what they might think they saw. But in reality, we’ll all just have to wait another year or two and see what develops.

© Gestalt for Gestalt IT, 2009. | EMC Symmetrix V-Max: When Does It Get FAST and Virtual?
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I was going back through a list of blog posts and articles that I wanted to read and think on, and I came across a link to Dave Graham’s article titled Moving a Fabric forward: FCoE Adoption and other Questions. His blog entry was partially in response to my FCoE discussion post. His post got me thinking again.

It seems like anytime someone talks about FCoE, they end up also talking about unified fabric. After having read a number of different articles and posts regarding FCoE, I can see where FCoE would be attractive to shops with significant FCP installations. In my mind, though, this doesn’t necessarily mean unified fabric. Given the political differences in organizations—think the “storage team” and the “networking team”—how likely is it that an organization may adopt FCoE, but not unified fabric? Or how likely is it that an organization may adopt FCoE, intending it to be a transitional technology leading to unified fabric, but never actually make it all the way?

So here’s my question: is unified fabric an inevitability?

And here’s a related question: Most people cite VoIP as proof that the unified fabric is inevitable. More so than anything else, I believe VoIP’s success was more a reflection of the rising importance of TCP/IP networking. If so, does that give iSCSI an edge over FCoE? Is iSCSI the “VoIP of the storage world”?

© Scott for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Is Unified Fabric an Inevitability?
Read more posts categorized as All, Storage

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is coming to Windows environments!

Although there is no word on a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) initiator in the vein of their wildly successful iSCSI offering, Microsoft announced today that they will be creating a logo program with test requirements for the new protocol. This certification program will likely follow the company’s similar work with iSCSI and Fibre Channel adapters and a host of other products to improve functionality and interoperability in the Windows market.

This announcement shows that Microsoft recognizes the potential of FCoE as a major force in future data centers as well as the possibility of difficulty once these products are released. Reading between the lines of the release leads one to a few other conclusions:

• The Windows FCoE logo is still a year off, suggesting either that Microsoft has some work ahead of them to develop logo requirements or that FCoE implementation isn’t likely to come before then, or both
• There is no mention of a native FCoE initiator, suggesting that no such product is imminent despite calls for such a move
• Microsoft is drawing a sharp line between existing Fibre Channel products and drivers and new FCoE offerings, firmly separating the two markets and requiring that no FCoE products bear a FC logo and vice versa

The full release is in Microsoft’s Windows Logo newsletter for March 10, 2009, which has been mailed but has not yet appeared on the company’s web site.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Microsoft Recognizes FCoE With Logo Program
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© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Is DMX The Worst Array for Wastage?
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The announcements are starting to pile up; nothing dramatic yet tho’ but we are probably at the start of the year when most Storage vendors refresh their main product lines and it’s going to be interesting to see the variety of approaches which are taken.

Am I expecting dramatic things from the big boys; almost certainly! Now, it is too soon for the economic downturn to have dramatically impacted what are often very long R&D cycles; so much of what we will see will have been in the labs for a long time. The downturn may have impacted some final feature sets with things like efficiency rising up the stack but these features were well up the list anyway.

When we talk about efficiency what do we mean? We can focus on the amount of storage we can actually use in our array, can we use 50% of that slow SATA disk before performance tails off and it becomes unuseable for anything else? Cheap/=efficient. We could focus on operational efficiency, how many heads does it take to manage your disk? How quickly can we service the business? What level of complexity do we expose to the business, what level of complexity is exposed to the storage administrators.

Actually, I’m expecting the big product announcements to focus on all these things. How do I make SSDs and SATA work efficiently and effectively? Note, SSDs and SATA; not FC! FC as disk technology will head to the toilet and look concerned about it’s prospects of being flushed! How do I automate storage provisioning and tiering? The gravy train for basic storage admin will come off the rails, there will be some delays in this due to the wrong type of rain/snow/leaves but automation will become prevalent.

This with a whole raft of server virtualisation announcements will change the IT Infrastructure environment; I already see server/network admins looking greedily at the storage domain, wanting to take charge of this key part of the infrastructure. I don’t see the currently harassed storage admins looking greedily the other way, I see a lot of wagons starting to go round in circles.

If you work in storage and want to continue to work in storage, it’s time for you to start getting ready for a different world and start to prepare yourselves to move away from Hypers, Metas. LSSs, RDF, PPRC etc, etc; time to get ready to manage more end-to-end. Sure, you’ll still be storage specialists but you’ll need to know a lot more, it’ll be fun!

An old manager of mine used to say ‘A Career isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon’; he was wrong, ‘A Career isn’t a sprint, it’s a series of them’. Had another one who used to say ‘Get focused or get f**ked’; he was more right but you’ve got to worry about the Bokeh, not just the focus!

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Ready?
Read more posts categorized as All, Storage

The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990’s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets trying to get my storage layout just right, balancing the workload across every available disk.

 

This is how we used to avoid hotspots in 1998: Carefully planning every detail of the storage layout.

Each disk drive consists of a spindle of spinning platters with read/write heads move back and forth. Each time you access a piece of data that’s not in cache, the drive moves its arm over the platter to access the correct piece of data. Since each drive can only access one piece of data at once, and since caches can only hold so much data, tuning a system to minimize the number of requests per drive is essential.

Manual storage array layout was an art, but we never fooled ourselves into thinking our designs were optimal. There were just too many intractable problems, so we had to compromise at every turn:

• We usually had no performance data to base our layout decisions on, so we had to rely on guesses and rules of thumb
• Workloads tend to change over time and manual layouts are painful to modify
• The smallest unit of allocation was an entire LUN or drive, so even the best disk layout mixed hot and rarely-accessed data everywhere
• Much of the allocated space was unused, so we used expensive disks to store nothing

One might think that, 10 years later, advances in technology would have solved these basic issues. But for many people using many of the so-called modern mainstream enterprise storage systems, these problems remain.

Like all good systems administrators, I’m a natural control freak. I am uncomfortable letting the system manage itself, having been burned too many times by computers (well, software really) making stupid decisions. It’s analogous to the backlash against anti-lock brakes, traction control, and automated transmissions among racing enthusiasts.

 

Do we allow technology to help us get better performance, or do we try to micro-manage everything? Photo by ClearInnerVision

But the time has come to let go. We don’t have to micro-manage storage anymore, and we have much to gain by letting the array do the work:

• Just as traction control can manage each wheel independently, something a driver could never do, modern virtualized storage systems can allocate small “chunks” to the optimal drive type, creating a better layout than anyone could manage with LUNs
• Dynamic optimization technology can move these chunks around, adapting as loads change
• Thin provisioning can go a step further, not wasting drive capacity for unused space
• Wide striping and post-RAID storage systems have a higher threshold before performance suffers due to spindle hotspots
• Widespread availability of tiered storage, including advanced caches, solid state drives, high-performance SAS and FC, and cheap bulk disks, gives us many more options

As I mentioned, not all systems have these capabilities, and not all implementations are created equal. I’m concerned about misuse of thin provisioning, for example, but it’s hard to argue with its effectiveness in many circumstances. Find out how granular your system’s allocation is – some remain LUN-only, while others are much more effective, using tiny chunks.

These new storage automation technologies really become essential once high-dollar flash storage is added to the mix. If you’re paying 30 times more for a flash drive, you want to make sure you’re making the best use of it that you can! Look at IBM’s recently-announced SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and solid state drive (SSD) combination, for example: It will almost certainly have fine-grained thin provisioning of SSDs, and should be able to dynamically move data between flash and disk storage and even between different storage arrays, but I still have questions on how granular this capability will be. HDS can do similar things with their USP-V. NetApp’s V-Series NAS systems will do dynamic allocation, thin provisioning, and data deduplication to enable a better return on the flash drive investment. I’d love to see 3PAR, Compellent, Dell/EqualLogic, and HP/LeftHand apply their solid dynamic allocation tech to solid state storage as well!

Then there’s the 800 lb gorilla: EMC. More enterprise SSD has probably been shipped out of Hopkinton than every other vendor combined, and both the CX and DMX support (optional/expensive) “virtual provisioning” (aka, thin provisioning) of flash storage. But EMC’s Optimizer is not widely used, and only migrates entire LUNs based on user input – hardly the kind of dynamic and granular technology needed to optimally use all of that flash storage. I’m sure the company is working on addressing this issue, though. Perhaps it will appear in the DMX-5 announcement we are all expecting this year?

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
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