Reliability

Despite trends in NAS virtualization and other appliance-based virtualization, nothing beats the rock solid reliability of Hitachi’s VSP—probably its top feature. Any growing enterprise with mission critical data should take a close look at the VSP for this reason. The VSP’s unique controller architecture can handle multiple cascading controller failures without going down, with very limited performance degradation. Software upgrades can be done without server reboots, which makes it the least disruptive to applications during SW upgrades.

One of our clients recently implemented the Hitachi VSP for this very feature. You can read about the full project in the CRN article, Denali Deploys Virtual Desktops To Give Doctors More Time With Patients. ASG handled the Hitachi VSP portion of this project. Here’s a quick summary from our own Pacific Northwest Regional Architect, Grant Loveridge:

“Seattle Children’s Hospital was having issues with their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) system going down intermittently, and VDI plays a very important role at Seattle Children’s Hospital.  Doctors and nurses rely on certain information to make critical decisions about patient care, etc.  In short, the system just can’t go down! In the process of rolling out their VDI deployment, the customer quickly realized their infrastructure was not robust enough. There were some concerns about the backend storage not being able to handle the demands and patient information not being available to the hospital staff.  Plus, the hospital operates 24 x 7, which means maintenance windows are very difficult to schedule.”

“The customer purchased the VSP to provide the reliability and scalability they needed—with just enough capacity to support the VDI pilot. The customer was able to get started with the VSP at an affordable level, using emergency funding.  All upgrades were accomplished with no downtime to users or applications. They have since scaled the system to support many more users and applications.  They also purchased a second VSP for disaster recovery and are using Hitachi Universal Replicator between sites—a project that is now underway. All in all, the customer is very happy with the VSP solution.”

With these benefits, I imagine the popularity of the Hitachi VSP can only continue to grow. I’ll be sure to keep you updated on its progress. If you have any questions about the VSP or our other Hitachi solutions, feel free to contact us.

About the Author
Anthony Sayre is an Advanced Product Specialist at ASG and our resident expert for Hitachi Data Systems solutions. You can contact him at asayre (at) virtual.com.

A quiet storm has been brewing at Advanced Systems Group. The Hitachi Data Systems Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), Hitachi’s flagship enterprise storage solution, has been quietly taking the data center world by storm. The Hitachi VSP can only be described as a smash hit since its introduction a year ago. With a full sales pipeline and 24 units sold or in process of implementation (that’s a lot—trust me), the VSP is fulfilling mid-range to enterprise needs for mission critical primary storage, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, public and private cloud, archival and more.

We can’t sell VSP solutions fast enough, for two reasons: the scale/consolidation abilities of the VSP and its unmatched reliability. Today, I’ll just discuss the first of these features—scale/consolidation.

Scale/consolidation

The VSP can be a diskless storage virtualization engine, and/or it can scale up to over 2000 2.5” disk drives. Plus, it can virtualize up to 255 petabytes (!) of external storage, which is key to Hitachi’s ability to scale and consolidate older legacy systems under one management tool. Here at ASG, we’re witnessing first-hand just how powerful the scale/consolidation story can be. Here’s an example:

One of our clients, a Colorado based e-marketing company, provides many cloud services to fortune 500 companies around the world. As new projects for their clients come up, they often need to move data on the fly from lower to higher storage tiers, run the project, and then move the data back. Without Hitachi’s storage virtualization features like tiered storage management, this wouldn’t be possible without hiring many more IT storage administrators, taking systems down, migrating data, and booting them back up again—a nightmarish task for any data center manager, but especially in this company’s multiple petabyte data center.

ASG engineers architected a VSP solution that’s in the implementation process now, and will consolidate the customer’s 1.3PB of storage spread across 111 devices to 1.6PB across just 11(!) devices in a streamlined virtualized storage environment with automated tiering and DR. This wouldn’t have been possible without the VSP’s consolidation and massive scaling abilities.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the second of the VSP’s most desired features—its outstanding reliability. In the mean time, feel free to share your own Hitachi success story in the comments below. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to learn more about the VSP or our other Hitachi solutions.

About the Author
Anthony Sayre is an Advanced Product Specialist at ASG and our resident expert for Hitachi Data Systems solutions. You can contact him at asayre (at) virtual.com.

Despite the great wedding celebrations and fanfare which will inevitably occur during the honeymoon period, I will sadly shed a tear as a fair maiden that believed and stood for the virtues of platform independent technologies is to be whisked off into the sunset by another burly corporate man. One can only hope that the aforementioned kiss is one of love and understanding which will rejuvenate Sun and not a fatal kiss of death.

But now, nearly two years on Oracle’s commitment to Sun hardware remains strong. In fact, we’re seeing some exciting developments that lead us to believe that the sum of the merger is greater than its individual parts. And that’s important for a number of reasons. An IDC Digital Universe study conducted in June of this year found the following staggering numbers:

• In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated was 1.8 zettabytes (that’s 1.8 trillion gigabytes). That’s 9X growth in the last 5 years
• Enterprises have liability for 80% of information in the digital universe at some point in its digital life
• The amount of information created doubles every two years
• By 2020 (that’s only 8 years away), the world will generate 50X the amount of information, yet IT staff to manage that information will grow only 1.5X

These numbers tell us that robust enterprise data storage solutions are going to be in high demand for the foreseeable future.

Oracle’s new Database Appliance is poised to ratchet up enterprise data management, and as one of their VARs, we couldn’t be more excited about it. CRN gave it high marks in a recent review, and there are plenty of reasons why we think this could be a fantastic offering for enterprises and SMBs alike.

1. It’s a single 4U rack-mountable chassis containing two Oracle Linux server nodes.  Each node has two 6-core Intel Xeon processors X5675 and 96 GB of memory. The appliance contains 12 TB of raw storage that’s triple-mirrored, offering 4 TB of resilient usable database storage.

2. It has out-of-the-box deployment, though at 167 pounds it might take a couple of people to mount safely.

3. It has redundant power and great thermals. Considering the computing power it contains, it doesn’t throw nearly the heat you’d expect.

The timing of the new Oracle Database Appliance couldn’t be better. There’s a huge data explosion happening, and we don’t see a slow down on the horizon. Also, while cloud computing solutions are certainly going to play a role in enterprise data management, the transition to the cloud is taking some time. The Database Appliance can bridge that gap while also boosting data security.

Data storage solutions

1. Leveraging tiered storage

2. Performing an extensive application workload analysis.

Here are the remaining 3 best practices for data storage.

3. Consolidate storage pools as much as possible.
Another helpful strategy for managing costs is physical centralization of your storage. This not only centralizes troubleshooting and remote maintenance, it centralizes administration, which eases task automation and reduces human intervention. Physical centralization o­ffers better information life-cycle management across the storage pools and shares peripheral storage—that ultimately increases overall reliability. Additionally, physical centralization reduces business continuance (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) costs and improves failover execution.

When you consolidate storage pools, you also increase your data availability without su­ffering the exponential costs often associated with it. This allows non-disruptive online modifications, provides multiple and redundant paths between applications and data, and off­ers better overall data protection options and facilities.

You might also consider creating a highly scalable and configurable storage solution when you consolidate storage pools. This o­ffers the ability to adapt to unpredictable growth, as well as the ability to separate your storage access from your data access.

4. Implement staged backups.
Although tape is seemingly inexpensive, you can easily underestimate the total cost of ownership. However, if you incorporate disk into the backup and recovery process, you can implement an eff­ective strategy that trims IT costs and reduces the complexity associated with data protection.

Disk-tape backups separate the backup target from the backup archive. Disk-based backups allow backup software to operate normally, except this strategy first writes backups to disk. Once copied on disk, the backup image is then cloned to tape.

When you incorporate disk-based backups into existing data protection processes, you can greatly simplify data protection management.  That’s because you can perform disk-based backups virtually any time without a significant impact on primary applications and databases. And when you keep backup images on disk, end-users can quickly recover their own data without intervention from IT personnel.

Disk-backups also extend the investment life of existing tape media and tape devices. Often, incorporating disk backups allows IT organizations to defer and even eliminate the need to invest in additional tape resources, backup media, and IT staff.

Once on this secondary storage, you can back up your data to tape and send it off-site, possibly in encrypted format, for robust data protection.

5. Automate discovery and reporting.
Simply storing data isn’t enough—you also need to be able to locate and retrieve it. Without adequate discovery and reporting, storage documentation is incomplete and inaccurate.

Unfortunately, as storage grows, so does the manual process of administrating it. Rather than investing in more resources, however, you can implement automation tools to automate discovery and reporting. Not only do such automation tools help manage IT costs, they also make your existing storage administrators more e­fficient, reducing potential mistakes.  Storage administrators can manage more storage, more effectively, while still meeting growth needs.

Automation tools provide valuable information that you can use to closely manage the most expensive tiers of storage and focus the majority of growth in lower-cost tiers. Again, it’s important to maintain the balance your business requirements with the tier of storage in order to make the most of your resources.

Although you can’t control all the potential problems disk drives present, you can implement these data storage solutions and strategies to help minimize threats and maximize opportunities for your business. Data affects your business so you should have the storage infrastructure that makes sense for your company, to get the most out of all your resources.

Data storage solutions, and subsequent best practices, vary greatly by manufacturer and implementation, which makes a universal perspective difficult to articulate. However, all companies require a robust storage infrastructure. And these days, everyone needs to make the most of limited resources without sacri­ficing service levels, limited budgets, and future scalability.

Here are ­the first two of five tips to help you establish a storage infrastructure that makes the most of your resources and realizes the highest possible ROI.

1. Leverage tiered storage. Like most businesses today, your company depends on the availability of electronic data. While your data storage needs grow exponentially along with your business, your budget does not.  To make the most of limited resources, organizations should ask, “What data and applications warrant the added cost and complexity of a SAN? What storage should remain on less costly server-attached RAID? What is the ratio of application ­les (fairly static) to data ­les (very dynamic)?”

Every company has several types of data and applications, and each piece provides different value to the company. When you implement a tiered storage structure, you align your storage infrastructure costs with the business value of each kind of data and application. When your business requirements correlate with your storage tiers, you save money.

The concept behind tiered storage is simple: You invest the majority of your storage resources in the fastest, most reliable devices for your highest-valued data and applications. This investment helps your business operate more effectively, more reliably, and more productively—ultimately making your business more profi­table. Today, this storage might include the new Solid State Drives (SSD) emerging on the market.

Likewise, you place your less-critical and less-valued data and applications on slower and less expensive storage. This includes any data that requires large amounts of storage, but users don’t access very often—such as e-mail data retained for U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, for example.

2. Perform an extensive application workload analysis. Once you implement a tiered storage structure, you need to populate the tiers with data and applications. To make the most educated decisions about the range of data storage solutions you need and determining which data and applications belong on each tier, you should perform an extensive application workload analysis.

In particular, you should determine I/O processing demand and latency requirements before deploying primary applications on SATA storage. Ultimately, this helps your company balance the availability and redundancy of the diff­erent data types with the various storage costs. You can determine which performance trade-o­ffs your company can accept—specifically, which data and applications can leverage lower cost storage infrastructures and which cannot.

Our next blog will cover the remaining 3 data storage solutions best practices, so check back shortly. In the interim, what are your best practices that you can share?

The launch of their new DXi6700 disk backup and deduplication appliances was the most successful branded systems product launch in Quantum’s 30 year history in terms of revenue generated. The DXi6701 and DXi6702 appliances saw wide market acceptance for providing a unique combination of industry-leading performance and value, along with broad scalability spanning midrange and enterprise environments and multi-protocol interfaces.

Our CTO, Mark Teter, had this to say…

“With the DXi6701/02, our customers get all of the necessary software licenses included in the price and an easy-to-deploy design. The complete package delivers best-in-class total cost of ownership and future-proof features.”

Partners like Quantum make it easier to provide disaster recovery and storage solutions to our customers, so we’re proud to share this exciting news. Here’s a link to the complete press release from Quantum.

Why would anyone intentionally move to a 10K rpm speed drives over 15K rpm? Especially for mission critical apps? A little analytics gives us the answer.

The key differentiators boil down to density and price. These two attributes work together to overcome the IOPS delta between 10K rpm vs. 15K rpm and here’s the secret sauce:

1) Density - 24 x 2.5” 10K rpm SAS drives fit into a 2U disk shelf, which makes it denser than regular 3U disk and even the so-called “hi-density” 4U shelf which HDS also offers.

2) Price – The individual drive and shelf price for 2.5” 10K are the same as that of the regular 3.5” 15K drive and shelf, and about a 3rd the cost of one hi-density shelf. But since 24 can fit into one 2U tray instead of 15 in a 3U tray (or even 38 in a 4U tray) the overall cost per tray is less. With the lowest cost available for SAS disk from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), clients can easily afford to add a few more disks to make up the IOPS difference and still save money.

The following chart illustrates how this works (click to enlarge):

• Each row in the above chart represents one full tray’s worth of disk for each disk type. The top section compares IOPS per tray, IOPS per rack unit, etc… while the bottom section compares environmentals
• The “IOPS/tray” column shows numbers that favor the 3.5” hi-density 600GB option. But since the 2.5” option is 2U instead of 4U, the “Computed IOPS/Rack Unit” column levels the playing field. And since the cost is less per tray, the “IOPS/dollar” is also about even. The “Raw GB/$” is quite a bit better for the upstart 2.5” 10K drive.
• The environmental comparison is off-the-charts in favor of the 2.5” 10K. For those that have power cooling cost concerns, this is the option to go with.

What does this mean in plain terms?
We are working on a solution currently where the client asked for an AMS2500 with about 87TB usable for a hi-performance production environment. We configured a 600GB 3.5” 15K “hi-density” version as well as a 600GB 2.5” 10K version. The 2.5” 10K MSRP hardware total came to $480K while the 3.5” “hi-density” version MSRP total came to $629K, 23%(!) higher.

The total IOPS for the 2.5” 10K version is 8%-10% less than the “hi-density” version, so the IOPS delta is negligible. And since the cost is so much less, we could add more drives into the data storage solution to make up the IOPS difference while still remaining at or below the cost of the “hi-density” solution (which would also increase the usable capacity).

It’s also interesting to note the 2.5” 10K version takes up a total of 22 rack units while the so-called “hi-density” version takes up 28 rack units. Lastly, the power/cooling numbers are 46%+ less (!) in the 2.5” 10K version. Remember this is just an 87TB usable solution and the argument is compelling. It becomes even more compelling as the total capacity goes up.

This is why several of ASG’s largest HDS clients are making the switch now to 2.5” 10K rpm drives as a standard for production or are seriously considering it.

Steve Wine, our most senior account executive based out of our Denver, Colorado office summed it up:

“We presented these drive performance numbers to my largest storage client in Colorado and it convinced them to make the switch. They deliver cloud storage and other related services so the need for high-performance was paramount and we took that into consideration. We now have several AMS units installed (at the client) with all 2.5” drives and they are performing perfectly, even in their highest performance tier.  Because they buy so much disk storage, switching to 2.5” drives has been a huge cost savings both on cap ex and op ex side. This will be their standard for most modular storage going forward.”

The complete analysis has garnered a lot of great feedback from our clients who really use it for data center planning. For a copy of this analysis containing a complete Hitachi modular drive comparison chart containing all available options, contact Anthony Sayre at “asayre (at) virtual.com”.

About the Author
Anthony Sayre
ASG Advanced Product Specialist
asayre (at) virtual.com

Art Center relies on a heavy computing environment, the result of offering data-intensive courses in film, photography, graphic design, and many other art and design programs. With their original decentralized storage infrastructure, Art Center found it difficult to manage and protect its growing data. They needed to consolidate their storage resources into a single unified platform to allow them to more effectively manage their IT environment while gaining efficiencies.

Here’s what they did…

Art Center worked with us to leverage NetApp’s unique storage efficiency technologies to reduce storage costs and requirements. With thin provisioning, Art Center now utilizes just 3.5TB of NetApp storage to manage a total storage allocation of 27.5TB for students and faculty, saving the college more than $90,000 in storage costs. The school has also saved an additional $45,000 with deduplication technology that reduces VMware storage requirements by 44%.

To reclaim much needed storage space, the college used to purge student data at the end of each academic year. With NetApp’s ability to quickly and easily reprovision storage combined with the increased efficiencies, Art Center is now able to provide 5GB of personal storage to students for the length of their time in school and 20GB to faculty members. Now, the college can more effectively respond to and manage the school’s hard-to-predict and expanding storage needs with improved flexibility.

Finally, Art Center leveraged SnapManager® for Exchange and Single Mailbox Recovery to enhance the college’s e-mail availability. As a result, recovering mailboxes—which used to take as much as 2 hours—now takes just 45 minutes, getting staff and faculty back online faster for improved productivity.

NetApp’s advancements in storage efficiency make these savings realistic for many organizations that have big data requirements.

Join us, along with NetApp, at the 20^th annual CISD Technology Conference and Expo.  This Council of Information Services Directors (CISD) show will be held on October 10-11 at the Crowne Plaza in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

NetApp will be highlighting their FlexPod™ for VMware Infrastructure Solution. With the innovative FlexPod solution, you can move your data center to the cloud with a prevalidated, fully-tested architecture solution that utilizes the leading technologies from NetApp, VMware, and Cisco. It simultaneously supports a variety of mixed application workloads and can be optimized for virtual desktop or server infrastructures, multi-tenancy, or private/public cloud computing environments.

You can read one of our previous blogs on FlexPod or check out NetApp’s FlexPod for VMware solution brief.

We hope to see you at the show next week!