Tag Archives: management

Time flies when you’re having fun!

Posted on by

I can’t believe it’s already been a year and a half since my last post…  I’m sorry for the lack of content here.  Things have been so busy at EMC as well as at home and so much of what I’ve been working on is customer proprietary that I’ve had trouble thinking of ways to write about it.  In the meantime I’ve taken on a new role at EMC in the last month which will likely change what I’m thinking about as well as how I look at the storage industry and customer challenges.

In the past couple of years I’ve been involved in projects ranging from data lifecycle and business process optimization, storage array performance analysis, and scale out image and video repositories, to Enterprise deployments of OpenStack on EMC storage, Hadoop storage rationalization, and tools rationalization for capacity planning.  It is these last three items that have, in part, driven me into taking on a new role.

For the first three and half years I’ve spent at EMC I’ve been an Enterprise Account Systems Engineer in the Pacific Northwest.  Technically, I was first hired into the TME (Telco/Media/Entertainment) division focused on a small set (12 at first) of accounts near Seattle.  After about a year of that, the TME division was merged into the Enterprise West division covering pretty much all large accounts in the area, but the specific customers I focused on stayed the same.  For the past year or so I’ve spent pretty much 80% of my time working with a very large and old (compared to other original DotCom’s) online travel company.  The rest of my time was spent with a handful of media companies.  I’ve learned A TON from my coworkers at EMC as well as my customers.  It’s amazing how much talent is lurking in the hallways of anonymous black glass buildings around Seattle, and EMC stands out as having the highest percentage of type-A geniuses (does that exist) of any place I’ve worked.

One of the projects I’ve been working on for a customer of mine is related to capacity planning.  As you may know, EMC has several software products (some old, some new, some mired in history) dedicated to the task of reporting on a customer’s storage environment.  These software products all now fall under the management of a dedicated division within EMC called ASD (Advanced Software Division).  Over the past 13 years, EMC has acquired and integrated dozens of software companies and for a long time these software products were all point solutions that, when viewed as a set, covered pretty much every infrastructure management need imaginable.  But they were separate products.  In the past couple years alone massive progress has been made towards integrating them into a cohesive package that is much better aligned and easier to consume and use.

In just the past 12 months, one acquisition specifically, has greatly contributed to EMC’s recent, and I’ll say future, success in the management tools sector, and that is Watch4Net.  More accurately the product was APG (Advanced Performance Grapher) from a company called Watch4Net, but now it is the flagship component of EMC’s Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with SRM Suite lately at several customer sites and I’m really quite impressed.  SRM Suite is NOT ECC (for those of you who know and love AND hate ECC), and it’s not ProSphere, or even what ProSphere promised; it’s better, it’s easier to deploy, it’s easier to navigate, it’s MUCH faster to navigate, it’s easier to customize (even without Professional Services), it’s massively extensible, and it works today!  The Watch4Net software component is really a framework for collection, data storage, and presentation of data, and it includes dozens of Solution Packs (combinations of collector plug-ins and canned reports for specific products).  And more Solution Packs are coming out all the time, and you can even make your own if you want to.

What I really like about SRM Suite is the UI that came from Watch4Net.  It’s browser based (yes it supports IE, Chrome, Firefox, Mac, PC, etc) and you can easily create your own custom views from the canned reports.  You can even combine individual components (ie: graphs or tables) from within different canned reports into a single custom view.  And any view you can create, you can schedule as an emailed, FTP’d, or stored report with 2 clicks.  Have an extremely complex report that takes a while to generate?  Schedule it to be pre-generated at specific times during the day for use within the GUI, again with 2 clicks.

As slick as the GUI is, the magic of SRM Suite comes from the collectors and reports that are included for the various parts of your infrastructure.  There are SolutionPacks for EMC and non-EMC storage arrays, multiple vendor FibreChannel switches, Cisco, HP, IBM servers, IP network switches and routers, VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle, SQL, MySQL, Frame-Relay, MPLS, Cisco WiFi networks, and many more.  This single tool provides drill down metrics on individual ports of a SAN switch for a Storage Engineer, Capacity forecasting for management, as well as rollup health dashboards for your company’s executives all within the same tool.  And those same Exec’s can get their reports on their iPhones and iPads with the Watch4Net APG iOS app anywhere they happen to be.

(From vTexan’s post about SRM)

It’s hard to paint the picture in words or even a few screenshots, so you should ask your local EMC SE for a demo!

The second Big Deal coming from EMC’s ASD division is EMC ViPR.  ViPR is EMC’s Software Defined Storage solution.  ViPR abstracts and virtualizes your SAN, NAS, Object, and Commodity storage into Virtual Pools and automates the provisioning process from LUN/FileSystem creation to masking, zoning, and host attach, all with Service Level definitions, Business Unit and Project role-based access, and built in chargeback/showback reporting.  A full web portal for self-service is included as well as a CLI but the real power is the fully capable REST API which allows your existing automation tools to issue requests to ViPR, to handle end-to-end provisioning of your entire environment.  Best of all ViPR has open APIs and supports heterogenous (ie: EMC and non-EMC storage) allowing you to extend the single ViPR REST API to all of your disparate storage solutions.

Looking at the future of the storage industry, as well as EMC as a company, I see ViPR, in combination with SRM Suite, as the place to be for the next few years at least.  And so that’s what I’m doing.  Right now I’m in the process of transitioning from my Account SE role into being one of just a handful of ASD Software Specialist SE’s (sometimes also referred to as SDSpecialists).  In my new roll I’ll be the local Specialist for SRM Suite, ViPR, Service Assurance Suite (aka EMC Smarts), and several other EMC products you probably never thought of as software, or probably never heard of.  There are many enhancements to all of the products on the near term roadmap which will further solidify the ASD software portfolio as market leading but I can’t talk to much about that here..  So ask your local EMC SE to set up a roadmap discussion at the same time as the demo you already asked for.

I do plan to get to writing more often again, and I believe that my new role in the ASD organization will provide good content for that.

More soon!

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Unified of the Beholder???

Posted on by

Apart from “The Cloud”, “Unified Storage” is the other big buzzword in the storage industry of late.  But what exactly is Unified Storage?

Mirriam-Webster defines unify as “to make into a unit or coherent whole“

So how does this apply to storage systems?  If you look at marketing messages by EMC, NetApp, and other vendors you’ll find that they all use the term in different ways in order to fit nicely with the products they have.  Based on what I see, there are generally two different approaches.

Single HW/SW Stack Approach:

Some vendors want you to believe that the only way it can be called Unified Storage is if the same physical box and software stack provides all protocols and features, even if management of the single system is not perfectly cohesive.

NetApp’s FAS storage systems are an example of this strategy.  A single filer provides all services whether SAN or NAS, IP or FiberChannel.  However, a single HA cluster is actually managed as two separate systems, each cluster node is managed independently using independent FilerView instances and there are separate tools (NetApp System Manager, Operations Manager, Provisioning Manager, Protection Manager) that can bring all of the filer heads into one view.  Disks are captive to a specific filer head in a cluster and moving disks and/or volumes between filer heads is not seamless.

Single Point of Management Approach:

Others approach it more holistically and figure that as long as the customer manages it as a single system, it qualifies as “Unified”, even if there may be disparate hardware and software components providing the different services.  After all, once it’s installed you don’t really go in the datacenter to physically look at the hardware very often.

EMC’s Unified Storage (which is a combination of Celerra NAS and Clariion Block storage systems) is an example of this.  In a best-of-breed approach, EMC allows the Clariion backend to do what it does best, block storage via FC or IP, while the Celerra, which is purpose built for NAS, provides CIFS/NFS services while leveraging the disk capacity, processors, cache, and other features of the Clariion as a kind of offload engine.  Regardless of which services you use, all parts of the solution are managed from a single Unisphere instance, including other Clariions and/or Celerras in the environment.  Unisphere launches from any Clariion or Celerra management port, and regardless of which device you launch it from, all systems are manageable together.

Which approach is better?

I see advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, as a former admin of both NetApp and EMC storage, I feel that while NetApp’s hardware and software stack is unified, their management stack is decidedly un-unified.  EMC’s Unified storage is physically “integrated” to work together as a system, but the unifying feature is the management infrastructure built-in with Unisphere.

There are other advantages to EMCs approach as well.  For example, if a particular workload seems to hammer the CPUs on the NAS but the backend is not a bottleneck, more Celerra datamovers can be added to take advantage of the same backend disks and improve front end performance.  Likewise, the backend can be augmented as needed to improve performance, increase capacity, etc without having to scale up the front end NAS head.  With the NetApp approach, if your CPU or cache is stressed, you need to deploy more FAS systems (in pairs for HA) along with any required disks for that new system to store data.

Both approaches work, and both have their merits, but what do customers really want?

In my opinion, most customers don’t really care *how* the hardware works, so long as it DOES WORK, and is easy to manage.  In the grand scheme of things, if I, as an admin, can provision, replicate, snapshot, and clone storage across my entire environment, regardless of protocol,  from a “single pane of glass”, that is a strong positive.

EMC Unisphere makes it easy to do just that and it launches right from the array with no separate installation or servers required.  Unisphere can authenticate against Active Directory or LDAP and has role-based-administration built in.  And since Unisphere launches from any Clariion Storage processor or Celerra Control Station, there’s no single point of failure for storage management either.

So what do you think customers want?  If you are a customer, what do YOU want?

Category: comparisons, solutions, technologies | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Simplify Storage Management Today, Risk Free, and Free of Charge

Posted on by

While my peers have been blogging about the new CLARiiON and Celerra releases, both of which provide significant enhancements to the EMC CX4-based Unified platforms you already own, I thought I’d shift gears just a tad…

What if you are a Clariion CX/CX3 customer, or a CX4 customer who isn’t ready to upgrade to the newly released FLARE30 code, but want to simplify management of your storage environment, get better reporting, dashboards, wizards, etc.  Well, you are in luck.

Just as with previous versions of Navisphere and FLARE, EMC offers off-array versions of Clariion management agents, servers, and GUIs.  As of yesterday, that includes off-array versions of Unisphere.  If you are a current customer of Clariion, you can login to PowerLink and download the Unisphere off-array software and build a management station.  After installation, you can manage your existing Clariion CX/CX3/CX4 hardware without upgrading the FLARE code.  As you upgrade your CX4 systems to FLARE30, new features will be enabled in Unisphere, and as you upgrade your Celerra NS systems to DART6, they can be added to the Clariion management domain and managed from the very same Unisphere instance.  How’s that for easy and convenient?

But what do you get by using Unisphere to manage your non-FLARE30 systems?  Unfortunately, you won’t be able to take advantage of FASTCache, FAST, Compression, and other features that are only available in FLARE 30, but there are some advantages..

First and foremost, Unisphere completely dumps the Navisphere tree-based management view and replaces it with end-result based tasks.  So instead of creating several objects to provision raid groups and LUNs, then present to a host, you just run the “Allocate” wizard and select the array, disks/raid group/pool, LUN size, hosts, etc and commit.

Second, upon launching Unisphere and logging in, you are immediately presented with dashboard views showing the amount of used/available storage, and active alerts, all customizable, so you can see the state of your entire CLARiiON storage environment “at-a-glance”.

To install Unisphere today, login to Powerlink, browse to “Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads T-Z > Unisphere Server Software” and download “EMC Unisphere Server” and “EMC Unisphere Client”.  Install them both to your Windows system and fire it up.  If you have Navisphere off-array software already installed, Unisphere will upgrade the existing installation for you.  You will also want to download and install Unisphere Service Manager (USM), also from Powerlink at “Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads T-Z > Unisphere Service Manager (USM).”  USM will provide various support and service related tools including active technical advisories for your storage arrays.

Begin using Unisphere today and you get some immediate benefits, plus you will be ready to take advantage of new features enabled with FLARE30 (FAST, FASTCache, Compression, etc) as well as managing NAS across all of your Celerra systems once they are upgraded to DART 6.  As a bonus, you’ll have a chance to get familiar with Unisphere before a future FLARE upgrade or new EMC Unified purchase forces you to learn it.

And did I mention you don’t have to buy anything or introduce risk with a firmware upgrade?

Category: announcements, efficiency | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

EMC CLARiiON and Celerra Updates – Defining Unified Storage

Posted on by

This past week, during EMC World 2010 in Boston, EMC made several announcements of updates to the Celerra and CLARiiON midrange platforms.  Some of the most impressive were new capabilities coming to CLARiiON FLARE in just a couple short months.  Major updates to Celerra DART will coincide with the FLARE updates and if you are already running CLARiiON CX4 hardware, or are evaluating CX4 (or Celerra), you will want to check these new features out.  They will be available to existing CX4(120,240,480,960)/NS(120,480,960) systems as part of a software update.

Here’s a list of key changes in FLARE 30:

  • Unified management for midrange storage platforms including CLARiiON and Celerra today, plus RecoverPoint, Replication Manager and more in the future.  This is a true single pane of glass for monitoring AND managing SAN, NAS, and data protection and it’s built in to the platform.  “EMC Unisphere” replaces Navisphere Manager and Celerra Manager and supports multiple storage systems simultaneously in a single window. (Video Demo)
  • Extremely large cache (ie: FASTCache) – Up to 2TB of additional read/write cache in CLARiiON using SSDs (Video Demo)
  • Block level Fully Automated Storage Tiering (ie: sub-LUN FAST) – Fully automated assignment of data across multiple disk types
  • Block Level Compression – Compress LUNs in the CLARiiON to reduce disk space requirements
  • VAAI Support – Integrate with vSphere ESX for improved performance

These features are in addition to existing features like:

  • Seamless and non-disruptive mobility of LUNs within a storage array – (via Virtual LUNs)
  • Non-Disruptive Data Migration – (via PowerPath Migration Enabler)
  • VMWare Aware Storage Management – (Navisphere, Unisphere, and vSphere Plugins giving complete visibility  and self-service provisioning for VMWare admins (Video Demo) AND Storage Admins
  • CIFS and NFS Compression – Compress production data on Celerra to reduce disk space requirements including VMs
  • Dynamic SAN path load balancing – (via PowerPath)
  • At-Rest-Encryption – (via PowerPath w/RSA)
  • SSD, FC, and SATA drives in the same system – Balance performance and capacity as needed for your application
  • Local and Remote replication with array level consistency – (SnapView, MirrorView, etc)
  • Hot-swap, Hot-Add, Hot-Upgrade IO Modules – Upgrade connectivity for FC, FCoE, and iSCSI with no downtime
  • Scale to 1.8PB of storage in a single system
  • Simultaneously provide FC, iSCSI, MPFS, NFS, and CIFS access

All together, this is an impressive list of features for a single platform. In fact, while many of EMC’s competitors have similar features, none of them have all of them in the same platform, or leverage them all simultaneously to gain efficiency.  When CLARiiON CX4 and Celerra NS are integrated and managed as a single Unified storage system with EMC Unisphere there is tremendous value as I’ll point out below…

Improve Performance easily…

  • Install a couple SSD drives into a CLARiiON and enable FASTCache to increase the array’s read/write cache from the industry competive 4GB-32GB up to 2TB of array based non-volatile Read AND Write cache available to ALL applications including NAS data hosted by the array.
  • Install PowerPath on Windows, Linux, Solaris, AND VMWare ESX hosts to automatically balance IO across all available paths to storage.  PowerPath detects latency and queuing occuring on each path and adjusts automatically, improving performance at the storage array AND for your hosts.  This is a huge benefit in VMWare environments especially.
  • When VMWare releases the updated version of vSphere ESX that supports VAAI, ESX will be able to leverage VAAI support in the CLARiiON to reduce the amount of IO required to do many tasks, improving performance across the environment again.
  • Upgrade from 1gbe iSCSI to 10gbe iSCSI, or from 4gbe FiberChannel to 8gbe FiberChannel, without a screwdriver or downtime.
  • Provide NAS shared file access with block-level performance for any application using EMC’s MPFS protocol.

Improve Efficiency and cost easily…

  • Create a single pool of storage containing some SSD, some FC, and some SATA drives, that automatically monitors and moves portions of data to the appropriate disk type to both improve performance AND decrease cost simultaneously.
  • Non-disruptively compress volumes and/or files with a single click to save 50% of your disk space in many cases.
  • Convert traditional LUNs to more efficient Thin-LUNs non-disruptively using PowerPath Migration Enabler, saving more disk space.

Increase and Manage Capacity easily…

  • Add additional storage non-disruptively with SSD, FC, and SATA drives in any mix up to 1.8PB of raw storage in a single CLARiiON CX4.
  • Using FASTCache, iSCSI, FC, and FCoE connectivity simultaneously does not reduce total capacity of the system.
  • Expanding LUNs, RAID Groups, and Storage Pools is non-disruptive.
  • Migrating LUNs between RAID groups and/or Storage Pools is non-disruptive using built-in CLARiiON LUN Migration, as is migrating data to a different storage array (using PowerPath Migration Enabler)!
  • Balancing workload between storage processors is non-disruptive and at individual LUN granularity.

Protect your data easily…

  • Snapshot, Clone, and Replicate any of the data to anywhere with built in array tools that can maintain complete data consistency across a single, or multiple applications without installing software.
  • Maintain application consistency for Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SAP, and much more, even within VMWare VMs, while replicating to anywhere with a single pane-of-glass.
  • Encrypt sensitive data seamlessly using PowerPath Encryption w/RSA.

Maintain Flexibility…

  • While you can do all of these things quickly and simply, you still have the flexibility to create traditional RAID sets using RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 where you need highly predicable performance, or tune read and write cache at the array and LUN level for specific workloads.  Do you want read/write snapshots? How about full copy clones on completely separate disks for workload isolation and failure protection? What about the ability to rollback data to different points in time using snapshots without deleting any other snapshots?  EMC Storage arrays have been able to do this for a long time and that hasn’t changed.

There are few manufacturers aside from EMC that can provide all of these capabilities, let alone provide them within a single platform.  That’s the definition of simple, efficient, Unified Storage in my opinion.

Category: announcements, efficiency, technologies | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Changes…

Posted on by

I’ve been absent from posting lately because there have been a lot of changes in my life.  Most notably I made a change in my career and have joined EMC Corporation as a Sr. Technical Consultant.

In this new role, I’ll be helping customers overcome challenges related to storing and managing information.

I’m not sure what my future topics will be other than to say they will still be storage related.  I expect that topics will come from the challenges my customers are facing and how they can be solved with today’s technology.

I promise to be as objective as possible despite my new employer being EMC, the corporate blogging policy is quite reasonable.

As before, the opinions expressed here are my own and not those of my employer or any other person or company.  All company and product names mentioned in this blog are copyrighted by their respective companies.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , ,

NetApp and EMC: Startup and First Impressions

Posted on by

In the last post, I talked about a project I am involved in right now to deploy NetApp storage alongside EMC for SAN and NAS.  Today, I’m going to talk about my first impressions of the NetApp during deployment and initial configuration.

First Impressions

I’m going to be pretty blunt — I have been working with EMC hardware and software for a while now, and I’m generally happy with the usability of their GUIs.  Over that time, I’ve used several major revisions of Navisphere Manager and Celerra Manager, and even more minor revisions, and I’ve never actually found a UI bug.  To be clear, EMC, IBM, NetApp, HDS, and every other vendor have bugs in their software, and they all do what they can to find and fix them quickly, but I just haven’t personally seen one in the EMC UIs despite using every feature offered by those systems. (I have come across bugs in the firmware)

Contrast that with the first day using the new NetApp, running the latest 7.3.1.1L1 code, where we discovered a UI problem in the first 10 minutes.  When attempting to add disks to an aggregate in FilerView, we could not select FC disk to add.  We could, however, add SATA disk to the FC aggregate.  The only way to get around the issue was to use the CLI via SSH.  As I mentioned in my previous post, our NetApp is actually an IBM nSeries, and IBM claims they perform additional QC before their customers get new NetApp code.

Shortly after that, we found a second UI issue in FilerView.  When creating a new Initiator group, FilerView populates the initiator list with the WWNs that have logged in to it.  Auto-populating is nice but the problem is that FilerView was incorrectly parsing the WWN of the server HBAs and populating the list with NodeWWNs rather than PortWWNs.  We spent several hours trying to figure out why the ESX servers didn’t see any LUNs before we realized that the WWNs in the Initiator group were incorrect.  Editing the 2nd digit on each one fixed the problem.

I find it interesting that these issues, which seemed easy to discover, made it through the QC process of two organizations.  ONTap 7.3.2RC1 is available now, but I don’t know if these issues were addressed.

Manageability

As far as FilerView goes, it is generally easy to use once you know how NetApp systems are provisioned.  The biggest drawback in an HA-Filer setup is the fact you have to open FilerView separately for each Filer and configure each one as a separate storage system.  Two HA-Filer pairs? Four FilerView windows.  If you include the initial launch page that comes up before you get to the actual FilerView window, you double the number of browser windows open to manage your systems.  NetApp likes to mention that they have unified management for NAS and SAN where EMC has two separate platforms, each with their own management tools. EMC treats the two storage processors (SPs) in a Clariion in a much more unified manner, and provisioning is done against the entire Clariion, not per SP.  Further, Navisphere can manage many Clariions in the same UI.  Celerra Manager acts similarly for EMC NAS.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other some say, except that I find that I generally provision NAS storage and SAN storage at different times, and I’d rather have all of the controllers/filers in the same window than NAS and SAN in the same window.  Just my preference.

I should mention, NetApp recently released System Manager 1.0 as a free download.  This new admin tool does present all of the controllers in one view and may end up being a much better tool than FilerView.  For now, it’s missing too many features to be used 100% of the time and it’s Windows only since it’s based on MMC.  Which brings me to my other problem with managing the NetApp.  Neither FilerView nor System Manager can actually do everything you might need to do, and that means you end up in the CLI, FREQUENTLY.  I’m comfortable with CLIs and they are extremely powerful for troubleshooting problems, and especially for scripting batch changes, but I don’t like to be forced into the CLI for general administration.  GUI based management helps prevent possibly crippling typos and can make visualizing your environment easier.  During deployment, we kept going back and forth between FilerView and CLI to configure different things.  Further, since we were using MultiStore (vFilers) for CIFS shares and disaster recovery, we were stuck in the CLI almost entirely because System Manager can’t even see vFilers, and FilerView can only create them and attach volumes.

Had I not been managing Celerra and Clariion for so long, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the above problems.  After several years of configuring CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, Virtual DataMovers, IP Interfaces, Snapshots, Replication, and DR Failover, etc. on Celerra, as well as literally thousands of LUNs for hundreds of servers on Clariion, I don’t recall EVER being forced to use the CLI.  CelerraCLI and NaviCLI are very powerful, and I have written many scripts leveraging them, and I’ll use CLI when troubleshooting an issue.  But for every single feature I’ve ever used on the Celerra or Clarrion, I was able to completely configure from start to finish using the GUI.  Installing a Celerra from scratch even uses a GUI based installation wizard.  Comparing Clariion Storage Groups with NetApp Initiator groups and LUN maps isn’t even fair.  For MS Exchange, I mapped about 50 LUNs to the ESX cluster, which took about 30 minutes in FilerView.  On the Clariion, the same operation is done by just editing the Storage Group and checking each LUN, taking only a couple minutes for the entire process.

Now, all of the above commentary has to do with the management tools, UIs, and to some degree personal preferences, and does not have any bearing on the equipment or underlying functionality.  There are, of course, optional management tools like Operations Manager, Provisioning Manager, and Protection Manager available from NetApp, just as there is Control Center from EMC (which incidentally can monitor the NetApp) or Command Central from Symantec.  Depending on your overall needs, you may want to look at optional management tools; or, FilerView may be perfectly fine.

In the next post,  I’ll get into more specifics about how the Exchange 2007 CCR cluster turned out in this new environment, along with some notes on making CCR truly redundant.  I’ve also been working on the NAS side of the project, so I’ll also post about that some time soon.

Category: comparisons, technologies | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,