Developing a Storage

Strategy for the Future

an Storage eBook
contents
[ ]
Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future

This content was adapted from Internet.com's

Enterprise Storage Forum, Enterprise IT Planet,
and InternetNews Web sites. Contributors:
Richard Adhikari, Judy Mottl, Henry Newman,
Drew Robb, Jennifer Schiff and Paul Shread.

2 2 The Data Pileup: Save

Money or Save Data?
Judy Mottl

4 Three Acronyms That Could

Change the Storage World
Henry Newman

4 6 6 Sorting Out Your

Storage Options
Jennifer Schiff

10 Choosing the Right High-

Performance File System
Drew Robb
10 13
13 Managing Storage in a
Virtual World
Drew Robb

16 The Trouble with Virtual

Disaster Recovery
16 Richard Adhikari

Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future, an Internet.com Storage eBook. © 2008, Jupitermedia Corp.

1
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future ]

The Data Pileup: Save

Money or Save Data?
By Judy Mottl

According to Gartner, the highest reported price in the

G
iven how cheap storage has become, it's under-
standable enterprises are expanding arrays to first quarter of 2008 for managed storage was $12.50
house growing data. But stocking up on hardware per gigabyte per month, and the lowest was $0.29 per
and software to hold more and more information is a costly gigabyte per month for archive storage needs.
misstep, according to a Gartner
report. A survey of Gartner clients
reported that none expected its
New regulations and legal con- storage budget to decrease in
cerns are likely prompting IT to 2008, and that 67 percent
keep every bit and byte of data expected the budget for storage
just in case some litigation issue hardware to increase. Of those
arises, and since storage costs polled, 64 percent also expected
are decreasing, the urge to push storage software costs to increase
another box into play can be as well.
tempting.
Just a quick look at backup stor-
The problem is that data growth age provides a clear view of how
will very quickly outpace the sav- storage costs are decreasing.
ings in storage, according to Prices dropped by about 30 per-
Whit Andrews, an analyst at cent from 2006 to 2008, accord-
Gartner. ing to Gartner.

Jupiterimages But then cheap storage isn't real-

"It's time for companies to mod-
ernize storage strategies and understand how informa-
tion access technology can be a good tool for making
sure they need what they're keeping," Andrews told
InternetNews.com.
ly cheap when additional management costs and
increased power and cooling costs are factored in.
Enterprises that choose to retain everything run the risk
of significant future costs, Gartner reported. Also, the

“
A survey of Gartner clients reported that none expected its storage budget to decrease
in 2008, and that 67 percent expected the budget for storage hardware to increase.

2 ”
Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future, an Internet.com Storage eBook. © 2008, Jupitermedia Corp.
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
longer information is saved, the harder it is to discern
value, according to the survey.
Information-Access Tools
Companies need to create a clear distinction on which
data should be saved on primary storage and what
data should be housed on cheaper secondary storage,
as the costs vary greatly in terms of hardware and soft-
ware.
Gartner provided a scenario, using a rough estimate of
$5 per gigabyte for backup storage and a generation
rate of 10 gigabytes per employee per year. A 5,000-
worker company faces annual costs of $1.25 million for
five years of storage with those financials. Cutting the
amount of data by 80 percent could save about $1 mil-
lion for five years and lower the organization's liability,
noted the report.
Information-access technologies include a wide range
of tools such as enterprise search, content analytics and
social search. Integration and deployment typically
require some expertise, such as an information archi-
tect, to get the tools in place and working well,
Andrews explained. And it's not cheap, either, as prod-
ucts can range from $10,000 to millions for advanced
applications.
3 Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future, an Internet.com Storage eBook. © 2008, Jupitermedia Corp.
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Still, companies can offset the costs through storage
savings, as well as benefits from improved business
processes.
The first step, according to Gartner, is to initiate and
develop a content valuation process. "This is determin-
ing what's important to keep and how a company
decides what to keep," explained Andrews.
"It means establishing criteria on what data is to be
stored, where, and why," he added. "Cheap storage is
expensive when it's storing data that doesn't need to
be stored," he noted.
A good best practice is establishing a content-valuation
policy on legacy data and making sure what's stored
requires that storage investment.
While some enterprises are using information-access
technologies, the majority is not at this point, according
to the research firm. But sooner or later companies will
realize the waste taking place in storage and the costs
of retaining data that has no value, Andrews said.
He adds, "Is what you're storing on tape valuable at
this point, because if it's not, then you don't need it."I
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future ]

Three Acronyms That Could

Change the Storage World
By Henry Newman

So without further ado, here are three things that I think

A
lot of claims have been made lately of disruptive
storage technologies, but saying a particular compa- will be truly disruptive to the enterprise storage market.
ny is disruptive is a long way from Clayton FCoE
Christensen's original definition. Very few individual compa-
nies have changed the industry, and one big reason is that Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is my No. 1 pick for
everyone wants a standards-based product, and standards a technology that could change enterprise storage in
require multiple companies to create them. Once a product dramatic ways.
is created that might be a disrup-
tive technology, lots of other Today, any higher performance
players jump into the mix. or higher reliability storage
data moves over Fibre
Clearly, disruptive technologies Channel. Fibre Channel has
are not an everyday event, nor been around for 10 years or so
are they easy to predict. Let's as the de facto storage medi-
examine some technologies um in the enterprise. iSCSI, in
that might significantly change my opinion, has never taken
enterprise storage and disrupt reasonable market share
the market. I won't adhere to because of the overhead both
the strict definition, but I am for CPU and packetization (the
going to suggest some tech- TCP/IP encapsulation uses a
nologies that if adopted could significant part of the packet
Jupiterimages
change the enterprise storage market. As I said, I think for small I/O requests).
very few companies are going to be able to create a
new technology market from a technology without a If FCoE happens, Fibre Channel connectivity to storage
standard that others can use. Even Microsoft, for exam- will be a thing of the past and we will have one net-
ple, supports all types of standards, from SATA (T13) work fabric for communications and storage. Even this
and FC/SCSI (T11) to IETF standards. No company can year, as FC interface-based disk drives are being
be an island today. replaced by SAS, FC chipsets shipped are declining. FC

“
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is my No. 1 pick for a technology that
could change enterprise storage in dramatic ways.

4 ”
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 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
chipsets never achieved the cost factor that Ethernet
chipsets achieved because FC was never considered a
commodity technology — it was always a higher-priced
storage interconnect. Every computer from your laptop
to a large SMP server has Ethernet built in. That is not
true and has never been true for Fibre Channel.
FCoE will reduce costs in a number of ways:
• Cost per port: Although 10GbE is likely a bit higher
than 4Gbit FC in the cost per Gbyte/sec, that trend
will not last long. I suspect this will be changing, and
so does most of the industry.
• Personnel: Today you have a storage networking
group and an IP networking group in most large
organizations. They are separated, as the people
must deal with different technologies, training, patch-
es, pricing, and so on. Having a single group of peo-
ple that can do the same things will save money.
• In my opinion, much of the Fibre Channel commu-
nity sees the writing on the wall, otherwise they
would not have such broad participation in the FCoE
community and standards.
FCoE, when deployed, will change the storage net-
working world. The first steps will be the host side con-
nections and switches and RAID controllers, and then
will come the other peripheral devices such as tape
drives. FCoE means that Ethernet gets a larger market
and, in my opinion, it will likely mean the end of the
line for InfiniBand, as the combined FC and Ethernet
market is just far too large a commodity market.
OSD
I have been writing about object-based storage for sev-
eral years now, and I am a big proponent of T10 OSD,
given the problems I see regularly with fragmentation.
OSD has a long way to go before it could be disrup-
tive. There is not as much momentum behind OSD as
there is for FCoE. I think part of the problem is that the
problems OSD solves are not as easily understood as
the problems that FCoE solves, and because OSD is
solving bigger, more complex problems, it requires a
larger infrastructure change such as file systems, drives,
storage controller changes, and disk drives. I still
believe that OSD solves many of the bigger problems
that most sites face for the management of the life of
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data from creation, to backup/archiving, restoration,
deletion, and everything in between, including data
protection and security. I believe OSD is coming to a
system near you, but it is going to take some time.
pNFS
I am a big proponent of this technology, and it has
some broad implications.
In today's world we have SAN storage and NAS stor-
age. Everyone knows that SAN-based storage is faster
than NAS for lots of good reasons, not the least of
which is that the NFS protocol was not really designed
to deliver high-performance streaming or I/O. NFS was
designed to solve a different problem.
When NFSv4.1 is implemented and released, the ability
to have SAN performance on NAS equipment could
become a reality. Of course, the NAS equipment would
need to be redesigned to deliver SAN performance,
and most NAS equipment is not designed that way, as
NFS is the bottleneck, but this would allow a merging
of the technologies. In addition, many environments
are going to shared file systems for clusters of systems.
NFSv4.1, if it lives up to its billing, would allow high
performance access from many nodes to a file system.
Of course, you will need a high performance file system
to support the high-speed access, and that could be a
problem for some vendors, but the tools are there. I
believe NFSv4.1 will be disruptive, as it will merge the
SAN and NAS world over time together (yet another
argument in favor of an IP-based storage world). NAS
vendors are going to have to build faster hardware and
better file systems, and SAN vendors are going to have
to team with file system vendors to develop joint prod-
ucts. This will all be very interesting, and I believe it
could also help OSD, as larger, higher performance file
systems likely will have more of the issues that are
solved by OSD.
I am very skeptical of claims by vendors that their tech-
nology is disruptive, as I have seen far too many such
claims never pan out, but we've covered a few tech-
nologies here that could turn out to be genuinely dis-
ruptive, and the implications for storage networks are
very interesting. I
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future ]

Sorting Out Your Storage Options

By Jennifer Schiff

What's Your Problem?

D
AS, SAN, NAS... RAID, MAID, solid state tech-
nologies, grid storage, hard disk drive storage,
Before you even talk to a vendor, "you have to deter-
tiered storage, tape storage... active storage,
mine what problem is it that your enterprise is trying
archival storage, remote storage, disaster recovery...
to solve... and define your pain points and require-
self-healing disk drives, virtualization, de-duplication,
ments," said Ashish Nadkarni, principal consultant at
thin provisioning…
GlassHouse Technologies.
It would take pages just to
You also need to know what
list all the types, makes, and
it is you are actually storing,
models of enterprise stor-
that is how much and what
age options currently on the
kind of data (e.g., file-based,
market. Then add a list of
block-based, structured or
the features and benefits of
unstructured), said Mark
each one and it's almost
Peters, an analyst with
enough to make a storage
Enterprise Strategy Group.
administrator in search of a
new, additional, or supple-
Other good questions to ask
mental storage system long
yourself and the people who
for the days when a storage
will be using the storage, he
solution was whatever came
said, include: How do you
with your server. Almost.
plan on utilizing this storage
system? Is it for active stor-
To make it easier for you to
age or backup or archiving
cut through at least some of Jupiterimages
— or remote storage or dis-
storage-decision-making clutter and make an
aster recovery? What applications are you running?
informed purchasing decision,
Do you want the system to be automated? Do you
EnterpriseStorageForum.com spoke with a few stor-
need it be scalable? How important are speed and
age analysts to gather advice to narrow down the
performance?
number of choices and help you find a storage solu-
tion that's right for your enterprise.
"You need to start from what you want rather than
what a vendor or group of vendors is trying to tell you

“
EnterpriseStorageForum.com spoke with a few storage analysts to gather advice
to narrow down the number of choices and help you find a storage solution that's
right for your enterprise.

6 ”
Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future, an Internet.com Storage eBook. © 2008, Jupitermedia Corp.
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
[you need]," said Peters, who added that "the chal-
lenge for the user is to actually know and define what
it is they want."
To aid in that process, Greg Schulz, founder of and
senior analyst at Storage IO, highly recommended
drawing up a list divided into three columns or cate-
gories. In the first column should be those features
and functionality you must have; in the second, those
things you want or need to have; and in the third the
features that would be nice to have.
For Schulz, must-haves include "availability, reliability,
some level of performance, some level of capacity
and scalability," specifically "RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6,
failover, redundant controllers, ease of management,
tiered storage, different types of drives (fast drives
and slow drives) and tape." Yes, even tape, which all
three analysts said isn't going away any time soon —
and is actually a good, economical, "green" storage
solution.
Things that fall into Schulz's want-to-have or nice-to-
have bucket include de-duplication, thin provisioning,
and snapshots, features that have generated a lot of
buzz and may be very helpful but aren't absolutely
essential to storing data.
Above all, said all three analysts, stay focused on the
essentials. If you happen to find a solution that meets
all of your must-have requirements and can also pro-
vide you with some of your want-to-have or nice-to-
have features — at the right price — then go for it.
Remember, "it's what you want out of a solution, not
what a company wants to sell you," stressed
Nadkarni. For example, if a certain amount of capacity
is a must-have requirement, focus on that. If compli-
ance is your main issue, make sure the solution you
choose has a good track record when it comes to
compliance. If you are looking for a disaster recovery
solution, stay focused on that. And be sure to validate
vendor claims by checking with customers and review-
ing test results (for things like performance) if a com-
pany is new.
Watch for the Warning Signs
While the analysts we spoke with believed good
enterprise solutions far outweigh the bad, it's still pos-
7 Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future, an Internet.com Storage eBook. © 2008, Jupitermedia Corp.
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The Cloud Offers Promise
for Storage Users
By Marty Foltyn
"Cloud computing" has been ill-defined and over-
hyped, yet storage vendors have been quick to trot
out their own "cloud storage" offerings and end
users are wondering whether there's significant
cost savings in these services for them, particularly
in tough economic times.
"Cloud-speak" can be downright confusing. A recent
Storage Networking World conference track pro-
claimed that clouds "are an evolving approach to
providing users transparent IT services through a
shared infrastructure of pools of systems and serv-
ices." Clouds "provide a vision of a frictionless econ-
omy enabled by lowering the barrier for entry and
reducing the penalty for failure." And clouds "are a
vehicle to deliver infinite resources, a commitment
proportional to need, and cost-effective economies
of scale," albeit with a few caveats on existing infra-
structure, manageability, and security.
Surprisingly, Gartner considers the amorphous
nature of the term to be good news: "The very con-
fusion and contradiction that surrounds the term
'cloud computing' signifies its potential to change
the status quo in the IT market," the IT research
firm said earlier this year. Gartner perhaps didn't
help matters any by defining cloud computing as a
"style of computing where massively scalable IT-
related capabilities are provided 'as a service' using
Internet technologies to multiple external cus-
tomers."
John Webster, principal IT advisor at Illuminata,
simplifies matters by advising users to "think of the
cloud as the Internet," delivering services and com-
puting resources.
Oddly enough, storage vendors developed some of
the earliest cloud services, although it took another
decade for the economics of Internet-based storage
to make sense.
"The application's storage is whatever sits up there
on that 'ethereal thing,'" said Webster. There are dif-
ferent ways to access that storage, whether as an
external service or setting up your own "cloud"
inside your enterprise firewall.
continued
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
sible to make a bad choice, particularly if you ignore
your must-have list, base your decision on marketing
hype, are too emotionally involved with a vendor or
brand, act too quickly, or go with the low-ball quote
without taking into account the total cost of owner-
ship and whether the system actually addresses most
of your needs.
So what are some easy ways to avoid making a bad
storage decision?
"When you hear the words revolutionary, the only, the
first, or the fastest or the most reliable, the alarm bells
should be going off," said Schulz. If vendors make
claims about having the best or the fastest perform-
ance, "have them back it up by showing you [using
test results from organizations like SPEC, Microsoft
ESRP, FPC, or TPC] and by comparing their perform-
ance to others.... And make sure it's an apples-to-
apples comparison, not apples to oranges."
Another safeguard is to test out all the systems you
are considering — or at least see one in action at a
customer site — and to speak with customers who've
been using that solution for at least a few months.
"Don't settle for a WebEx demo," said Schulz. "Get
your hands on a system if you can. Ask questions. Ask
for references... but ask to hear about a story that did-
n't quite go well, though the customer still ended up
buying."
The truth is, he said, that "every vendor out there will
have problems at some point or another. And any
vendor that tells you they've never had a problem,
they've never had an interruption, that's an alarm bell.
All vendors have issues. All technologies have issues
at some point in time. What separates the vendors is
how they respond to those issues. How do they pre-
vent them from recurring? How do they manage
them? And then also have they improved their tech-
nology?"
Speaking of which, because technologies get updat-
ed or replaced all the time, before you buy anything,
"grill the vendors on what their product road map is,"
said Nadkarni. "For example, if they just released a
product a year ago, then there's a very good chance
that in the next year they're not going to have any-
thing very drastic coming out that will replace that
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While cloud storage is not applicable for tier-one,
mission-critical data due to the nature of the infor-
mation (e-mail, databases, transactional data), pri-
vate clouds can serve as community storage pools
for enterprise backup and archival data. Cloud stor-
age can also be a viable option for static data result-
ing from applications such as digital content and
distribution, video surveillance, or streaming
media.
Internal clouds can also offer advantages to users
concerned with security issues who are more com-
fortable with their staff managing data within a cor-
porate intranet than over the Internet.
Especially with new regulations such as the Federal
Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) on depositions and
discovery, using cloud storage in a highly redun-
dant way helps make sure enough copies are lying
around based on a policy set. It can also free up
expensive human resources now targeted to sorting
and cataloging data.
Security experts note, however, that for regulated
data moving into any kind of a cloud, security best
practices in the areas of encryption, key manage-
ment and general storage security apply. As out-
lined in the SNIA Storage Security Best Current
Practices Technical Proposal, organizations should
"ensure appropriate service-level objectives for vir-
tual storage: 1) match the availability objective for
the 'storage cloud' to the application requirements;
and 2) match the confidentiality and privacy
requirements for the 'storage cloud' to the types of
information stored."
Companies might also be wise to examine their stor-
age and retention procedures in light of tracking
down data relevant to an e-discovery request. If
organizations are already having trouble finding
data, cloud computing could potentially create more
places one has to look. And storage on external
clouds or third-party facilities could also be includ-
ed in any FRCP requests for backups and disaster
recovery copies. I
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
product. [But] if the product has been in the market
for a few years, the vendor may be [coming out] with
a brand new, completely redesigned product that's
going to replace any and all products," which could
pose a problem, he said. That's why it pays to see a
product road map, to help you determine if the sys-
tem you are considering is going to need to be
upgraded or replaced sooner rather than later.
As an example, Nadkarni points to modular storage
arrays. Vendors, he said, have been moving "away
from the old loop-based backend drives to a point-to-
point system. [But] there are a lot of arrays out there
in the market that have loop-based drives — and
they're all being replaced, slowly, by point-to-point-
based drives. So if you're buying a modular storage
array, definitely check if that storage array is due for a
refresh, because once that point-to-point drive come
out, [your] loop-based one is going to be obsolete,
and you're going to have a disruptive upgrade to go
from one to another."
That's why establishing a good rapport with a vendor
is important — and why you should talk to customers,
to see if that vendor will be there for you when you
need help, not just during installation.
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"We tend to get so embroiled in needs and feeds and
speeds that the down-to-earth relationships can get
missed," said Peters. "Reputation, references, and
(where relevant) experience are crucial... to storage
system choice."
And if you do not feel comfortable making an impor-
tant storage decision on your own, get help, in the
form of an independent consultant.
Take Your Time
Above all, be patient when choosing a critical storage
system. "Patience is a virtue," said Nadkarni, who said
he thinks that phrase should be an operational guide-
line. "Never hurry into a large decision. If you are
proactive about how you manage your [storage] envi-
ronment, you will know ahead of time what you need
to do — and to purchase — to keep it running.
"If you are under the gun to make a decision quickly,
chances are you're going to make a mistake," he said.
"But when you have time on your side, you can make
sure all your i's are dotted and your t's are crossed —
and be more assured that you're making the right
decision." I
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future ]

Choosing the Right High-

Performance File System
By Drew Robb

for scratch storage, as they don't provide high enough

T
here are a lot of high-performance file systems out
there: Sun QFS, IBM GPFS, Quantum StorNext, Red I/O rates or a sufficient range of data management
Hat GFS and Panasas, to name a few. So which is tools such as snapshots.
best? It depends on who you ask and what your needs are.
Tough talk indeed from Panasas. So how do its rivals
"We typically compete with NetApp OnTap or OnTap respond to these claims?
GX, EMC, IBM GPFS, HP
Polyserve or Sun's open Todd Neville, GPFS offering
source research project manager at IBM, said the
called Lustre," said Len GPFS installation base is
Rosenthal, chief marketing diverse, including HPC,
officer of Panasas Inc. retail, media and entertain-
"Although we have ment, financial services, life
replaced systems running sciences, healthcare, Web
Sun's QFS, we have never 2.0, telco, and manufactur-
really competed with them ing. Neville is also dismis-
in sales situations." sive of the I/O rate claims.

Rosenthal claims that Greg Nuss, director of the

Quantum StorNext and HP software business line at
Polyserve can only deal Quantum, is more emphat-
with a maximum of 16 clus- ic, stating that the state-
tered NFS servers, so they Jupiterimages ment by Panasas about

don't tend to compete in scale-out NAS bids. Similarly,
he said that IBM GPFS and Sun Lustre, which are both
parallel file systems like Panasas PanFS, are mainly used
by universities and government research organizations
StorNext's capabilities is completely false.
"Each node in a StorNext cluster can act as NFS server,
each presenting the common file system namespace at
the back end," he said. "Today our stated node sup-

“
There are a lot of high-performance file systems out there: Sun QFS, IBM
GPFS, Quantum StorNext, Red Hat GFS and Panasas, to name a few.

10 ”
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 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
port is 1,000 nodes and we support both SAN-attached
as well as LAN-attached nodes into the cluster. We
have practical installations in the 300 to 400 node
range deployed today. We don't typically run into
Panasas in the market because StorNext is not typically
deployed in scale-out NAS configurations, but rather in
high-performance workflow and archive configura-
tions."
HP, meanwhile, also took umbrage about the Panasas
claims. The company said that HP Scalable NAS does
not have an architectural limit on the number of NAS
File Services server nodes that a customer can use in
their clusters.
"The stated 16 server node limit is a test limit only,"
said Ian Duncan, director of marketing for NAS for HP
StorageWorks. "HP has a number of NAS File Services
customers using clusters with more than 16 server
nodes."
Duncan said Panasas, Sun QFS, IBM GPFS, and
Quantum StorNext are not true symmetrical file sys-
tems, but are cluster file systems based on master
servers — whether for metadata operations, locking
operations, or both — which are relatively easy to
implement as an extension of traditional, single-node
systems. However, Duncan believes they suffer from
performance and availability limitations inherent in the
master server's singular role.
"As servers are added, the load on the master server
increases, undercutting performance and subjecting
more nodes to loss of functionality in the event of a
master server's failure," said Duncan. "By contrast, the
4400 Scalable NAS File Services uses the HP Clustered
File System (CFS), which exploits multiple, independent
servers to provide better scalability and availability,
insulating the cluster from any individual node's failure
or performance limitation."
With that out of the way, let's take a closer look at
some of these file systems.
Panasas PanFS
The Panasas PanFS parallel file system is an object-
based file system designed for scale-out applications
that require high performance in both I/O and band-
width. Unlike NFS or CIFS, which Panasas also sup-
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ports, PanFS uses the parallel DirectFLOW protocol,
which is the foundation of the upcoming pNFS (Parallel
NFS) standard, which is the major advance in the
upcoming NFS version 4.1. The key benefit to Panasas
parallel storage is said to be superior application per-
formance.
Where NFS servers require that all I/O requests go
through a single NAS filer head, PanFS enables parallel
transfer of data directly from the clients or server nodes
into the storage system. With Panasas, the NAS head is
removed from the data path and is no longer the I/O
bottleneck. Case in point: Panasas parallel storage is
installed with the world's highest performance comput-
er system in the world, the Roadrunner system at Los
Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. It generates close
to 100 GB/s to a single shared file system.
"As a result of this architecture, Panasas parallel stor-
age systems scale to thousands of users/servers, tens of
Petabytes and can generate over 100GB/s in band-
width," said Rosenthal. "Other key features include its
software-based RAID architecture that enables parallel
RAID reconstructions that are 5X to 10X faster than
most storage systems."
PanFS also includes Panasas Tiered Parity technology,
which automatically detects and corrects unrecoverable
media errors, which is important during reconstructions.
Finally, this file system is optimized for use with many
simulation and modeling applications.
Note, though, that Panasas systems are designed for
file storage, not block storage. Therefore, it is typically
not installed for transaction-oriented applications such
as ERP, order entry or CRM. Instead, it tends to be
deployed in applications where a large number of users
or server nodes need shared access to a common pool
of large files.
HP File Services
HP claims superiority by pushing symmetry over paral-
lelism. The product is aimed at medium-sized cus-
tomers who need to seamlessly increase application
throughput far in excess of traditional NAS products
and easily grow storage capacity online without service
disruption. HP StorageWorks 4400 Scalable NAS File
Services includes an HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise
Virtual Array with dual array controllers and 4.8 TB of
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
storage, three file serving nodes, management and
replication software, and support for Windows or Linux.
With three file serving nodes and dual array controllers,
the 4400 Scalable NAS File Services does not have a
single point of failure.
Downsides?
"The 4400 Scalable NAS File Services is less suitable
for high-performance computing applications that
require more than 6 GB/sec of throughput," said
Duncan.
Quantum StorNext
StorNext is certainly the platform of choice for anyone
using Apple. Further, in media rich environments where
Apple, Windows, and other systems must interact,
StorNext appears to have the market cornered. For
example, StorNext is commonly used in demanding
video production and playback applications because of
its ability to handle the large capacity and frame rates
of high-definition content. How does it do beyond that
niche?
"The key differentiators between StorNext and other
shared file systems are our tight level of integration
with the archive tier (StorNext/StorageManager) along
with the robust tape support, as well as the broad OS
platform support," said Nuss. "No other file system can
support varieties of Linux, Unix, Apple and Windows
within a single cluster environment."
The StorNext file system is a heterogeneous, shared file
system with integrated archive capability. It enables sys-
tems to share a high-speed pool of images, media,
content, analytical data and other files so they can be
processed and distributed rapidly, whether SAN or LAN
connected. According to Nuss, it excels at both high-
performance data rates and high capacity in terms of
the file size as well as number of files in the file system.
IBM GPFS
The General Parallel File System (GPFS) from IBM has
been out for a few years.
"GPFS is a high-performance, shared disk, clustered file
system for AIX and Linux," said John Webster, an ana-
lyst at Iluminata Inc.
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]
Originally designed for technical high performance
computing (HPC), it has since expanded into environ-
ments that require performance, fault tolerance and
high capacity such as relational databases, CRM, Web
2.0 and media applications, engineering, financial
applications and data archiving.
"GPFS is built on a SAN model where all the servers
see all the storage," said Neville. "To allow data access
from systems not attached to the SAN, GPFS provides
a software simulation of a SAN, allowing access to the
data using general purpose networks such as
Ethernet."
Data is striped across all the disks in each file system,
which allows the bandwidth of each disk to be used for
service of a single file or to produce aggregate per-
formance for multiple files. This performance can be
delivered to all the nodes that make up the cluster.
GPFS can also be configured so that there are no sin-
gle points of failure. On top of the core file service fea-
tures, GPFS provides functions such as the ability to
share data between clusters and a policy-based infor-
mation life cycle management (ILM) tool where data is
migrated among different tiers of storage, which can
include tape.
In addition, GPFS can be used at the core of a file-serv-
ing NAS cluster where all the data is served via NFS,
CIFS, FTP, or HTTP from all nodes of the cluster simul-
taneously. Further nodes or storage devices can be
added or removed from the cluster as demands
change. The IBM Scale Out File Services (SoFS) offer-
ing, based on GPFS, includes additional functionality.
"As file-centric data and storage continues to expand
rapidly, NAS is expected to follow the trend of HPC,
Web serving, and other similar industries into a scale-
out model based on standard low-cost components,
which is a core competency for GPFS," said Neville. I
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future ]

Managing Storage in
a Virtual World
By Drew Robb

capacity. And it also makes it easier to provision away

D
emand for storage has been growing rapidly for
some time to meet ever-expanding volumes of data. an awful lot of storage.
And it seems that the more common virtualized
servers become, the more storage is required. Together, the In theory, this is supposed to make storage more effi-
two trends — data growth and virtualization — are becom- cient by improving utilization rates. But could it inad-
ing a potent combination for vertently be doing the oppo-
storage growth. site?

"Storage capacity continues to "VMware virtualized environ-

grow at a rate of nearly 60 per- ments do not inherently need
cent per year," said Benjamin more storage than their physical
Woo, an analyst at IDC. "2008 counterparts," said Jon Bock,
is likely to represent an inflec- VMware's senior product mar-
tion point in the way applica- keting manager. "An important
tions and storage will be inter- and relevant point is that cus-
faced. And virtual servers will tomers do often change the
emerge as the killer applica- way they use and manage stor-
tion for iSCSI." age in VMware environments to
leverage the unique capabilities
Are virtual machines (VMs) of VMware virtualization, and
accelerating storage growth? Jupiterimages their storage capacity require-
According to Scott McIntyre, vice president of software ments will reflect that."
and customer marketing at Emulex, VMware is typically
given a large storage allocation than normal. This acts What seems to be happening is that companies are
as an extra reserve to supply capacity on demand to adapting their storage needs to take advantage of the
various virtual machines as they are created. In fact, capabilities built into virtual environments. For exam-
VMware actually encourages storage administrators to ple, the snapshot capability provided by VMware's stor-
provision far more storage than is physically present, for age interface, VMFS (virtual machine file system), is
example, giving each of 20 VMs a 25 percent share of used to enable online backups, to generate archive

“
What seems to be happening is that companies are adapting their storage needs
to take advantage of the capabilities built into virtual environments.

13 ”
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 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
copies of virtual machines, and to provide a known
good copy for rollback in cases such as failed patch
installs, virus infections, and so on. While you can do a
lot with it, it also requires a lot more space.
Solving Management Headaches
Perhaps the bigger problem, however, is the manage-
ment confusion inherent in the collision of virtual
servers and virtual storage.
"The question of coordinating virtualized servers and
virtualized storage is a particularly thorny issue," said
Mike Karp, an analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates. "The movement toward virtualizing enter-
prise data centers, while it offers enormous opportuni-
ties for management and power use efficiencies, also
creates a whole new set of challenges for IT man-
agers."
Virtualization, after all, is all about introducing an
abstraction layer to simplify management and adminis-
tration. Storage virtualization, for example, refers to the
presentation of a simple file, logical volume, or other
storage object (such as a disk drive) to an application in
such a way that allows the physical complexity of the
storage to be hidden from both the storage administra-
tor and the application.
However, even in one domain — such as servers — this
"simple layer" can get pretty darn complicated. Just
take a look at what it does to the traditional art of CPU
measurement using as an example an IBM microparti-
tion in an AIX simultaneous multi-threaded (SMT) envi-
ronment that consists of two virtual CPUs in a shared
processor pool. This partition has a single process run-
ning that uses, let's say, 45 seconds of a physical CPU
in a 60-second interval. When you come to measure
such an environment, it presents some challenges. The
results can be different, for example, if SMT is enabled
or disabled, and if the processor is capped or
uncapped.
The CPU statistic %busy represents the percentage of
the virtual processor capacity consumed. In this exam-
ple, it might come out as 37.5 percent. Now take
another CPU measurement, this time by LPAR (Logical
Partition) known as %entc. This represents the percent-
age of the entitled processor capacity consumed and it
comes out as 75 percent. Take another metric,
14 Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future, an Internet.com Storage eBook. © 2008, Jupitermedia Corp.
]
%lpar_pool_busy, which is percentage of the processor
pool capacity consumed. It comes out at only 18.75
percent. Or %lpar_phys_busy — the percentage of the
physical processor capacity consumed. It scores 9.38
percent. And there are other metrics that might show
completely different results.
"A capacity planner might look at one score and think
utilization is low, whereas another takes a different view
and sees an entirely different picture," said Jim Smith,
an enterprise performance specialist at TeamQuest
Corp. of Clear Lake, Iowa. "So who's right? It's not an
easy question to answer with virtualized processors.
Each answer is correct from its own perspective."
Finding the Root Cause
To make things more challenging, there is the ongoing
trend of marrying up virtual servers with virtual storage.
That means having to manage across two abstraction
layers instead of one. Now let's suppose something
goes wrong. How do you find out where the problem
lies? Is it on the application server, on the storage, on
the network or somewhere in between?
"Identifying the root cause of the problem that poten-
tially could be in any one of several technology
domains (storage, servers, network) is not a problem for
the faint of heart and, in fact, is not a problem that is
always solvable given the state of the art of the current
generation of monitoring and analysis solutions," said
Karp. "Few vendors offer solutions with an appropriate
set of cross-domain analytics that allow real root cause
analysis of the problem."
EMC — majority owner of VMware — starts to look
pretty smart now for its acquisition of Smarts a little
while back. It is heading down the road of being able
to provide at least some of the vitally needed cross-vir-
tualization management. And NetApp is heading down
the same road with the acquisition of Onaro.
"Onaro extends the NetApp Manageability Software
family, as SANscreen's VM Insight and Service Insight
products help minimize complexity while maximizing
return," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions
marketing at NetApp. "These capabilities make Onaro
a key element in NetApp's strategy to help customers
improve their IT infrastructure and processes."
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
For virtual machine environments, VM Insight provides
virtual machine-to-disk performance information to
optimize the number of virtual machines per server. For
large-scale virtual machine farms, this type of cross-
domain analytics assists in maintaining application avail-
ability and performance. SANscreen Service Insight
makes it easier to map resources used to support an
application in a storage virtualization environment. It
provides service level visibility from the virtualized envi-
ronment to the back-end storage systems.
Meanwhile, the management of multiple virtualization
technologies is coming together under the banner of
enterprise or data center virtualization. This encom-
passes server virtualization, storage virtualization, and
fabric virtualization.
"IT managers are increasingly considering the prospect
of a fully virtualized data center infrastructure," said
Emulex's McIntyre. "One of the characteristics of enter-
prise data centers is the existence of storage area net-
works. There is a high degree of affinity between SANs
and server virtualization, because the connectivity
offered by a SAN simplifies the deployment and migra-
tion of virtual machines."
SAN-based storage can be shared between multiple
servers, enabling data consolidation. Conversely, a vir-
tual storage device can be constructed from multiple
physical devices in a SAN and be made available to
one or more host servers. Not surprisingly then, not
only are storage devices being virtualized, but increas-
ingly there is interest in virtualizing the SAN fabric itself
in order to consolidate multiple physical SANs into one
logical SAN, or segment one physical SAN into multi-
ple logical storage networks.
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]
Emulex, for example, is providing the virtual plumbing
to handle some of the connectivity gaps between stor-
age and server silos. Emulex LightPulse Virtual HBA
technology virtualizes SAN connections so that each
virtual machine has independent access to its own pro-
tected storage.
"The end result is greater storage security, enhanced
management and migration of virtual machines and the
ability to implement SAN best practices such as LUN
masking and zoning for individual virtual machines,"
said McIntyre. "In addition, Virtual HBA Technology
allows virtual machines with different I/O workloads to
co-exist without impacting each other's I/O perform-
ance. This mixed workload performance enhancement
is crucial in consolidated, virtual environments where
multiple virtual machines and applications are all
accessing storage through the same set of physical
HBAs."
No doubt over time, more and more of the pieces of
the virtual plumbing and a whole lot more analytics will
have to be added to the mix to make virtualization
function adequately in an enterprise-wide setting. Until
then, get ready for an awful lot of complexity in the
name of simplification.
"It is absolutely necessary to understand the topology,
in real time — or at the very least, in near real-time —
in order both to identify problems and to manage the
entire environment proactively as a system and pre-
empt problems," said Karp. "In a best-case scenario, a
constantly updated topology map would be available
for each process being monitored." I
 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future ]

The Trouble with

Virtual Disaster Recovery
By Richard Adhikari

Lamorena.

A
s enterprises virtualize their data centers to cut costs
and consolidate their servers, they may be setting
themselves up for big trouble. So why are virtual servers being left out of DR plans, or,
if they're included, aren't being backed up? That's
According to the latest disaster recovery research because enterprise IT just does not have the right tools
report from Symantec, based to back up virtual servers,
on surveys of 1,000 IT man- according to Symantec.
agers in large organizations
worldwide, 35 percent of an The biggest problem for 44 per-
organization's virtual servers cent of North American respon-
are not included in its disaster dents was the plethora of differ-
recovery (DR) plans. ent tools for physical and virtual
environments. There are so
Worse yet, not all virtual many that IT doesn't know what
servers included in an organi- to use and when.
zation's DR plan will be backed
up. Only 37 percent of respon- Another 41 percent complained
dents to the survey said they about the lack of automated
back up more than 90 percent recovery tools. Much of the dis-
of their virtual systems. aster recovery process is manu-
Jupiterimages al, although VMware recently

When companies virtualize, they need to overhaul their
backup and DR plans, Symantec says; the survey found
that 64 percent of organizations are doing so.
"That's no surprise, because virtualization has had a
huge impact on the way enterprises do disaster recov-
ery," said Symantec senior product marketing manager
for high availability and disaster recovery Dan
unveiled a tool to automate the run book.
Another 39 percent of respondents said the backup
tools available are inadequate.
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, CA, and smaller vendors such as
ManageIQ, Avocent, and Apani offer tools to manage
both the virtual and physical environments. And com-

“
When companies virtualize, they need to overhaul their backup and DR plans,
Symantec says; the survey found that 64 percent of organizations are doing so.

16 ”
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 [ Developing a Storage Strategy for the Future
panies like Hyperic are bringing out new tools.
However, virtual server management tools, being rela-
tively new, are not as sophisticated as their counter-
parts for the physical environment. Also, they have not
been around long enough for users to be familiar with
them. For example, provisioning, or setting up, virtual
machines from physical ones and vice versa can also be
a problem, and tools for this have only recently
emerged.
"Virtualization makes some aspects of backup and dis-
aster recovery more difficult," said Symantec senior
product marketing manager for NetBackup Eric Schou.
"IT shops are still struggling with the steep learning
curve."
Porting over solutions from the physical environment
won't work, Schou said. "IT shops need to get solu-
tions that are finely tuned for virtualization," he added.
Failing DR
Judging from the results of the survey, IT is still not as
familiar with DR as it should be. DR testing is a mess.
A whopping 30 percent of respondents said their DR
tests failed. That's better than the 50 percent failure
rate in 2007, but it's still pretty scary.
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]
For 35 percent of the respondents, the tests failed
because "people didn't do what they were supposed
to do," Lamorena said. This means that much of recov-
ery is still a manual process, and companies must begin
looking at automation, he said.
Another cause is that tests are not run frequently
enough. That's because "when you run a test, it dis-
rupts employees and customers," Lamorena said. He
added that 20 percent of the respondents said their
revenue is hurt by DR tests, so "the tests cause the
same pain to their customers as if they had a real disas-
ter."
Finally, the survey found that top-level executive
involvement in DR planning has fallen. "Last year, the
C-level involvement on disaster recovery committees
was 55 percent; this year, it's 33 percent," Lamorena
said. C-level executives are CIOs, CTOs and CEOs.
Lamorena finds the reduction in top-level involvement
disturbing because it could lead to more problems with
DR. "That's a huge drop, and we've been thinking
about this day and night," he said. "What's alarming is,
companies may be getting a little lax and don't think
they'll be affected by a disaster." I