The separate tools used to manage the LAN, SAN, blade server connectivity, NICs and HBAs also contribute to data center management complexities. Often administrators can see only what is in their direct line of responsibility and don’t have the overall view of the entire network environment. Now, imagine if they could:

• Logically eliminate the management of multiple switching layers
• Apply policies and manage traffic across many physical switches as if they were one switch
• Scale network bandwidth without manual reconfiguration of switch ports and network policies
• Provide a single, customized view of network status available to server, network, and storage administrators

Ethernet data center bridging and its new Ethernet fabric allows organizations to broaden the sphere of application mobility, provide VM awareness, and optimize server resources for applications just as it improves networking for storage.

Using this new data center bridging Ethernet fabric, organizations can simplify network architecture, more rapidly scale their networks, and significantly reduce data center management overhead. This is still a work in progress, but here at ASG at least, we see converged enterprise DCB Ethernet networks as the future, and we’re focused on helping companies get there as easily as possible.

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.

I recommend this article to anyone considering implementing a cloud computing solution. But I think it’s also important to add something to this discussion—the idea of IT departments adopting a chargeback model based on the services they provide to their business organizations.

What does that mean? IT departments should consider recovering the costs of providing cloud computing services from their end users. This doesn’t necessarily involve billing end users—a chargeback model would also map resource usage, which would help predict capacity management needs and future growth planning.

In order to answer that critical question, “How can a business evaluate the benefits between using its own IT versus those from a public cloud provider?” IT needs to provide accurate cost structures about its services much like an ISP, and businesses need to be held accountable for their IT service consumption. Some very mature organizations may achieve this with a show back of costs to the consuming business units, but in most enterprises, chargeback will be a necessity.

The difficulty is that internal IT organizations can’t build capability prior to demand. CFOs should be ready to fund future capacity to enable rapid service provisioning so the business unit receives Johnny-on-the-spot service delivery. The average IT shop is going to have a lot of work ahead of it to sell a CFO on financing an information factory. It could start by establishing an internal chargeback service model.

Once the capacity is in place, IT can get on the task of selling its services to other business units, even business units outside of their own organization! Some companies have already implemented this strategy. For example, a few hospitals we work with already provide regional medical offices with outsourced medical billing and patient applications.

What do you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts on pricing IT service delivery, so drop a comment below.

Organizations of all sizes are already using cloud computing solutions to dramatically increase the flexibility of their IT infrastructure and reduce costs. This is your opportunity to learn more about new solutions and offerings that will empower organizations still contemplating cloud solutions.

Intel’s Sandy Bridge is the name for their second generation of Core processors. It’s first “visibly smart” microarchitecture to combine visual and three-dimensional graphics technology with performance-leading microprocessors on a single chip. Incorporating the newly architected Intel HD Graphics on each 32nm die enables significant graphics performance improvements over previous-generation graphics for both HD media processing and mainstream gaming. The chips improve performance and yet still offer great battery life and the ability to design thinner, lighter and more innovative laptops and all-in-one PCs.

Combining Red Hat’s cloud vision – which is unlike that of any other IT vendor – with Intel’s latest processing advances, and you have the flexibility to evolve your organization to the cloud efficiently and cost effectively.

If you’re in the Houston area and would like to attend, please register. But if you’re not in Houston or are unable to attend, we’ll blog further on this after the event, so please check back.

For example, Solid state disk (SSD) is a form of ­flash memory. This non-volatile memory retains data even when powered off. SSDs use ­flash cells with a storage interface such as FC, SATA or SAS interconnect. There are two general uses for ­flash-based SSD in the enterprise IT stack today:

1. A caching tier
2. A storage tier

Today’s controllers can only handle a limited amount of HDDs before they’re saturated. Similarly, ­flash used as a storage tier limits current storage controllers—several fl­ash drives as a storage partition will easily over saturate current controllers’ bandwidth. Consequently, one of the most strategic, current uses for ­flash is as a storage tier sitting directly on computers PCI buses.

Using ­flash as a caching tier offers far more efficiency and ­flexibility. Sadly, you can only use ­flash as a caching tier for servers with an advanced file system or caching appliance designed for it. Vendors are adjusting file systems to work better with current SSDs, and it’s possible SSDs will evolve to behave more like hard drives, eliminating the need to modify file systems altogether. At the moment, though, you’ll need to tweak file systems to take advantage of the unique features of SSDs.

Thankfully, the Linux 2.6.30 kernel is packed with next-generation file systems including NILFS— a new log-structured file system showing great promise with SSD drives. NILFS treats the storage as a circular buffer in which new blocks are always written to the end. Because all writes go to a contiguous set of blocks, with reads dominated by the caching tier, these file systems tend to do very well on benchmarks that measure write performance.

The ZFS file system from Oracle/Sun Microsystems also reveals the advantages of fl­ash. ZFS automatically uses fl­ash for both writes and reads using specific ­flash pools. It can determine data access patterns and store frequently accessed data in its ­flash-based, level-2 read cache (L2ARC). Plus, it leverages writes by bundling small write IOs into a sequential “lazy” contiguous write. For sequential writes, ZFS utilizes the inherent burst bandwidth of a HDD.

In order to realize the dramatic improvements fl­ash technology offers, system architects must consider two important constraints:

1. Physical access to ­flash is generally restricted to a single host system (unless it is being shared via an exported NFS volume).
2. Lightly-threaded write IO may be slower than traditional NVRAM-based storage systems.

For example, writes to database redo log files that are stored in ­flash memory require more time than those of traditional NVRAM-based systems — a consequence of the write service time characteristics of ­flash devices. Therefore, fl­ash is better suited for use in a hybrid storage pool (mix of ­flash and traditional HDD).

Several vendors have applied solid state technology to create caching modules as an alternative to SSDs for networked storage systems. The use of ­flash as caching tiers requires no administration and— because it ultimately reduces the number of disk drives needed in a storage system— it saves power, cooling, and data center space.

In fact, a storage array will improve its throughput by nearly 80% and reduce the response time by 30% just by adding 1TB of ­flash to an existing 80 TB high-performance HDD storage pool. You’d have to add 140 additional high-performance HDDs to even come close to the effects of this cache. You’d also have to add 120% more cost to the solution and find 125% more rack space, not to mention the extra power you’d need.

Of course, HDD isn’t going away altogether, at least not anytime soon. You should still use low-cost, slower SATA HDD for the bulk of your mass storage needs. But rather than thinking of fl­ash as an expensive technology on a cost-per-gigabyte basis, you can consider ­flash a bargain in terms of cost-per-IOPS.

When required, ­flash delivers high performance cost-efficiently.  Flash offers organizations the highest possible performance from their servers, effectively capturing the full return on their server investment. So wherever performance is an issue, consider using fl­ash as a way to improve performance while respecting your company’s budget.

How are you using flash in your IT environment? Is it playing a role in your data storage solutions? We’d love to hear from you.

The IT world certainly has changed and along with it computer network and data security. The cloud, social media, smartphones, widespread WiFi, tablets, and other innovative technologies bring exciting and valuable business capabilities to the market. Unfortunately, they’ve also introduced new vulnerabilities, breeding a new generation of attackers who are eager capitalize on the susceptibilities.

Few dispute that data has become an organization’s most valuable asset. Organizations must ensure the integrity and control of that data through encryption, data loss prevention strategies, and other data security management techniques.

In the past, network and data security was IT-centric. It typically involved defenses like:

>  Protecting edge switches
>  Setting up layers of firewalls
>  Implementing virus protection by deploying anti-virus software, intercepting viruses at the email and Internet servers, educating users to leave unknown attachments unopened, and blocking users from accessing known risky websites
>  Thwarting DOS attacks by monitoring incoming traffic, recognizing attacks early, and setting switches and routers to perform rate limiting and traffic shaping functions. Organizations expecting more sustained, sophisticated, and distributed DOS attacks deployed additional hardware to capture and divert or redirect the attacks.
>  Scanning online activity to identify and isolate individual hackers often considered “lone rangers” or rogue players.

Although these defenses took nearly a decade to develop and deploy e­ffectively—and in recent years organizations have experienced some success in curtailing malicious activities— these defenses weren’t intended to defend against many of the types of online threats organizations face today. As a result, organizations continue to experience disturbing losses due to computer network security breaches.

Maintaining proper security monitoring and controls are central to defending your organization against data security breaches. Fortunately, new efforts at Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) strategies can counter the latest threats.

SIEM uses automated collection, analysis, alerting, auditing, reporting, and secure storage of all logs, which produces a mountain of information. Tools then correlate this huge amount of seemingly unrelated data and turn it into intelligible patterns that reveal what actually happens on your network and immediately generates alerts if anything significant happens. The results are invaluable to the stakeholders in any organization, including Compliance, HR, Security, IT, and Network Operations.

DLP consists of systems to identify, monitor, and protect data in use, in motion, and at rest. It relies on deep content inspection and contextual data security analysis of all aspects of a transaction within a centralized management framework. In short, DLP is designed to detect and prevent the unauthorized use and transmission of confidential information.

The network and data security threats organizations face place a substantial premium on their ability to recognize threats and correlate threat behavior. Therefore, companies require not only technology tools but enterprise-wide information governance grounded in policies and education. That’s why it’s equally important that management has the will and commitment to enforce corporate governance and HR policies.

With all this in mind, please check out our previous blogs – Eight Step Computer Network Security Assessment: Best Practices, and Five Critical Shifts that Threaten Network Security. Let’s make 2012 a data-safe year!

Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently assembled a panel of experts to discuss What’s Next with Hypervisors? Personally, I don’t believe there’s a one size fits all hypervisor available. I think that we should be choosing the hypervisor that is most compatible today with the application you are going to run. The first question to ask is “What problem are you trying to solve?”

Here’s a table with a few ideas to help you get started:

We’d love to hear what you think. What hypervisors are you running today and what are you finding?

A sound enterprise data management solution should contain a well thought out data retention policy.  It’s a critical component of data archiving and with today’s strict data requirements, a necessity.

Once you have a data retention policy, enforce it for all the information you have on your network. You should also record the retention periods, both for distribution to users and as part of the legal defensibility record. The retention schedule does not need to be elaborate, but it should include speci­fics about the various categories and associated retention periods. When creating a written schedule, organizations should focus on two main criteria: the maximum retention periods and data distribution.

As part of a data retention policy, you should set minimum retention periods and maximum retention periods, in order to avoid over-retention. You can either include speci­fic maximum retention periods for each category, or you can include a general clause that when the minimum retention period expires, the company no longer retains the data. This maximum retention period should also address the disposal of any currently retained enterprise data, including information archived under an interim in­finite-retention period.

Once you establish your archival retention periods, distribute the information to all users, both to communicate policy and to address the storage habits of individual users. In cases where individual employees use a variety of different email programs or in cases where it is common for users to archive e-mail messages, the retention schedule should make clear that this is not “retention” for purposes of the organization.

Organizations can meet legal preservation obligations with interim archiving, regardless of whether a complete retention policy is in place. Litigation requires that a company be immediately able to preserve and retain information (also known as instituting a legal hold) as soon as it reasonably anticipates litigation or governmental action.

Simply moving information into an archive does not constitute effective enterprise data management. In order to gain the highest benefi­t from archiving, companies should categorize all archived information, setting retention periods for each category. Well established retention periods with automated, effective, and easy-to-use archiving systems create streamlined, customized, and uncomplicated data preservation systems.

Once a good data retention policy is in place and being enforced, you can help your company trim costs by reserving the more expensive storage for more frequently accessed data.

We’d love to hear about your data retention policies. Do you have a policy in place and how do you enforce it?