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Building Blocks – Part VI: But my #PrivateCloud is too small (or too big) for building blocks!

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Does your Building Block need a Fabric? <- Part 6

Okay, so this is all well and good, but you have been reading these posts and thinking that your environment is nowhere near the size of my example so Building Blocks are not for you. The fact is you can make individual Building Blocks quite a bit smaller or larger than the example I used in these posts and I’ll use a couple more quick examples to illustrate.

Small Environment: In this example, we’ll break down a 150 VM environment into three Building Blocks to provide the availability benefit of multiple isolated blocks. Additional Building Blocks can be deployed as the environment grows.

150 Total VMs deployed over 12 months
(2 vCPUs/32GB Disk/1GB RAM/25 IOPS per VM)

    • 300 vCPUs
    • 150GB RAM
    • 4800 GB Disk Space
    • 3750 Host IOPS

Assuming 3 Building Blocks, each Building Block would look something like this:

    • 50 VMs per Building Block
    • 2 x Dual CPU – 6 Core Servers (Maintains the 4:1 vCPU to Physical thread ratio)
    • 24-32GB RAM per server
    • 19 x 300GB 10K disks in RAID10 (including spares) — any VNXe or VNX model will be fine for this
      • >1600GB Usable disk space (this disk config provides more disk space and performance than required)
      • >1250 Host IOPS

Very Large Environment: In this example, we’ll scale up to 45,000 VMs using sixteen Building Blocks to provide the availability benefit of multiple isolated blocks. Additional Building Blocks can be deployed as the environment grows.

45000 Total VMs deployed over 48 months
(2 vCPUs/32GB Disk/4GB RAM/50 IOPS per VM)

    • 90000 vCPUs
    • 180,000 GB RAM
    • 1,440,000 GB Disk Space
    • 2,250,000 Host IOPS

Assuming 4 Building blocks per year, each Building Block would look something like this:

    • 2812 VMs per Building Block
    • 18 x Quad CPU – 10 Core Servera plus Hyperthreading (Maintains the 4:1 vCPU to Physical thread ratio)
    • 640GB Ram per server
    • 1216 x 300GB 15K disks in RAID10 (including spares) — one EMC Symmetrix VMAX for each Building Block
      • >90000GB Usable disk space (the 300GB disks are the smallest available but still too big and will provide quite a bit more space than the 90TB required. This would be a good candidate for EMC FASTVP sub-LUN tiering along with a few SSD disks, which would likely reduce the overall cost)
      • >140,000 Host IOPS

Hopefully this series of posts have shown that the Building Block approach is very flexible and can be adapted to fit a variety of different environments. Customers with environments ranging from very small to very large can tune individual Building Block designs for their needs to gain the advantages of isolated, repeatable deployments, and better long term use of capital.

Finally, if you find the benefits of the Building Block approach appealing, but would rather not deal with the integration of each Building Block, talk with a VCE representative about VBlock which provides all of the benefits I’ve discussed but in a pre-integrated, plug-and-play product with a single support organization supporting the entire solution.

Does your Building Block need a Fabric? <- Part 6

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Building Blocks – Part V: Does your #PrivateCloud building block need a fabric?

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Sizing your Building Block <- Part 5 -> I’m too small for Building Blocks

You may have noticed in the last installment that I did not include any FibreChannel switches in the example BOM. There are essentially three ways to deal with the SAN connectivity in a Building Block and there are advantages as well as disadvantages to each. (Note: this applies to iSCSI as well)

1.) Use switches that already exist in your datacenter: You can attach each storage array and each server back to a common fabric that you already have (or that you build as part of the project) and zone each of the Building Block’s servers to their respective storage array.

  • Advantages:
    • Leverage any existing fabric equipment to reduce costs and centralize management
    • Allow for additional servers to be added to each Building Block in the future
    • Allow for presenting storage from one Building Block to servers in a different Building Block (useful for migrations)
  • Disadvantages:
    • Increases complexity – Requires you to configure zoning within each Building Block during deployment
    • Increases chances for human error that could cause an outage – Accidentally deleting entire Zonesets or VSANs is not as uncommon as you might think
    • Reduces the availability isolation between Building Blocks – The fabric itself becomes a point-of-failure common to all Building Blocks.

2.) Deploy a dedicated fabric within each Building Block: Since each Building Block has a known quantity of storage and server ports, you can easily add a dual-switch/fabric into the design. In our example of 9 hosts you’d need a total of 18 ports for hosts and maybe 8 ports for the storage array for a combined total of 26 switch ports. Two 16-port switches can easily accommodate that requirement.

  • Advantages:
    • Depending on the switches used, it could allow for additional servers in each Building Block in the future
    • Allow for presenting storage from one Building Block to servers in a different building block (useful for migrations) by connecting ISLs between Building Blocks
    • Maintains the Building Block isolation by not sharing the fabric switches across Building Blocks.
  • Disadvantages:
    • Increases complexity – Requires you to configure zoning within each Building Block during deployment
    • Increases chances for human error that could cause an outage – Again, accidentally deleting entire Zonesets or VSANs is not as uncommon as you might think

3.) Dispense with the fabric entirely: Since Building Blocks are relatively small, resulting in fewer total initiator/target pairs, it’s possible in some cases to directly attach all of the hosts to the storage array. In our example, the nine hosts need eighteen ports and the VNX5700 supports up to twenty four FC ports. This means you can directly attach all of the hosts to the array and still have six remaining ports on the array for replication, etc. Different arrays from EMC as well as other vendors will have various limits on the number of FC ports supported. Also, not all vendors support direct attached hosts so you’ll need to check that with your storage vendor of choice to be sure.

  • Advantages:
    • Maintains the Building Block isolation by not sharing the fabric switches across Building Blocks.
    • Simplifies deployment by eliminating the need to do any zoning at all and effectively eliminates any port queue limits (HBA elevator depth settings)
    • Simplifies troubleshooting by eliminating the fabric (buffer to buffer credits, bandwidth, port errors, etc) from the IO path.
  • Disadvantages:
    • Limits the number of hosts per Building Block by the maximum number of ports supported by the storage array.
    • More difficult to non-disruptively migrate VMs between Building Blocks since storage cannot be shared across. (If all Building Blocks are in the same Virtual Data Center in VMWare vSphere, you can still live-migrate VMs via the IP network between Building Blocks using Storage vMotion)

If you decide that the host count limit is okay, and either non-disruptive migration between Building Blocks is unnecessary or Storage vMotion will work for you, then eliminating the fabric can reduce cost and complexity, while improving overall availability and time to deploy. If you need the flexibility of a fabric, I personally like using dedicated switches in each building block. Cisco and Brocade both offer 1U switches with up to 48 ports per switch that will work quite well. Always deploy two switches (as two fabrics) in each Building Block for redundancy.

Okay, so you’ve managed to calculate the size of your environment, how much time it will take you to virtualize it, the number of Building Blocks you need, and the specifications for each Building Block, including whether you need a fabric. Now you can submit your budget, get your final quotes, and place orders. Once the equipment arrives it’s time to implement the solution.

When your first Building Block arrives, it would be a valuable use of time to learn how to script the configuration for each component in the Building Block. An EMC VNX array can be completely configured using Naviseccli or PowerShell, from the Storage Pool and LUN provisioning to initiator registration and Host/LUN masking. VMWare vSphere can similarly be configured using scripts or PowerShell. If you take the time to develop and test your scripts against your first Building Block, then you can use those scripts to quickly stand up each additional Building Block you deploy. Since future Building Blocks will be nearly identical, if not entirely identical, the scripts can speed your deployment time immensely.

EMC Navisphere/Unisphere CLI (for VNX) is documented fully in the VNX Command Line Interface (CLI) Reference for Block 1.0 A02. This document is available on EMC PowerLink at the following location:

Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Software ~ J-O ~ Documentation > Navisphere Management Suite > Maintenance/Administration

Be sure to leverage any storage vendor plug-ins available to you for your chosen hypervisor (VMWare, Hyper-V, etc) to improve visibility up and down the layers and reduce the number of management tools you need to use on a daily basis.

For example, EMC Unisphere Manager, the array management UI running on the VNX storage array, includes built-in integration with VMWare and other host operating systems. Unisphere Manager displays the VMFS datastores, RDMs, and VMs that are running on each LUN and a storage administrator can quickly search for VM names to help with management and/or troubleshooting tasks.

EMC also provides free downloadable plug-ins for VMWare vSphere and Hyper-V so server administrators can see what storage arrays and LUNs are behind their VMs and datastores. The plug-ins also allow administrators to provision new LUNs from the storage array through the plug-ins without needing access to the array management tools.

Depending on which storage vendor you choose, if you build a fabric-less Building Block, you may be able to do all of your server and storage administration from vCenter if you leverage the free plug-ins.

Sizing your Building Block <- Part 5 -> I’m too small for Building Blocks

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Building Blocks – Part IV: Sizing Your #PrivateCloud Building Blocks

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How many Building Blocks? <- Part 4 -> Does your Building Block need a Fabric?

Now that we know we’ll be deploying about 562 VM’s per Building Block we can use the other metrics to determine the requirements for a single block.

  • Since 562 VMs is about 12.5% of the 4500 total VMs, we then calculate 12.5% of the other metrics determined in the last post.
    • 12.5% of 9000 vCPUs = 1125 vCPUs
    • 12.5% of 4500GB RAM = 562GB RAM
    • 12.5% of 225,000 IOPS = 28125 Host IOPS
    • 12.5% of 562TB = 70TB Usable Disk capacity

First we’ll size the compute layer of the Building Block

  • At 4:1 vCPUs per Physical CPU thread you’d want somewhere around 281 hardware threads per Building Block. Using 4-socket, 8-core servers (32 cores per server) you’d need about 9 physical servers per building block. The number of vCPUs per physical CPU thread affects the % CPU Ready time in VMWare vSphere/ESX environments.
  • For 562GB of total RAM per Building Block, each server needs about 64GB of RAM
  • Per standard best practices, a highly available server needs two HBAs, more than two can be advantageous with high IOPS loads.

Next, we’ll calculate the storage layer of the Building Block

  • Assuming no cache hits, the backend disk load for 28,125 Host IOPS @ 50:50 read/write looks like the following:
    • RAID10 : 28125/2 + 28125/2*2 = 42187 Disk IOPS
    • RAID5 : 28125/2 + 28125/2*4 = 70312 Disk IOPS
    • RAID6 : 28125/2 + 28125/2*6 = 98437 Disk IOPS
  • If you calculate the number of disks required to meet the 70TB Usable in each RAID level, and the # of disks needed for both 10K RPM and 15K RPM disks to meet the IOPS for each RAID level, you’ll eventually find that for this specific example, using EMC Best Practices, 600GB 10K RPM SAS disks in RAID10 provides the least cost option (317 disks including hot spares). Since 10K RPM disks are also available in 2.5” sizes for some storage systems, this also provides the most compact solution in many cases (29 Rack Units for an EMC VNX storage array that has this configuration). In reality this is a very conservative configuration that ignores the benefits of storage array caching technologies and any other optimizations available, it’s essentially a worst case scenario and it would be beneficial to work with your storage vendor’s performance group to perform a more intelligent modeling of your workload.
  • Finally, you’ll need to select a storage array model that meets the requirements. Within EMC’s portfolio, 317 disks necessitate an EMC VNX5700 which will also have more than enough CPU horsepower to handle the 28125 host IOPS requirement.

At this point you’ve determined the basic requirements for a single Building Block which you can use as a starting point to work with your vendors for further tuning and pricing. Your vendors may also propose various optimizations that can help save you money and/or improve performance such as block-level tiering or extended SSD/Flash based caching.

Example bill-of-materials (BOM):

  • 9 x Quad-CPU/8-Core servers w/64GB RAM each
  • 2 x Single port FibreChannel HBAs
  • 1 x EMC VNX5700 Storage Array with 317 x 300GB 2.5” 10K SAS disks

Wait, where’s the fabric?

How many Building Blocks? <- Part 4 -> Does your Building Block need a Fabric?

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Building Blocks – Part III: How Many Building Blocks does your #PrivateCloud need?

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The Building Block Approach <- Part 3 -> Sizing your Building Block

The key to sizing Building Blocks is to calculate the ratio between the compute and storage metrics. First you need to take a look at the total performance and disk space requirements for the whole environment, similar to the below example:

  • Total # of Virtual Machines you expect to be hosting (example: 4500 VMs)
  • Total Virtual CPUs assigned to all Guest VMs (average of 2 vCPUs per VM = 9000 vCPUs)
  • Total Memory required across all Guest VMs (average of 1GB per VM = 4.5TB)
  • Total Host IOPS needed at the array for all Guest VMs (average of 50 IOPS per VM = 225,000 Host IOPS)
    • You will need to have a read/write ratio with this as well (we will use 50:50 for these examples)
  • Total Disk Storage required for all Guest VMs. (average of 125GB per VM = 562TB)

Once you have the above data, you need to decide how many Building Blocks you want to have once the entire environment is built out. There are several things to consider in determining this number:

  • How often you want to be deploying additional Building Blocks (more on this below)
  • Your annual budget (I’m ignoring budget for this example, but your budget may limit the size of your deployment each year)
  • How many VMs you think you can deploy in a year (we’ll use 2250 per year for a two year deployment)

Some of these are pretty subjective so your actual results will vary quite a bit, but based what I’ve seen I do have some recommendations.

  • In order to take advantage of the availability isolation inherent in the Building Block approach, you’ll want to start with at least two Building Blocks and then add them one or two at a time depending on how you want to spread your server farms across the infrastructure.
  • Depending on the size of each Building Block you may want to keep Building Block deployments down to one every 3-6 months. That gives you ample time to build each block correctly and hopefully leaves time between deployments to monitor and adjust the Building Blocks.

That said I’d lean toward 4 to 6 Building Blocks per year. Of course this is just my opinion and your mileage may vary. For our example of 4500 VMs over 2 years @ 4 Building Blocks per year. we’ll end up with 8 Building Blocks with about 562 VMs each.

The Building Block Approach <- Part 3 -> Sizing your Building Block

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Building Blocks – Part II: The Building Block Approach to the #PrivateCloud

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Build your own Private Cloud <- Part 2 -> How many Building Blocks

Since server virtualization abstracts the physical hardware from the operating systems and applications, essential for Cloud Infrastructures (also known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service), it’s ideally suited for breaking down the physical infrastructure into Building Blocks. Put simply, Building Blocks are repeatable, pre-designed mixes of storage, CPU, and memory.

There are several advantages to the Building Block approach that I’ll point out here:

  1. Rather than dropping a huge amount of capital up front on the entire infrastructure you need over the long haul, some of which will not be used at first, you can start with a smaller capital outlay today, then make multiple similarly small capital purchases only as needed. Further, when the hardware in a single Building Block reaches the end of its life (for any number of reasons), only that one Building Block will need to be refreshed at that time rather than a wholesale replacement of the entire environment.
  2. In an environment where virtualization is a new endeavor, sizing the compute, memory, and storage required is really an educated guess. As each Building Block is consumed, the real-world performance can be analyzed and adjusted for future Building Blocks to more closely match your specific workload.
  3. Building Blocks are inherently isolated which creates natural performance and availability boundaries. This can be leveraged for web and application server farms by spreading nodes of each farm across multiple Building Blocks. In the event of a catastrophic failure of one Building Block, due to major software bug affecting the cluster or the failure of an entire storage array for some reason, nodes of the server farm not hosted on the failed Building Block will be unaffected.
  4. The list price for storage arrays and servers goes down over time. If your growth is similar to many of my customers, where full build out of the physical infrastructure will not be required until 2-3 years after the start of the project, the acquisition cost of each individual Building Block will decrease over time, saving you money overall.
  5. In many cases, and due to a variety of factors, the cost to upgrade a storage array is higher than the cost to purchase the capacity with a new array. Upgrades also add complexity, complicate asset depreciation, and warranty renewals. The Building Block approach eliminates the majority of upgrades and the associated complexity.

Each Building Block can be maintained in its original build state or upgraded independent of the other building blocks so, for example, you don’t have to worry about upgrading every server in your datacenter with new HBA drivers if you decide to upgrade the storage array firmware on one array. You would only need to upgrade the servers in that arrays’ Building Block.

You may be thinking that your environment is not large enough to use a Building Block approach, but the more I worked on this project, the more I realized that Building Blocks can be adjusted to fit even very small environments. I’ll go into that a bit more later.

Build your own Private Cloud <- Part 2 -> How many Building Blocks

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Building Blocks – Part I: Build your own #PrivateCloud

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Part 1 -> The Building Block Approach

As 2011 wraps up and I have a little time at home over the holidays, I’ve been reflecting on some of the customer projects I’ve worked on over the past year. Cloud computing and EMC’s vision for the “Journey to the Private Cloud” have been hot topics this year and of the various projects I’ve worked on this past year, one stands out to me as something that could be used as a blueprint for others who want to deploy their own Private Cloud but may not know how to start.

I have been working with a customer with approximately 10,000 servers that support their business and for all intents had zero virtualization as recent as 2010.  As most customers already know, they thought it would be good to begin virtualizing their environment to drive up asset utilization and flexibility while bringing down costs.  In the past, they’ve experimented with multiple server virtualization solutions (such as VMWare ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V) with limited success and had all but abandoned the idea.  A change in leadership in late 2010 brought a top-down initiative to virtualize wherever possible, but in order to instill confidence in virtualized environments within the various business units, the virtual infrastructure needed to be reliable and performant.

The customer spent the latter half of 2010 looking at their existing physical environment, finding that about 80% of the 10,000 servers were various application, file, and web servers; the remaining 20% being various database servers (mostly MS SQL).  Moving an infrastructure this large into a Private Cloud model would take several years and, further adding to the challenge, the DBA teams were particularly wary about virtualizing their database servers.  That said, the newly formed Virtualization and Cloud team set a goal of virtualizing the approximately 8,000 non-database servers over 36 months, starting out with dev/test and gradually adding production and tier-1 applications until only the database servers remained on physical infrastructure.  They believe that if they prove success with virtualization during this first 3 years, the DBAs will be more willing to begin virtualizing their systems, plus there should be more knowledge and tools in the public domain for managing virtual database instances by then.

To accomplish all of their goals, the customer leveraged some experience that individual team members had gained from prior environments to come up with a Building Block based deployment.  I worked with them to finalize the design and sizing for the each Building Block and throughout the year have helped analyze the performance of the deployed infrastructure to help determine how the Building Blocks can be optimized further.  Through the next several posts, I will explain the Building Block approach, detailing the benefits, some of the considerations, and some thoughts around sizing.  I hope that this information will be useful to others.  The content is mostly vendor agnostic except for some example data that uses EMC specific storage best practices.

Part 1 -> The Building Block Approach

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Defining RTO and RPO for your data…

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Do you have a clearly defined Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for your data?  What about a clearly defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?

One challenge I run in to quite often is that, while most customers assume they need to protect their data in some way, they don’t have clear cut RPO and RTO requirements, nor do they have a realistic budget for deploying backup and/or other data protection solutions.  This makes it difficult to choose the appropriate solution for their specific environment.  Answering the above questions will help you choose a solution that is the most cost effective and technically appropriate for your business.

But how do you answer these questions?

First, let’s discuss WHY you back up… The purpose of a backup is to guarantee your ability to restore data at some point in the future, in response to some event.  The event could be inadvertent deletion, virus infection, corruption, physical device failure, fire, or natural disaster.  So the key to any data protection solution is the ability to restore data if/when you decide it is necessary.  This ability to restore is dependent on a variety of factors, ranging from the reliability of the backup process, to the method used to store the backups, to the media and location of the backup data itself.  What I find interesting is that many customers do not focus on the ability to restore data; they merely focus on the daily pains of just getting it backed up.  Restore is key! If you never intend to restore data, why would you back it up in the first place?

What is the Risk?

USA Today published an article in 2006 titled “Lost Digital Data Cost Businesses Billions” referencing a whole host of surveys and reports showing the frequency and cost to businesses who experience data loss.

Two key statistics in the article stand out.

  • 69% of business people lost data due to accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses, fire or another disaster
  • 40% Lost data two or more times in the last year

Flipped around, you have at least a 40% chance of having to restore some or all of your data each year.  Unfortunately, you won’t know ahead of time what portion of data will be lost.  What if you can’t successfully restore that data?

This is why one of my coworkers refuses to talk to customers about “Backup Solutions”, instead calling them “Restore Solutions”, a term I have adopted as well.  The key to evaluating Restore Solutions is to match your RPO and RTO requirements against the solution’s backup speed/frequency and restore speed respectively.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Since RPO represents the amount of data that will be lost in the event a restore is required, the RPO can be improved by running a backup job more often.  The primary limiting factor is the amount of time a backup job takes to complete.  If the job takes 4 hours then you could, at best, achieve a 4-hour RPO if you ran backup jobs all day.  If you can double the throughput of a backup, then you could get the RPO down to 2 hours.  In reality, CPU, Network, and Disk performance of the production system can (and usually is) affected by backup jobs so it may not be desirable to run backups 24 hours a day.  Some solutions can protect data continuously without running a scheduled job at all.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Since RTO represents the amount of time it takes to restore the application once a recovery operation begins, reducing the RTO can be achieved by shortening the time to begin the restore process, and speeding up the restore process itself.  Starting the restore process earlier requires the backup data to be located closer to the production location.  A tape located in the tape library, versus in a vault, versus at a remote location, for example affects this time.  Disk is technically closer than tape since there is no requirement to mount the tape and fast forward it to find the data.  The speed of the process itself is dependent on the backup/restore technology, network bandwidth, type of media the backup was stored on, and other factors.  Improving the performance of a restore job can be done one of two ways – increase network bandwidth or decrease the amount of data that must be moved across the network for the restore.

This simple graph shows the relationship of RTO and RPO to the cost of the solution as well as the potential loss.The values here are all relative since every environment has a unique profit situation and the myriad backup/restore options on the market cover every possible budget.

Improving RTO and/or RPO generally increases the cost of a solution.  This is why you need to define the minimum RPO and RTO requirements for your data up front, and why you need to know the value of your data before you can do that.  So how do you determine the value?

Start by answering two questions…

How much is the data itself worth?  

If your business buys or creates copyrighted content and sells that content, then the content itself has value.  Understanding the value of that data to your business will help you define how much you are willing to spent to ensure that data is protected in the event of corruption, deletion, fire, etc.  This can also help determine what Recovery Point Objective you need for this data, ie: how much of the data can you lose in the event of a failure.

If the total value of your content is $1000 and you generate $1 of new content per day, it might be worth spending 10% of the total value ($100) to protect the data and achieve an RPO of 24 hours.  Remember, this 10% investment is essentially an insurance policy against the 40% chance of data loss mentioned above which could involve some or all of your $1000 worth of content.  Also keep in mind that you will lose up to 24 hours of the most recent data ($1 value) since your RPO is 24 hours.  You could implement a more advanced solution that shortens the RPO to 1 hour or even zero, but if the additional cost of that solution is more than the value of the data it protects, it might not be worth doing.  Legal, Financial, and/or Government regulations can add a cost to data loss through fines which should also be considered.  If the loss of 24 hours of data opens you up to $100 in fines, then it makes sense to spend money to prevent that situation.

How much value does the data create per minute/hour/day?

Whether or not your data itself has value on it’s own, the ability to access it may have value.  For example, If your business sells products or services through a website and a database must be online for sales transactions to occur, then an outage of that database causes loss of revenue.  Understanding this will help you define a Recovery Time Objective, ie: for how long is it acceptable for this database to be down in the event of a failure, and how much should you spend trying to shorten the RTO before you get diminishing returns.

If you have a website that supports company net profits of $1000 a day,  it’s pretty easy to put together an ROI for a backup solution that can restore the website back into operation quickly.  In this example, every hour you save in the restore process prevents $42 of net loss.  Compare the cost of improving restore times against the net loss per hour of outage.  There is a crossover point which will provide a good return on your investment.

Your vendor will be happy when you give them specific RPO and RTO requirements.

Nothing derails a backup/recovery solution discussion quicker than a lack of requirements.  Your vendor of choice will most likely be happy to help you define them but it will help immensely if you have some idea of your own before discussions start.  There are many different data protection solutions on the market and each has it’s own unique characteristics that can provide a range of RPO and RTO’s as well as fit different budgets. Several vendors, including EMC, have multiple solutions of their own — one size definitely does not fit all.  Once you understand the value of your data, you can work with your vendor(s) to come up with a solution that meets your desired RPO and RTO while also keeping a close eye on the financial value of the solution.

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If You Are Using SSDs, You Should Be Encrypting

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I saw the following article come across Twitter today.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/ssd-security-the-worst-of-all-worlds/1326

In it, Robin Harris describes the issues around data recovery and secure erasure specific to SSD disks.  In layman’s terms, since SSDs do all sorts of fancy things with writes to increase longevity and performance, disk erasure is nearly impossible using normal methods, and forensic or malicious data recovery is quite easy.  So if you have sensitive data being stored on SSDs, that data is at risk of being read by someone, some day, in the future.  It seems that pretty much the only way to mitigate this risk is to use encryption at some level outside the SSD disk itself.

Did you know that EMC Symmetrix VMAX offers data-at-rest encryption that is completely transparent to hosts and applications, and has no performance impact?  With Symmetrix D@RE, each individual disk is encrypted with a unique key, managed by a built-in RSA key manager, so disks are unreadable if removed from the array.   Since the data is encrypted as the VMAX is writing to the physical disk, attempting to read data off an individual disk without the key is pointless, even for SSD disks.

The beauty of this feature is that it’s set-it-and-forget it.  No management needed, it’s enabled during installation and that’s it.  All disks are encrypted, all the time.

  • Ready to decomm an old array and return it, trade it, or sell it?  Destroy the keys and the data is gone.  No need for an expensive Data Erasure professional services engagement.
  • Failed disk replaced by your vendor?  No need for special arrangements with your vendor to keep those disks onsite, or certify erasure of a disk every time one is replaced.  The key stays with the array and the data on that disk is unreadable.

If you have to comply with PCI and/or other compliance rules that require secure erasure of disks, you should consider putting that data on a VMAX with data-at-rest encryption.

Now, What if you have an existing EMC storage system and the same need to encrypt data?  You can encrypt at the volume level with PowerPath Encryption.  PowerPath encrypts the data at the host with a unique key managed by an RSA Key Manager.  And it works with the non-EMC arrays that PowerPath supports as well.

Under normal circumstances, PowerPath Encryption does have some level of performance impact to the host however HBA vendors, such as Emulex, are now offering HBAs with encryption offload that works with PowerPath.  If you combine PowerPath Encryption with Emulex Encryption HBAs, you get in-flight AND at-rest encryption with near-zero performance impact.

  • Do you replicate your sensitive data to a 3rd party remote datacenter for business continuity?  PowerPath Encryption prevents unauthorized access to the data because no host can read it without the proper key.
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Auto-Tiering, Cloud Storage, and Risk-Free Thin Pools

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Some customers are afraid of thin provisioning…

Practically every week I have discussions with customers about leveraging thin provisioning to reduce their storage costs and just as often the customer pushes back worried that some day, some number of applications, for some reason, will suddenly consume all of their allocated space in a short period of time and cause the storage pool to run out of space.  If this was to happen, every application using that storage pool will essentially experience an outage and resolving the problem requires allocating more space to the pool, migrating data, and/or deleting data, each of which would take precious time and/or money.  In my opinion, this fear is the primary gating factor to customers using thin provisioning.  Exacerbating the issue, most large organizations have a complex procurement process that forces them to buy storage many months in advance of needing it, further reducing the usefulness of thin provisioning.  The IT organization for one of my customers can only purchase new storage AFTER a business unit requests it and approved by senior management; and they batch those requests before approving a storage purchase.  This means that the business unit may have to wait months to get the storage they requested.

This same customer recently purchased a Symmetrix VMAX with FASTVP and will be leveraging sub-LUN tiering with SSD, FC, and SATA disks totaling over 600TB of usable capacity in this single system.  As we began design work for the storage array the topic of thin provisioning came up and the same fear of running out of space in the pool was voiced.  To prevent this, the customer fully allocates all LUNs in the pool up front which prevents oversubscription.  It’s an effective way to guarantee performance and availability but it means that any free space not used by application owners is locked up by the application server and not available to other applications.  If you take their entire environment into account with approximately 3PB of usable storage and NO thin provisioning, there is probably close to $1 million in storage not being used and not available for applications.  If you weigh the risk of an outage causing the loss of several million dollars per hour of revenue, the customer has decided the risks outweigh the potential savings.  I’ve seen this decision made time and again in various IT shops.

Sub-LUN Tiering pushes the costs for growth down

I previously blogged about using cloud storage for block storage in the form of Cirtas BlueJet and how it would not be to much of a stretch to add this functionality to sub-LUN tiering software like EMC’s FASTVP to leverage cloud storage as a block storage tier as shown in this diagram.

Let’s first assume the customer is already using FASTVP for automated sub-LUN tiering on a VMAX.  FASTVP is already identifying the hot and cold data and moving it to the appropriate tier, and as a result the lowest tier is likely seeing the least amount of IOPS per GB.  In a VMAX, each tier consists of one or more virtual provisioned pools, and as the amount of data stored on the array grows FASTVP will continually adjust, pushing the hot data up to higher tiers and cold data down to the lower tiers  The cold data is more likely to be old data as well so in many cases the data sort of ages down the tiers over time and its the old/least used portion of the data that grows.  Conceptually, the only tier you may have to expand is the lowest (ie: SATA) when you need more space.  This reduces the long term cost of data growth which is great.  But you still need to monitor the pools and expand them before they run out of space, or an outage may occur.  Most storage arrays have alerts and other methods to let you know that you will soon run out of space.

Risk-Free Thin Provisioning

What if the storage array had the ability automatically expand itself into a cloud storage provider, such as AT&T Synaptic, to prevent itself from running out of space?  Technically this is not much different from using the cloud as a tier all it’s own but I’m thinking about temporary use of a cloud provider versus long term.  The cloud provider becomes a buffer for times when the procurement process takes too long, or unexpected growth of data in the pool occurs.  With an automated tiering solution, this becomes relatively easy to do with fairly low impact on production performance.  In fact, I’d argue that you MUST have automated tiering to do this or the array wouldn’t have any method for determining what data it should move to the cloud.  Without that level of intelligence, you’d likely be moving hot data to the cloud which could heavily impact performance of the applications.

Once the customer is able to physically add storage to the pool to deal with the added data, the array would auto-adjust by bringing the data back from the cloud freeing up that space.  The cloud provider would only charge for the transfer of data in/out and the temporary use of space.  Storage reduction technologies like compression and de-duplication could be added to the cloud interface to improve performance for data stored in the cloud and reduce costs.  Zero detect and reclaim technologies could also be leveraged to keep LUNs thin over time as well as prevent the movement of zero’d blocks to the cloud.

Using cloud storage as a buffer for thin provisioning in this way could reduce the risk of using thin provisioning, increasing the utilization rate of the storage, and reducing the overall cost to store data.

What do you think?  Would you feel better about oversubscribing storage pools if you had a fully automated buffer, even if that buffer cost some amount of money in the event it was used?

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Saving $90,000 per minute with VMAX Federated Live Migration

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One of the customers I work with regularly has a set of key MS SQL databases totaling over 100TB in size which process transactions for their customer facing systems. If these databases are down, no transactions can be processed and customers looking to spend money will go elsewhere. The booking rate related to these databases is ~$90,000 per minute, all day, every day.

Today these databases live on Symmetrix DMX storage which has been very reliable and performant. As happens in an IT world, some of these Symmetrix systems are getting long in the tooth and we are working on refreshing several older DMX systems into fewer, newer VMAX systems. Aside from the efficiency and performance benefits of sub-LUN tiering (EMC FASTVP), and the higher scalability of VMAX vs DMX as well as pretty much any other storage array on the market, EMC has added another new feature to VMAX that is particularly advantageous to this particular customer — Federated Live Migration

Tech Refresh and Data Migrations:

Tech Refresh is a fact of life and data migrations, as a result are common place. The challenge with a data migration is finding a workable process and then shoehorning that process into existing SLAs and maintenance windows. In general, data migrations are disruptive in some way or another, and the level of disruption depends on the technology used and the type of migration. EMC has a long list of migration tools that cover our midrange storage systems, NAS systems, as well as high-end Symmetrix arrays. The downside with these and other vendors’ migration tools is that there is some level of downtime required.

There are 3 basic approaches:

  1. Highest Amount of Downtime:
    • Take system down, copy data, reconfigure system, bring system online
  2. Less Downtime:
    • Copy Data, Take system down, copy recent changes, reconfigure system, bring system online (EMC Open Replicator, EMCopy, RoboCopy, Rsync, EMC SANCopy, etc)
  3. Even Less Downtime:
    • Set up new storage to proxy old storage, reconfigure system, serve data while copying in the background. (EMC Celerra CDMS, EMC Symmetrix Open Replicator)
    • (Traditional virtualization systems like Hitachi USP/VSP, IBM SVC, etc are similar to this as well since you must take some level of downtime to get hosts configured through the virtualization layer, after which you can non-disruptively move data).

Common theme in all 3? Downtime!

Non-Disruptive Migrations are becoming more realistic:

A while ago now, EMC added a feature to PowerPath called Migration Enabler which is a way to non-disruptively migrate data between LUNs and/or Storage arrays from the host perspective. PowerPath Migration Enabler could also leverage storage based copy mechanisms and help with cut over. This is very helpful and I have multiple customers who have successfully migrated data with PPME. The challenge has been getting customers to upgrade to newer versions of PowerPath that include the PPME features they need for their specific environment. Software upgrades usually require some level of downtime, at least on a per-host basis, and we run into maintenance windows and SLAs again.

EMC Symmetrix Federated Live Migration (FLM)

For Symmetrix VMAX customers, EMC has added a new capability that could make data migrations easy as pie for many customers. With FLM, a VMAX can migrate data into itself from another storage array, and perform the host cutover, automatically, and non-disruptively. The VMAX does not have to be inserted in front of the other storage array, and there is no downtime required to reconfigure the host before or after the migration.

Federation is the key to non-disruptive migrations:

The way FLM works is really pretty simple. First, the host is connected to the new VMAX storage without removing the connectivity to the old storage. The VMAX is also connected to the old storage array directly (through the fabric in reality). The VMAX system then sets up a replication session for the devices owned by the host and begins copying data. This is all pretty straightforward. The smart stuff happens during the cut over process.

As you probably know, the VMAX is an Active/Active storage system, so all paths from a host to a LUN are active. Clariion, similar to most other midrange systems is an Active/Passive storage system. On Clariion, paths to the storage processor that owns the LUN are active, while paths to the non-owner are passive until needed. PowerPath and many other path management tools support both active/active and active/passive storage systems.

Symmetrix FLM leverages this active/passive support for the cut over. Essentially the old storage system is the “owning SP” before and during the migration. At cut over time, the VMAX essentially becomes the owning SP and it’s paths go active while the old paths go passive. PowerPath follows the “trespass” and the host keeps on chugging. To make this work, VMAX actually spoofs the LUN WWN and host ID, etc from the old array, so the host thinks it’s still talking to the old array. Filesystems and LVMs that signature and track LUNs based on WWN and/or Host ID are unaffected as a result. The cut over process is nothing more than a path change at the HBA level. The data copy and cut over are managed directly from the VMAX by an administrator.

Of course there are limitations… FLM initially supports only EMC Symmetrix DMX arrays as the source and requires PowerPath. From what I gather, this is not a technical limitation however, it’s just what EMC has tested and supports. Other EMC arrays will be supported later and I have no doubt it will support non-EMC arrays as a source as well.

Solving the $5 million problem:

Symmetrix Federated Live Migration became a signature feature in our VMAX discussions with the aforementioned customer because they know that for every minute their database is down, they lose $90,000 in revenue. Even with the fastest of the 3 traditional methods of migration, they would be down for up to an hour while 12 cluster nodes are rezoned to new storage, LUNs masked, drive letters assigned, etc. A reboot alone takes up to 30 minutes. 1 hour of downtime equates to $5,400,000 of lost revenue. By the way, that’s quite a bit more than the cost of the VMAX, and FLM is included at no additional license cost, so FLM just paid for the VMAX, and then some.

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