Tag Archives: vplex

StorageSavvy Blog 2010 in review

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WordPress sent me an email with overall stats for 2010 and I thought I’d share a few things I noticed.

First, thank you to all of my readers as well as those who have linked to and otherwise shared my posts with others.  I know that many of my peer bloggers have much higher numbers than I, but I still think 22,000 views is pretty respectable.

For 2010, my most popular post was Resiliency vs Redundancy: Using VPLEX for SQL HA.  The top 5 posts are listed here..

1

Resiliency vs Redundancy: Using VPLEX for SQL HA June 2010

2

EMC CLARiiON and Celerra Updates – Defining Unified Storage May 2010
1 comment

3

NetApp and EMC: Real world comparisons October 2009
10 comments

4

While EMC users benefit from Replication Manager, NetApp users NEED SnapManager June 2010
25 comments

5

NetApp and EMC: Replication Management Tools Comparison June 2010
2 comments

You may notice a theme here.  First, Midrange Storage is HOT, and any comparisons between EMC and it’s competitors seem to get more attention compared to most other topics. Note #3 was written in 2009 and it’s the 3rd most viewed post on my blog in 2010. A secondary theme in these top 5 posts might be disaster recovery as well since most of these posts have DR concepts in the content as well.

Looking at search engine results the it looks like emc flare 30, clariion, and mirrorview network qos requirements were the hottest terms.  The MirrorView one is pretty specific so I may do some blogging on that topic in the future.

With these stats in mind, I’ll keep working to hone my blogging skills through 2011 and sharing as much real-world information as I can, especially as I work with my customers to implement solutions.  One thing I’ll do is try and provide the comparisons people seem to be interested in, but focusing on the advantages of products, while steering clear of negativity as much as possible.

Welcome to 2011!  It’s going to be fun!

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Using Cloud as a SAN Tier?

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I came across this press release today from a company that I wasn’t familiar with and immediately wanted more information.  Cirtas Systems has announced support for Atmos-based clouds, including AT&T Synaptic Storage.  Whenever I see these types of announcements, I read on in hopes of seeing real fiber channel block storage leveraging cloud-based architectures in some way.  So far I’ve been a bit disappointed since the closest I’ve seen has been NAS based systems, at best including iSCSI.

Cirtas BlueJet Cloud Storage Controller is pretty interesting in its own right though.  It’s essentially an iSCSI storage array with a cache and a small amount of SSD and SAS drives for local storage.  Any data beyond the internal 5TB of usable capacity is stored in “the cloud” which can be an onsite Private Cloud (Atmos or Atmos/VE) and/or a Public Cloud hosted by Amazon S3, Iron Mountain, AT&T Synaptic, or any Atmos-based cloud service provider.

Cirtas BlueJet

The neat thing with BlueJet is that it leverages a ton of the functionality that many storage vendors have been developing recently such as data de-duplication, compression, some kind of block level tiering, and space efficient snapshots to improve performance and reduce the costs of cloud storage.  It seems that pretty much all of the local storage (SAS, SSD, and RAM) is used as a tiered cache for hot data.  This gives users and applications the sense of local SAN performance even while hosting the majority of data offsite.

While I haven’t seen or used a BlueJet device and can’t make any observations about performance or functionality, I believe this sort of block->cloud approach has pretty significant customer value.  It reduces physical datacenter costs for power and cooling, and it presents some rather interesting disaster recovery opportunities.

Similar to how Compellent’s signature feature, tiered block storage, has been added to more traditional storage arrays, I think modified implementations of Cirtas’ technology will inevitably come from the larger players, such as EMC, as a feature in standard storage arrays.  If you consider that EMC Unified Storage and EMC Symmetrix VMAX both have large caches and block- level tiering today, it’s not too much of a stretch to integrate Atmos directly into those storage systems as another tier.  EMC already does this for NAS with the EMC File Management Appliance.

Conceptual Diagram

I can imagine leveraging FASTCache and FASTVP to tier locally for the data that must be onsite for performance and/or compliance reasons and pushing cold/stale blocks off to the cloud.  Additionally, adding cloud as a tier to traditional storage arrays allows customers to leverage their existing investment in Storage, FC/FCoE networks, reporting and performance trending tools, extensive replication options available, and the existing support for VMWare APIs like SRM and VAAI.

With this model, replication of data for disaster recovery/avoidance only needs to be done for the onsite data since the cloud data could be accessed from anywhere.  At a DR site, a second storage system connects to the same cloud and can access the cold/stale data in the event of a disaster.

Another option would be adding this functionality to virtualization platforms like EMC VPLEX for active/active multi-site access to SAN data, while only needing to store the majority of the company’s data once in the cloud for lower cost.  Customers would no longer have to buy double the required capacity to implement a disaster recovery strategy.

I’m eagerly awating the implementation of cloud into traditional block storage and I can see how some vendors will be able to do this easily, while others may not have the architecture to integrate as easily.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

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EMC, Isilon, and CSX possibilities..

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As you’ve no doubt heard, EMC has completed the tender offer to acquire Isilon (www.isilon.com)  for a Cajillion dollars (actually ~$2 Billion) and some people are asking why.  From where I sit, there are many reasons why EMC would want a company like Isilon, ranging from it’s media-minded customer base, to the technical IP, like scale-out NAS, that sets Isilon apart from the rest.

This EMC Press Release, as well as this one, and Chucks Blog are some of the many places to find out more about the acquisition…

I was thinking a lot about that technology as I worked on a high-bandwidth NAS project with a customer recently.  Isilon’s primary product is an IP-based storage solution that uses commodity based hardware components, combined with their proprietary OneFS Operating System, to deliver scale-out NAS with super simple management and scalability.  A single Isilon OneFS based filesystem can scale to over 10PB across hundreds of nodes.  Isilon also provides various versions of hardware that can be intermixed to increase performance, capacity, or both depending on customer needs.  You don’t necessarily have to add disks to an Isilon cluster to increase performance.

When looking at EMC’s own product line, you’ll find that Atmos delivers similar scale-out clustering for object-based storage, while VMAX does a similar type of scaling for high-end block storage (FC, FCoE, and iSCSI), and Greenplum provides scale-out analytics as well.  Line up Isilon’s OneFS, EMC GreenPlum, EMC Atmos, and EMC VMAX, and we can now deliver massive scale-out storage for database, object, file, and block data.  With VPLEX and Atmos, EMC also delivers block and object storage federation across distance.

Isilon’s OneFS also has technologies that mirror EMC’s but are implemented in such a way as to leverage the Scale-Out NAS model.  Take FlexProtect, for example, which is Isilon’s data protection mechanism (similar to RAID) and allows admins to apply different protection schemes (N+1 ala RAID5, N+2 ala RAID6, N+3, and even N+4 redundancy) on individual files and directories.  SmartPools, which is policy based, automatically tiers data at a file level based on read/write activity across different protection types and physical nodes, similar to how FASTVP tiers data at a block level on EMC Unified and VMAX.  Both EMC and Isilon realize that all data is not equal.

Rather than just repackage OneFS with an EMC logo (which I’m sure we’ll do at first), I wonder what else can we do with Isilon’s IP…

A recent series of blog posts by Steve Todd (Information Playground) on the topic of a Common Software Execution Environment (See CSX Technology and The Benefits of Component Assembly) got me thinking about deeper integration and how CSX can accelerate that integration.

For example…

What if EMC Engineering took the portions of code from Isilon’s OneFS that handle client load-balancing, file-level automated tiering, and flexible protection and turned them into CSX components.  Those components could be dropped into Celerra and immediately add Scale-Out NAS to EMC’s existing Unified storage platforms.  Or, imagine those components running directly in VMAX engines, providing scale-out NAS simultaneously with scale-out SAN across multiple, massive scale storage systems.  Combine the load balancing code and FlexProtect from Isilon with FASTVP in EMC Clariion to provide scale-out SAN in a midrange platform.

We could also reverse the situation and use the compression component that is in Clariion and Celerra, plus federation technology in Atmos, both added to OneFS in order reduce the storage footprint and extend Scale-Out NAS to many sites over any distance.  Add a GreenPlum component and suddenly you have a massive analytics cluster that spans multiple sites for data where you need it, when you need it.

The possibilities here really are endless, it will be very interesting to see what happens over the next 12 to 24 months.

Disclaimer: Even though I am an EMC employee, I am in no way involved in the EMC/Isilon acquisition, have no knowledge of future plans and roadmaps with regard to EMC and Isilon, and am not privy to any non-public information about this topic.  I am merely expressing my own personal views on this topic.

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Resiliency vs Redundancy: Using VPLEX for SQL HA

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A little history on my philosophy around high-availability

Around the year 2000, when I was working in network operations for a large wireless telco, a very senior network architect explained to me the company’s philosophy on building high availability solutions into the network.  The phrase I remember from that conversation was “we don’t build redundant networks, we build resilient networks..” The difference is that while redundant networks failover to secondary paths to resume traffic, resilient networks don’t go down at all.  This concept has stuck with me ever since and I tend to tackle high-availability problems of all kinds with this idea in mind.  It’s frankly been very difficult to build solutions that are resilient across the entire stack, mostly because infrastructure technology hasn’t quite gotten there yet.

Things may have changed…

I recently had a meeting with a customer to discuss local high availability for SQL.  This customer has a very large multi-node clustered SQL environment (hundreds of TBs of data, hundreds of databases, hundreds of instances, many clusters, many nodes per cluster) and has been testing SQL database mirroring as an alternative to traditional Windows Failover Clustering.  The focus of the meeting wound up focused primarily on leveraging VPLEX as an alternative to SQL mirroring, and the reasons for that decision suddenly reminded me of the Resiliency vs Redundancy discussion I had years ago.  A VPLEX solution potentially solves the same problem as DB mirroring, does it with less complexity, and less risk.

VPLEX Local as a Resilient HA solution

One of the many features of VPLEX is it’s ability to mirror data across multiple storage arrays and present that mirror as a single LUN to the host.  For customers already running large multi-node MSCS clusters, the LUN appears just like any normal storage LUN and Windows/SQL treat the LUN normally.  There are several reasons VPLEX should be considered as an alternative to database mirroring. (much of this applies to Exchange CCR as well)

VPLEX hardware is inherently Resilient.  A VPLEX cluster is an N+1 cluster of loosely coupled nodes, cooperating with each other, but not depending on each other.  Hosts can access any of the hosted data, through any of the ports, on any of the cluster nodes.  If a node fails for any reason, the remaining nodes continue serving IO for any data.  Except for a dead path on the host side (managed by PowerPath or MPIO), there is no failover process, and no cache mirroring to worry about.  The potential performance impact of a failure is equal to 1, divided by the quantity of that component in the cluster. (128 x 8gbe ports across 8 director nodes for a large VPLEX Local cluster)

In addition, because VPLEX utilizes a write-through cache, there is never any dirty cache data (data in cache that has not been committed to disk) in a VPLEX system.  A power outage or VPLEX hardware failure does not put data at risk.

Other Advantages of using VPLEX over SQL Database Mirroring

Improved Performance:

  • Compared with SQL Database mirroring, VPLEX mirroring has significantly less impact on transaction performance for writes and can improve transaction performance in some cases due to the large read cache in the VPLEX directors. (Note: I am comparing to DB Mirroring in Full-Safety mode since the customer’s requirement was a zero-data-loss solution.)

Non-Disruptive Storage Failover:

  • In the event of a storage failure, SQL Mirroring must perform a cluster node failover which takes a few seconds at best, possibly disrupting applications.  VPLEX provides completely non-disruptive failover when a storage failure occurs.  (A server hardware failure still triggers a node failover as it would in any other failover clustering scenario.)

Less Management Overhead:

  • From a management perspective, using VPLEX instead of SQL Database mirroring gives the SQL DBAs fewer SQL instances and fewer moving parts to manage on a daily basis.  The storage team just presents a mirrored LUN from VPLEX to the cluster and it’s business as usual for the DBAs.
  • VPLEX also allows the storage team to non-disruptively migrate data between storage arrays behind VPLEX to balance load, perform hardware refreshes, resolve capacity problems.  VPLEX performs the migration at the direction of the storage admins.

Reduced Risk:

  • Reducing management complexity also reduces risk.  With a high number of database instances and db mirrors involved in a large environment like this one, the chance of one of those mirrors having a problem, or being configured incorrectly, is increased.  DBAs can rely on VPLEX mirroring all of the data, 24x7x365, even when host maintenance is being performed.

Reduced Cost:

  • When compared with the SQL Database Mirroring solution, the VPLEX solution reduced the number of physical servers needed in this environment, reducing cost enough to more than offset the cost of VPLEX itself.  Combined with reductions in soft costs, like reduced DBA management overhead, VPLEX will actually save them quite a bit of money, and increased uptime during storage refresh and maintenance will increase revenues in this case as well.

A Distributed Future:

  • Next year, when a second datacenter is online nearby, the first VPLEX Local cluster can be connected to another VPLEX cluster in the new datacenter.  Then the SQL cluster nodes and data can be distributed across both datacenters, providing protection from entire datacenter outages, or solving space constraints with no changes to the application or servers, and no downtime.

I wonder how many other customers would like to build more resilient infrastructures?

If you combine a VPLEX solution with a true cluster file system and an active-active database engine (ie: Oracle RAC), you can eliminate the disruption caused by server hardware failures.  It’s just a matter of time now until the entire stack can be designed for true resiliency with very little management overhead.  I can’t wait to see what happens.

The following EMC White Paper has a lot of good information about using VPLEX in this same context:

Workload Resiliency with EMC VPLEX

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EMC VPLEX enables the private cloud.. But what is a “private cloud”?

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Buzzword Much?

If you have seen any of EMC’s marketing for EMC World, or you are attending EMC World in Boston this week, you no doubt noticed a ton of talk about the “Private Cloud”.  There has been a lot more talk from vendors as of late about the “cloud” and “cloud computing” and you may be reminded about how every few years the word “cloud” is shouted out by vendors of all kinds and how inevitably the talk quiets and nothing is really different.  So is it different this time?  I think so.

What is a Cloud?

In the context of IT, there are examples of clouds already.  The Internet and public telephone system are two examples of clouds.  Facebook, Flickr, and Salesforce are examples of clouds as well.  The common theme is that each of these examples provides some sort of service to the end user without requiring the end user to purchase or build any infrastructure to support it.  You can plug a phone into a wall and immediately call nearly anyone in the world.  Cloud is a fancy word (or buzzword) for providing something “as-a-service”.  Salesforce.com is software-as-a-service (SaaS).

So what is the Private Cloud?  

In the context of enterprise datacenters, the focus of EMC’s vision, the Private Cloud is Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and it enables corporate IT to transition from a necessary expense, to a profit center within the business, providing IT-as-a-Service to the rest of the business.  It decouples infrastructure from applications providing unprecedented levels of scalability, availability, and flexibility at lower cost.

What if…
a.) your corporate applications could run from anywhere, and users had access from anywhere?
b.) you could relocate your applications from anywhere to anywhere else, at any time, without disruption to your users.
c.) you could replace any piece of physical hardware in your infrastructure without impacting your applications.

Sounds too good to be true right? Maybe not…

This week, EMC announced a completely new product called VPLEX.  VPLEX has the ability to take your existing storage arrays and pool them into a cooperative pool of storage for hosts and applications.  It then allows you to move application data within and across those arrays as needed without disrupting the application or users.  If you are familiar with EMC’s Invista, IBM’s SVC, or Hitachi’s USP-V products you may be thinking that VPLEX is just another storage virtualization product.  But I assure you it’s different.  VPLEX virtualizes storage within the datacenter similar to how the above products can, but VPLEX can ALSO combine storage across multiple datacenters and allow an application to run from any of them or all of them, simultaneously, through the power of Federation.

Active/Active Datacenters

With VPLEX Federation, you can move a virtual machine and all of its data from datacenter A to datacenter B in a matter of minutes without user disruption; or hundreds of VMs, or thousands of VMs.  You can run the same application in both locations, sharing a single dataset.  Armed with EMC VPLEX and VMWare vSphere, you can upgrade, replace, and reconfigure any part of your infrastructure (storage, servers, network, power distribution, etc) without ever having to take your applications offline.  How’s that for availability?

The ability to create a virtual infrastructure from the storage layer through to the server layer and host any application on that infrastructure is the key to creating providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service, building the Private Cloud, and provisioning IT-as-a-Service within your organization.  Imagine running the IT department as a business within the business and actually showing financial value to the business.

There is a lot more to this concept but I wanted to at least bring some context around “cloud” as well as EMC’s new VPLEX product.  There will be more to come on this topic.

Chuck Hollis wrote about VPLEX as a new Storage Platform today, and VirtualGeek called it a Virtual Machine teleporter in his quite detailed write up of this new technology.  The key is to step back with an open mind and think about how application design and disaster recovery planning could be approached in entirely new ways when the data is no longer confined to a particular physical location.

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