All posts by Randy Weis

Disaster Recover, DRaaS, Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management, Virtualization

10 Storage Predictions for 2014

By Randy Weis, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

As we wrap up 2013 and head into the New Year, I wanted to give 10 predictions I have for the storage market for 2014.

  1. DRaaS will be the hottest sector of cloud-based services: Deconstructing cloud means breaking out specific services that fit a definition of a cloud type service such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and other specialized and targeted usages of shared multi-tenant computing and storage services. Capital expenditures, time to market, and staff training are all issues that prevent companies from developing a disaster recovery strategy and actually implementing it. I predict that DRaaS will be the hottest sector of cloud based services for small to medium businesses and commercial companies. This will impact secondary storage purchases.
  2. Integration of flash storage technology will explode: The market for flash storage is maturing and consolidating. EMC has finally entered into the market. Cisco has purchased Whiptail to integrate it into unified computing systems. PCI flash, server flash drives at different tiers of performance and endurance, hybrid flash arrays, and all flash arrays will all continue to drive the adoption of solid state storage in mainstream computing.
  3. Storage virtualization – software defined storage on the rise: VMware is going to make their virtual VSAN technology generally available at the beginning of Q2 in 2014. This promises to create a brand new tier of storage in datacenters for virtual desktop solutions, disaster recover, and other specific use cases. EMC is their first release of a software defined storage product called ViPR. It has a ways to go before it really begins to address software defined storage requirements, but it is a huge play in the sense that it validates a segment of the market that has long had a miniscule share. DataCore has been the only major player in this space for 15 years. They see EMC’s announcement as a validation of their approach to decoupling storage management and software from the commodity hard drives and proprietary array controllers.
  4. Network Attached Storage (NAS) Revolution: We’re undergoing a revolution with the integration and introduction of scale out NAS technologies. One of the most notable examples is Isilon being purchased by EMC and starting to appear as a more fully integrated and fully available solution with a wide variety of applications. Meanwhile NetApp continues to innovate in the traditional scale up NAS market with increasing adoption of ONTAP 8.x. New NAS systems feature support of the most recent releases SMB 3.0, Microsoft’s significant overhaul of Windows-based file sharing protocol (also known as CIFS). This has a significant impact on design Hyper V Storage and Windows file sharing in general. Client and server side failover are now possible with SMB 3.0, which enables the kind of high availability and resiliency for Hyper V that VMware has enjoyed as a competitive advantage.
  5. Mobile Cloud Storage – File Sharing Will Never Be the Same: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Huddle and other smartphone-based methods to access data anywhere are revolutionizing the way individual consumers access their data. This creates security headaches for IT admins, but the vendors are responding with better and better security built into their products. At the enterprise level, Syncplicity, Panzura, Citrix ShareFile, Nasuni and other cloud storage and shared storage technologies are providing deep integration into Active Directory and enabling transfer of large files across long distances quickly and securely. These technologies integrate with on premise NAS systems and cloud storage. Plain and simple, file sharing will never be the same again.
  6. Hyper Converged Infrastructure Will Be a Significant Trend: The market share dominance of Nutanix, Simplivity (based in Westborough, MA) and VMware’s VSAN technology will all change the way shared storage is viewed in datacenters of every size. These products will not replace the use of shared storage arrays but, instead, provide an integrated, flexible and modular way to scale virtualized application deployments, such as VDI and virtual servers. These technologies all integrate compute & storage, networking (at different levels) and even data protection technology, to eliminate multiple expenditures and multiple points of management. Most importantly, Hyper-converged Infrastructure will allow new deployments to begin small and then scale out without large up-front purchases. This will not work for every tier of application or every company, but it will be a significant trend in 2014.
  7. Big Data Will Spread Throughout Industries: Big Data has become as much a buzzword as cloud. The actual use of the technologies that we call big data is growing rapidly. This adoption is not only in internet giants like Google and companies that track online behavior, but also in industries such as insurance, life sciences, and retailers. Integration of big data technologies (i.e. Hadoop, MapReduce) with more traditional SQL database technology allows service providers of any type to extract data from traditional databases and begin processing it on a huge scale more efficiently and more quickly, while still gaining the advantage of more structured databases. This trend will continue to spread throughout many industries that need to manage large amount of structured and unstructured data.
  8. Object based storage will grow: Cloud storage will be big news for 2014 for two major reasons. The first reason stems from shock waves of Nirvanix going out of business. Corporate consumers of cloud storage will be much more cautious and demand better SLAs in order to hold cloud storage providers accountable. The second reason has to do with adoption of giant, geographically dispersed data sets. Object based storage has been a little known, but important, development in storage technology that allows data sets on scale of petabytes to be stored and retrieved by people who generate data and those who consume it. However, these monstrous data sets can’t be protected by traditional RAID technologies. Providers such as Cleversafe have developed a means to spread data across multiple locations, preserving its integrity and improving resiliency while continuing to scale to massive amounts.
  9. More Data Growth: This may seem redundant, but it is predicted that business data will double every two years. While this may seem like great news for traditional storage vendors, it is even better news for people who provide data storage on a massive scale, and for those technology firms that enable mobile access to that data anywhere while integrating well with existing storage systems. This exponential data growth will lead to advances in file system technologies, object storage integration, deduplication, high capacity drives and storage resource/lifecycle management tool advances.
  10. Backup and Data Protection Evolution + Tape Will Not Die: The data protection market continues to change rapidly as more servers and applications are virtualized or converted to SaaS. Innovations in backup technology include the rapid rise of Veeam as a dominant backup and replication technology – not only for businesses but also for service providers. The Backup as a Service market seems to have stalled out because feature sets are limited; however the appliance model for backups and backup services continue to show high demand. The traditional market leaders face very strong competition from the new players and longtime competitor CommVault. CommVault has evolved to become a true storage resources management play and is rapidly gaining market share as an enterprise solution. Data deduplication has evolved from appliances such as Data Domain into a software feature set that’s included in almost every backup software out there. CommVault, Veeam, Backup Exec, and others all have either server side deduplication or client side deduplication (or both). The appliance model for disk-spaced backups continues to be popular with Data Domain, ExaGrid, and Avamar as leading examples. EMC dominates this market share – the competition is still trying to capture market share. Symantec has even entered the game with its own backup appliances, which are essentially servers preconfigured with their popular software and internal storage. Tape will not die. Long term, long capacity archives still require use of tapes, primarily for economic reasons. The current generation of tape technology, such as LTO6, can contain up to 6 TB of data on a single tape. Tape drives are routinely made with built-in encryption to avoid data breaches that were more common in the past with unencrypted tape.

 

So there you have it, my 2014 storage predictions. What do you think? Which do you agree with/disagree with? Did I leave anything off that you think will have a major impact next year? As always, reach out if you have any questions!

 

Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management, Uptime

Questions Around Uptime Guarantees

Some manufacturers recently have made an impact with a “five nines” uptime guarantee, so I thought I’d provide some perspective. Most recently, I’ve come in contact with Hitachi’s guarantee. I quickly checked with a few other manufacturers (e.g. Dell EqualLogic) to see if they offer that guarantee for their storage arrays, and many do…but realistically, no one can guarantee uptime because “uptime” really needs to be measured from the host or application perspective. Read below for additional factors that impact storage uptime.

Five Nines is 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, or 25.9 seconds a month.

Four Nines is 52.6 minutes/year, which is one hour of maintenance, roughly.

Array controller failover in EQL and other dual controller, modular arrays (EMC, HDS, etc.) is automated to eliminate downtime. That is really just the beginning of the story. The discussion with my clients often comes down to a clarification of what uptime means – and besides uninterrupted connectivity to storage, data loss (due to corruption, user error, drive failure, etc.) is often closely linked in people’s minds, but is really a completely separate issue.

What are the teeth in the uptime guarantee? If the array does go down, does the manufacturer pay the customer money to make up for downtime and lost data?

{Register for our upcoming webinar on June 12th ”What’s Missing in Hybrid Cloud Management- Leveraging Cloud Brokerage“ featuring guest speakers from Forrester and Gravitant}

There are other array considerations that impact “uptime” besides upgrade or failover.

  • Multiple drive failures, since most are purchased in batches, are a real possibility. How does the guarantee cover this?
  • Very large drives must be in a suitable RAID configuration to improve the chances that a RAID rebuild will be completed before another URE (unrecoverable read error) occurs. How does the guarantee cover this?
  • Dual controller failures do happen to all the array makers, although I don’t recall this happening with EQL. Even a VMAX went down in Virginia once, in the last couple of years. How does the guarantee cover this?

 

The uptime “promise” doesn’t include all the connected components. Nearly every environment has something with a single path or SPOF or other configuration issue that must be addressed to insure uninterrupted storage connectivity.

  • Are applications, hosts, network and storage all capable of automated failover at sub-10 ms speeds? For a heavily loaded Oracle database server to continue working in a dual array controller “failure” (which is what an upgrade resembles), it must be connected via multiple paths to an array, using all available paths.
  • Some operating systems don’t support an automatic retry of paths (Windows), nor do all applications resume processing automatically without IO errors, outright failures or reboots.
  • You often need to make temporary changes in OS & iSCSI initiator configurations to support an upgrade – e.g. change timeout value.
  • Also, the MPIO software makes a difference. Dell EQL MEM helps a great deal in a VMware cluster to insure proper path failover, as do EMC PowerPath and Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager. Dell offers a MS MPIO extension and DSM plugin to help Windows recover from a path loss in a more resilient fashion
  • Network considerations are paramount, too.
    • Network switches often take 30 seconds to a few minutes to reboot after a power cycle or reboot.
    • Also in the network, if non-stacked switches are used, RSTP must be enabled. If not, and anything else isn’t configured correctly, connectivity to storage will be lost.
    • Flow Control must be enabled, among other considerations (disable unicast storm control, for example), to insure that the network is resilient enough.
    • Link aggregation, if not using stacked switches, must be dynamic or the iSCSI network might not support failover redundancy

 

Nearly every array manufacturer will say that upgrades are non-disruptive, but that is at the most simplistic level. Upgrades to a unified storage array, for example, will involve disruption to file system presentation, almost always. Clustered or multi-engine frame arrays (HP 3PAR, EMC VMAX, NetApp, Hitachi VSP) can offer the best hope of achieving 5 nines, or even greater. We have customers with VMAX and Symmetrix that have had 100% uptime for a few years, but the arrays are multi-million dollar investments. Dual controller modular arrays, like EMC and HDS, can’t really offer that level of redundancy, and that includes EQL.

If the environment is very carefully and correctly set up for automated failover, as noted above, then those 5 nines can be achieved, but not really guaranteed.

 

EMC, Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management, virtualized storage

EMC World 2013 Recap

By Randy Weis, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

 

The EMC World Conference held last week in Las Vegas demonstrated how EMC has a strong leadership position in the Virtualization, Storage and Software Defined Datacenter markets.

Seriously, this is not the Kool-Aid talking. Before anyone jumps in to point out how all the competitors are better at this or that, or how being a partner or customer of EMC has its challenges, I’d like to refer you to a previous blog I wrote about EMC: “EMC Leads the Storage Market for a Reason.” I won’t recap everything, but that blog talks about business success, not technical wizardry. Do the other major storage and virtualization vendors have solutions and products in these areas? Absolutely, and I promise to bring my opinions and facts around those topics to this blog soon.

What I found exciting about this conference was how EMC is presenting a more cohesive and integrated approach to the items listed below. The ExtremIO product has been greatly improved, some might say so that it is really usable now. I’d say the same about the EMC DR and BC solutions built on RecoverPoint and VPLEX – VPLEX is affordable and ready to be integrated into the VNX line. The VNX product line is mature now, and you can expect announcements around a major refresh this year. I’d say the same about the BRS line – no great product announcements, but better integration and pricing that helps customers and solution providers alike.

There are a few items I’d like to bullet for you:

  1. Storage Virtualization – EMC has finally figured out that DataCore is onto something, and spent considerable time promoting ViPR at EMC World. This technology (while 12 years to market behind DataCore) will open the eyes of the entire datacenter virtualization market to the possibilities of a Storage Hypervisor. What VMware did for computing, this technology will do for storage – storage resources deployed automatically, independent of the array manufacturer, with high value software features running on anything/anywhere. There are pluses and minuses to this new EMC product and approach, but this technology area will soon become a hot strategy for IT spending. Everyone needs to start understanding why EMC finally thinks this is a worthwhile investment and is making it a priority. To echo what I said in that prior blog, “Thank goodness for choices and competition!” Take a fresh look at DataCore and compare it to the new EMC offering. What’s better? What’s worse?
  2. Business Continuity and Highly Available Datacenters: Linking Datacenters to turn DR sites into an active computing resource is within reach of non-enterprise organizations now – midmarket, commercial, healthcare, SMB – however you want to define it.
    1. VPLEX links datacenters together (with some networking help) so that applications can run on any available compute or storage resource in any location – a significant advance in building private cloud computing. This is now licensed to work with VNX systems, is much cheaper and can be built into any quote. We will start looking for ways to build this into various solutions strategies – DR, BC, array migration, storage refreshes, stretch clusters, you name it.  VPLEX is also a very good solution for any datacenter in need of a major storage migration due to storage refresh or datacenter migration, as well as a tool to manage heterogeneous storage.
    2. RecoverPoint is going virtual – this is the leading replication tool for SRM, is integrated with VPLEX and now will be available as a virtual appliance. RP also has developed multi-site capabilities, with up to five sites, 8 RP “appliances” per site, in fan-in or fan-out configurations.
    3. Usability of both has improved, by standardizing management of both in Unisphere editions for both products.
    4. High Performance Storage and Computing – Server-side Flash, Flash Cache Virtualization and workload-crushing all-Flash arrays in the ExtremSF, ExtremSW and ExtremIO product line (formerly known as VFCache). As usual, the second release nails it for EMC. GreenPages was recently recognized as Global leaders in mission critical application virtualization, and this fits right in. Put simply, put an SSD card in a vSphere host and boost SQL/Oracle/EXCH performance over 100% in some cases. The big gap was in HA/DRS/vMotion. The host cache was a local resource, and thus vMotion was broken, along with HA and DRS. The new release virtualizes the cache so that VMs assigned local cache will see that cache even if it moves. This isn’t an all or nothing solution – you can designate the mission critical apps to use the cache and tie them to a subset of the cluster. This make this strategy affordable and granular.
    5. Isilon – This best in class NAS system keeps getting better. Clearly defined use cases, much better VMware integration and more successful implementations makes this product the one to beat in the scale-out NAS market.

 

Another whole article can be written about ViPR, EMC’s brand new storage virtualization tool, and that will be coming up soon. As promised, I’ll also take a look at the competitive offerings of HP and Dell, at least, in the Storage Virtualization, DR/BC, Server-side flash and scale-NAS solutions areas, as well as cloud storage integration strategies. Till then, thanks for reading this and please share your thoughts.

Data management, EMC, Storage, Storage and Information Management

EMC Leads the Storage Market for a Reason

By Randy Weis, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

There are reasons that EMC is a leader in the market. Is it because they come out first with the latest and greatest technological innovation? No, or at least not commonly. Is it because they rapidly turn over their old technology and do sweeping replacements of their product lines with the new stuff? No. It’s because there is significant investment in working through what will work commercially and what won’t and how to best integrate the stuff that passes that test into traditional storage technology and evolving product lines.

Storage Admins and Enterprise Datacenter Architects are notoriously conservative and resistant to change. It is purely economics that drives most of the change in datacenters, not the open source geeks (I mean that with respect), mad scientists and marketing wizards that are churning out & hyping revolutionary technology. The battle for market leadership and ever greater profits will always dominate the storage technology market. Why is anyone in business but to make money?

Our job as consulting technologists and architects is to match the technology with the business needs, not to deploy the cool stuff because we think it blows the doors off of the “old” stuff. I’d venture to say that most of the world’s data sits on regular spinning disk, and a very large chunk of that behind EMC disk. The shift to new technology will always be led by trailblazers and startups, people who can’t afford the traditional enterprise datacenter technology, people that accept the risk involved with new technology because the potential reward is great enough. Once the technology blender is done chewing up the weaker offerings, smart business oriented CIOs and IT directors will integrate the surviving innovations, leveraging proven manufacturers that have consistent support and financial history.

Those manufacturers that cling to the old ways of doing business (think enterprise software licensing models) are doomed to see ever-diminishing returns until they are blown apart into more nimble and creative fragments that can then begin to re-invent themselves into more relevant, yet reliable, technology vendors. EMC has avoided the problems that have plagued other vendors and continued to evolve and grow, although they will never make everyone happy (I don’t think they are trying to!). HP has had many ups and downs, and perhaps more downs, due to a lack of consistent leadership and vision. Are they on the right track with 3PAR? It is a heck of a lot more likely than it was before the acquisition, but they need to get a few miles behind them to prove that they will continue to innovate and support the technology while delivering business value, continued development and excellent post-sales support. Dell’s investments in Compellent, particularly, bode very well for the re-invention of the commodity manufacturer into a true enterprise solution provider and manufacturer. The Compellent technology, revolutionary and “risky” a few years ago, is proving to be a very solid technology that innovates while providing proven business value. Thank goodness for choices and competition! EMC is better because they take the success of their competitors at HP and Dell seriously.

If I were starting up a company now, using Kickstarter or other venture investment capital, I would choose the new products, the brand new storage or software that promises the same performance and reliability as the enterprise products at a much lower cost, knowing that I am exposed to these risks:

  • the company may not last long (poor management, acts of god, fickle investors) or
  • the support might frankly sucks, or
  • engineering development will diminish as the vendor investors wait for the acquisition to get the quick payoff.

Meanwhile, large commercial organizations are starting to adopt cloud, flash and virtualization technologies precisely for all the above reasons. Their leadership needs to drive profitability into the datacenter technologies to increase speed to market and improve profitability. As the bleeding edge becomes the smart bet as brought to market by the market leading vendors, we will continue to see success where Business Value and Innovation intersect.

Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management

The Newest Data-Storage Device is DNA?

By Randy Weis

Molecular and DNA Storage Devices- “Ripped from the headlines!”

-Researchers used synthetic DNA encoded to create the zeros and ones of digital technology.

-MIT Scientists Achieve Molecular Data Storage Breakthrough

-DNA may soon be used for storage: All of the world’s information, about 1.8 zettabytes, could be stored in about four grams of DNA

–Harvard stores 70 billion books using DNA: Research team stores 5.5 petabits, or 1 million gigabits, per cubic millimeter in DNA  storage medium

–IBM using DNA, nanotech to build next-generation chips: DNA works with nanotubes to build more powerful, energy-efficient easy-to-manufacture chips

Don’t rush out to your reseller yet! This stuff is more in the realm of science fiction at the moment, although the reference links at the end of this post are to serious scientific journals. It is tough out here at the bleeding edge of storage technology to find commercial or even academic applications for the very latest, but this kind of storage technology, along with quantum storage and holographic storage, will literally change the world. Wearable, embedded storage technology for consumers may be a decade or more down the road, but you know that there will be military and research applications long before Apple gets this embedded in the latest 100 TB iPod. Ok, deep breath—more realistically, where will this technology be put into action first? Let’s see how this works first.

DNA is a three dimensional media, with density capabilities of up to a zettabyte in a millimeter volume. Some of this work is being done with artificial DNA, injected into genetically modified bacteria (from a Japanese research project from last year). A commercially available genetic sequencer was used for this.

More recently, researchers in Britain encoded the “I Have a Dream” speech and some Shakespeare Sonnets in synthetic DNA strands. Since DNA can be recovered from 20,000 year old wooly mammoth bones, this has far greater potential for long term retrievable storage than, say, optical disks (notorious back in the 90s for delaminating after 5 years).

Reading the DNA is more complicated and expensive, and the “recording” process is very slow. It should be noted that no one is suggesting storing data in a living creature at this point.

Molecular storage is also showing promise, in binding different molecules in a “supramolecule” to store up to 1 petabyte per square inch. But this is a storage media in two dimensions, not three. This still requires temperatures of -9 degrees, considered “room temperature” by physicists. This work was done in India and Germany. IBM is working with DNA and carbon nanotube “scaffolding” to build nano devices in their labs today.

Where would this be put to work first? Google and other search engines, for one. Any storage manufacturer would be interested—EMC DNA, anyone? Suggested use cases: globally and nationally important information of “historical value” and the medium-term future archiving of information of high personal value that you want to preserve for a couple of generations, such as wedding video for grandchildren to see.  The process to lay the data down and then to decode it makes the first use case of data archiving the most likely. The entire Library of Congress could be stored in something the size of a couple of sugar cubes, for instance.

What was once unthinkable (or at least only in the realm of science fiction) has become reality in many cases: drones, hand held computers with more processing power than that which sent man to the moon, and terabyte storage in home computers. The future of data storage is very bright and impossible to predict. Stay tuned.

Here is a graphic from Nature Journal (the Shakespeare Sonnets), “Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA” http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11875.html#/ref10

Click here to learn more about how GreenPages can help you with your organization’s storage strategy

Other References:

Researchers used synthetic DNA encoded to create the zeros and ones of digital technology.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/23/dna-information-storage/1858801/

MIT Scientists Achieve Molecular Data Storage Breakthrough

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/mit-scientists-achieve-molecular-data-storage-near-room-temperature.php

DNA may soon be used for storage

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9236176/DNA_may_soon_be_used_for_storage?source=CTWNLE_nlt_storage_2013-01-28

Harvard stores 70 billion books using DNA

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230401/Harvard_stores_70_billion_books_using_DNA

IBM using DNA, nanotech to build next-generation chips

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136744/IBM_using_DNA_nanotech_to_build_next_generation_chips

 

Disaster Recovery, Featured, Storage and Information Management

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, or DRaaS: Revisited

By Randy Weis

The idea of offering Disaster Recovery services has been around as long as SunGard or IBM BCRS (Business Continuity & Resiliency Services). Disclaimer: I worked for the company that became IBM Information Protection Services in 2008, a part of BCRS.

It seems inevitable that Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage should have an impact on the kinds of solutions that small, medium and large companies would find attractive and would fit their requirements. Those cloud-based DR services are not taking the world by storm, however. Why is that?

Cloud infrastructure seems perfectly suited for economical DR solutions, yet I would bet that none of the people reading this blog has found a reasonable selection of cloud-based DR services in the market. That is not to say that there aren’t DR “As a Service” companies, but the offerings are limited. Again, why is that?

Much like Cloud Computing in general, the recent emergence of enabling technologies was preceded by a relatively long period of commercial product development. In other words, virtualization of computing resources promised “cloud” long before we actually could make it work commercially. I use the term “we” loosely…Seriously, GreenPages announced a cloud-centric solutions approach more than a year before vCloud Director was even released. Why? We saw the potential, but we had to watch for, evaluate, and observe real-world performance in the emerging commercial implementations of self-service computing tools in a virtualized datacenter marketplace. We are now doing the same thing in the evolving solutions marketplace around derivative applications such as DR and archiving.

I looked into helping put together a DR solution leveraging cloud computing and cloud storage offered by one of our technology partners that provides IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). I had operational and engineering support from all parties in this project and we ran into a couple of significant obstacles that do not seem to be resolved in the industry.

Bottom line:

  1. A DR solution in the cloud, involving recovering virtual servers in a cloud computing infrastructure, requires administrative access to the storage as well as the virtual computing environment (like being in vCenter).
  2. Equally important, if the solution involves recovering data from backups, is the requirement that there be a high speed, low latency (I call this “back-end”) connection between the cloud storage where the backups are kept and the cloud computing environment. This is only present in Amazon at last check (a couple of months ago), and you pay extra for that connection. I also call this “locality.”
  3. The Service Provider needs the operational workflow to do this. Everything I worked out with our IaaS partners was a manual process that went way outside normal workflow and ticketing. The interfaces for the customer to access computing and storage were separate and radically different. You couldn’t even see the capacity you consumed in cloud storage without opening a ticket. From the SP side, notification of DR tasks they would need to do, required by the customer, didn’t exist. When you get to billing, forget it. Everyone admitted that this was not planned for at all in the cloud computing and operational support design.

Let me break this down:

  • Cloud Computing typically has high speed storage to host the guest servers.
  • Cloud Storage typically has “slow” storage, on separate systems and sometimes separate locations from a cloud computing infrastructure. This is true with most IaaS providers, although some Amazon sites have S3 and EC2 in the same building and they built a network to connect them (LOCALITY).

Scenario 1: Recovering virtual machines and data from backup images

Scenario 2: Replication based on virtual server-based tools (e.g. Veeam Backup & Replication) or host-based replication

Scenario 3: SRM, array or host replication

Scenario 1: Backup Recovery. I worked hard on this with a partner. This is how it would go:

  1. Back up VMs at customer site; send backup or copy of it to cloud storage.
  2. Set up a cloud computing account with an AD server and a backup server.
  3. Connect the backup server to the cloud storage backup repository (first problem)
    • Unless the cloud computing system has a back end connection at LAN speed to the cloud storage, this is a showstopper. It would take days to do this without a high degree of locality.
    • Provider solution when asked about this.
      • Open a trouble ticket to have the backups dumped to USB drives, shipped or carried to the cloud computing area and connected into the customer workspace. Yikes.
      • We will build a back end connection where we have both cloud storage and cloud computing in the same building—not possible in every location, so the “access anywhere” part of a cloud wouldn’t apply.

4. Restore the data to the cloud computing environment (second problem)

    • What is the “restore target”? If the DR site were a typical hosted or colo site, the customer backup server would have the connection and authorization to recover the guest server images to the datastores, and the ability to create additional datastores. In vCenter, the Veeam server would have the vCenter credentials and access to the vCenter storage plugins to provision the datastores as needed and to start up the VMs after restoring/importing the files. In a Cloud Computing service, your backup server does NOT have that connection or authorization.
    • How can the customer backup server get the rights to import VMs directly into the virtual VMware cluster? The process to provision VMs in most cloud computing environments is to use your templates, their templates, or “upload” an OVF or other type of file format. This won’t work with a backup product such as Veeam or CommVault.

5. Recover the restored images as running VMs in the cloud computing environment (third problem), tied to item #4.

    • Administrative access to provision datastores on the fly and to turn on and configure the machines is not there. The customer (or GreenPages) doesn’t own the multitenant architecture.
    • The use of vCloud Director ought to be an enabler, but the storage plugins, and rights to import into storage, don’t really exist for vCloud. Networking changes need to be accounted for and scripted if possible.

Scenario 2: Replication by VM. This has cost issues more than anything else.

    • If you want to replicate directly into a cloud, you will need to provision the VMs and pay for their resources as if they were “hot.” It would be nice if there was a lower “DR Tier” for pricing—if the VMs are for DR, you don’t get charged full rates until you turn them on and use for production.
      • How do you negotiate that?
      •  How does the SP know when they get turned on?
      • How does this fit into their billing cycle?
    • If it is treated as a hot site (or warm), then the cost of the DR site equals that of production until you solve these issues.
    • Networking is an issue, too, since you don’t want to turn that on until you declare a disaster.
      • Does the SP allow you to turn up networking without a ticket?
      • How do you handle DNS updates if your external access depends on root server DNS records being updated—really short TTL? Yikes, again.
    • Host-based replication (e.g. WANsync, VMware)—you need a host you can replicate to. Your own host. The issues are cost and scalability.

Scenario 3: SRM. This should be baked into any serious DR solution, from a carrier or service provider, but many of the same issues apply.

    • SRM based on host array replication has complications. Technically, this can be solved by the provider by putting (for example) EMC VPLEX and RecoverPoint appliances at every customer production site so that you can replicate from dissimilar storage to the SP IDC. But, they need to set up this many-to-one relationship on arrays that are part of the cloud computing solution, or at least a DR cloud computing cluster. Most SPs don’t have this. There are other brands/technologies to do this, but the basic configuration challenge remains—many-to-one replication into a multi-tenant storage array.
    • SRM based on VMware host replication has administrative access issues as well. SRM at the DR site has to either accommodate multi-tenancy, or each customer gets their own SRM target. Also, you need a host target. Do you rent it all the time? You have to, since you can’t do that in a multi-tenant environment. Cost, scalability, again!
    • Either way, now the big red button gets pushed. Now what?
      • All the protection groups exist on storage and in cloud computing. You are now paying for a duplicate environment in the cloud, not an economically sustainable approach unless you have a “DR Tier” of pricing (see Scenario 2).
      • All the SRM scripts kick in—VMs are coming up in order in protection groups, IP addresses and DNS are being updated, CPU loads and network traffic climb…what impact is this?
      • How does that button get pushed? Does the SP need to push it? Can the customer do it?

These are the main issues as I see it, and there is still more to it. Using vCloud Director is not the same as using vCenter. Everything I’ve described was designed to be used in a vCenter-managed system, not a multi-tenant system with fenced-in rights and networks, with shared storage infrastructure. The APIs are not there, and if they were, imagine the chaos and impact on random DR tests on production cloud computing systems, not managed and controlled by the service provider. What if a real disaster hit in New England, and a hundred customers needed to spin up all their VMs in a few hours? They aren’t all in one datacenter, but if one provider that set this up had dozens, that is a huge hit. They need to have all the capacity in reserve, or syndicate it like IBM or SunGard do. That is the equivalent of thin-provisioning your datacenter.

This conversation, as many I’ve had in the last two years, ends somewhat unsatisfactorily with the conclusion that there is no clear solution—today. The journey to discovering or designing a DRaaS is important, and it needs to be documented, as we have done here with this blog and in other presentations and meetings. The industry will overcome these obstacles, but the customer must remain informed and persistent. The goal of an economically sustainable DRaaS solution can only be achieved by market pressure and creative vendors. We will do our part by being your vigilant and dedicated cloud services broker and solution services provider.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cloud computing, cloud management, Featured

Getting Out of the IT Business

Randy Weis, Director of Solutions Architecture

Strange title for a blog from an IT solutions architect? Not really.

Some of our clients—a lumber mill, a consulting firm, a hospital—are starting to ask us how to get out of “doing IT.” What do these organizations all have in common? They all have a history of challenges in effective technology implementations and application projects leading to the CIO/CTO/CFO asking, “Why are we in the IT business? What can we do to offload the work, eliminate the capital expenses, keep operating expenses down, and focus our IT efforts on making our business more responsive to shifting demands and reaching more customers with a higher satisfaction rate?”

True stories.

If you are in the business of reselling compute, network, or storage gear, this might not be the kind of question you want to hear.

If you are in the business of consulting on technology solutions to meet business requirements, this is exactly the kind of question you should be preparing to answer. If you don’t start working on those answers, your business will suffer for it.

Technology has evolved to the point where the failed marketing terms of grid or utility computing are starting to come back to life—and we are not talking about zombie technology. Cloud computing used to be about as real as grid or utility computing, but “cloud” is no longer just a marketing term. We now have new, proven, and emerging technologies that actually can support a utility model for information technology. Corporate IT executives now are starting to accept that the new cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service is reliable (recent AWS outages not withstanding) predictable, and useful to a corporate strategy. Corporate applications still need to be evaluated for requirements that restrict deployment and implementation strategies–latency, performance, concerns over satisfying legal/privacy/regulatory issues, and so on. However, the need to have elastic, scalable, on-demand IT services that are accessible anywhere is starting to force even the most conservative executives to look at the cloud for offloading non-mission critical workloads and associated costs (staff, equipment, licensing, training and so on). Mission critical applications can still benefit from cloud technology, perhaps only as internal or private cloud, but the same factors still apply—reduce time to deploy or provision, automate workflow, scale up or down as dictated by business cycles, and push provisioning back out into the business (while holding those same units accountable for the resources they “deploy”).

Infrastructure as a service is really just the latest iteration of self-service IT. Software as a service has been with us for some time now, and in some cases is the default mode—CRM is the best example (e.g. Salesforce). Web-based businesses have been virtualizing workloads and automating deployment of capacity for some time now as well. Development and testing have also been the “low hanging fruit” of both virtualization and cloud computing. However, when the technology of virtualization reached a certain critical mass, primarily driven by VMware and Microsoft (at least at the datacenter level), then everyone started taking a second look at this new type of managed hosting. Make no mistake—IaaS is managed hosting, but New and Improved. Anyone who had to deal with provisioning and deployment at AT&T or other large colocation data centers (and no offense meant) knew that there was no “self-service” involved at all. Deployments were major projects with timelines that rivaled the internal glacial pace of most IT projects—a pace that led to the historic frustration levels that drove business units to run around their own IT and start buying IT services with a credit card at Amazon and Rack Space.

If you or your executives are starting to ask yourselves if you can get out of the day-to-day business of running an internal datacenter, you are in good company. Virtualization of compute, network and storage has led to ever-greater efficiency, helping you get more out of every dollar spent on hardware and staff. But it has also led to ever-greater complexity and a need to retrain your internal staff more frequently. Information Technology services are essential to a successful business, but they can no longer just be a cost center. They need to be a profit center; a cost of doing business for sure, but also a way to drive revenues and shorten time-to-market.

Where do you go for answers? What service providers have a good track record for uptime, customer satisfaction, support excellence and innovation? What technologies will help you integrate your internal IT with your “external” IT? Where can you turn to for management and monitoring tools? What managed services can help you with gaining visibility into all parts of your IT infrastructure, that can deal with a hybrid and distributed datacenter model, that can address everything from firewalls to backups? Who can you ask?

There is an emerging cadre of thought leaders and technologists that have been preparing for this day, laying the foundation, developing the expertise, building partner relationships with service providers and watching to see who is successful and growing…and who is not. GreenPages is in the very front line of this new cadre. We have been out in front with virtualization of servers. We have been out in front with storage and networking support for virtual datacenters. We have been out in front with private cloud implementations. We are absolutely out in front of everyone in developing Cloud Management As A Service.

We have been waiting for you. Welcome. Now let’s get to work.For more information on our Cloud Management as a Service Offering click here

Cloud Storage, Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management

Top Takeaways From EMC World 2012

A little over a week has gone by since the end of EMC World, and all the product announcements have gotten out of the bag. So, why another article about EMC World, if there are no “big reveals” left? Because I want to make sense of all of the hype, product announcements, and strategic discussions. What do the over 40 new products mean to GreenPages’ customers—both present and future? How many of those products were just cosmetic makeovers and how many are actual game changers? Why should you, our friends and extended business family, care, and what should you care about?

I will start by saying that this EMC World really did reveal some technology-leading thoughts and products, and proved that EMC has taken the lead in major storage technology strategy. EMC has always been the 800-pound gorilla of the storage industry, but for many years was far from the front of the pack. This has changed, and in a big way. Innovation still takes place mostly in the small companies on the bleeding edge of storage (SSD, virtualization across platforms, innovative file systems), but EMC has become the leading investor in storage R&D, and it shows. While they may not be inventing the coolest and most striking new storage and hardware, their pace of development and integration of that cool stuff has exponentially increased. Time to market and product refresh cycles are picking up pace. Relationships with the people who get the products in front of you (resellers, integrators and distributors) are vastly improved and much friendlier to the commercial world we all live in (as opposed to the rarified heights of the largest enterprises). The relevance of EMC products to the virtualized datacenter is clear, and the storage engineers who ran the technical sessions and laid out all the new storage, DR, and virtualization roadmaps proved that EMC is the leading storage technology firm in the world.

What are the highlights for GreenPages’ world?

Product Announcements:

Probably the biggest technology in terms of impact, IMHO, is Isilon. This is the fastest, most scalable, easy-to-manage NAS systems ever. It can grow to the petabyte range, and there is no downtime or forklift upgrades. It is “scale-out” storage, meaning you add nodes that contain processing (CPU), RAM for Cache and additional bandwidth, along with capacity in three flavors (SSD, 15K and 7.2K).  This is the system of choice for any healthcare PACs application or Life Sciences data storage. It is a fantastic general-purpose NAS system as well. Isilon is the system of choice for anyone managing Big Data (large amounts of unstructured data). The entry point for this system is around 10 TB, so you don’t have to be a large company to find the value here. Isilon also has the advantage of being a true scale-out system. Some technical nuggets around Isilon OneFS Upgrade: 90% greater throughput, or 740 GB/sec; roles-based admin – SEC 17a-4 compliance; better caching (50% reduction in latency of IO intensive apps; VMware Integration: VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) and VASA (vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness).

If you are going to jump up into the big time storage array arena, the new VMAX line is arguably the one to get, for power, performance and integration with the virtualized datacenter. It has expanded to the VMAX 10, 20 (current), and 40. The top of the line sports 8 controllers, scales up to 4 PB, has up to 32 2.8 GHz Xeon 6-core processors, 1 TB usable RAM, 2.5” drives,  and uses MLC SSD drives (bringing that cost of the flash drive down into the lower atmosphere). The latest development of the auto-tiering software FAST allows IBM and HDS storage to be a “tier” of storage for the VMAX. Other arrays will be added soon.

VNXe 3150 storage system offers up to 50% more performance and capacity in an entry level system. This system includes 10 GbE connectivity, Solid State Storage and the first production storage system (that I have heard of) that uses the latest Intel CPU, Sandy Bridge. Who says EMC product lifecycles are slow and behind the times??

VPLEX Metro/VPLEX Geo solutions have some significant upgrades, including integration with RecoverPoint and SRM, more performance and scalability; and Oracle RAC up to 100 KM apart. If you want to federate your datacenters, introduce “stretch clusters” and have both an HA and DR strategy, this is the industry leader now.

The VNX Series  has  more than a few improvements: lower price SSDs, RAID types that can be mixed in FAST; 256 snaps per LUN; connector for vCOPs; EMC Storage Analytics Suite based on vCOPs; AppSync to replace/improve Replication Manager.

The new VSPEX Proven Infrastructure includes EMC’s VNX and VNXe hybrid storage arrays, along with Avamar software and Data Domain backup appliances. The cloud platform also includes processors from Intel, switches from Brocade, servers from Cisco, and software from Citrix, Microsoft HyperV and VMware.  Avamar and Data Domain products will offer data deduplication to users, while EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), will offer data migration between varying disk storage arrays based on data use patterns. There are initially 14 VSPEX configurations, which EMC said represent the most popular use cases for companies moving to cloud computing.

Data Domain & Avamar upgrades include the DD990 with an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU, doubling the performance of the DD890 – 28 PB, 16 TB/hr throughput; tight integration of Avamar with VMware, including Hyper-V, SAP, Sybase, SQL2012 – recovery is 30 times faster than NBU/V-Ray.

Vfcache PCIe NAND Flash Card is a server side I/O enhancement that pushes Flash Cache to the server, but integrates Cache management with the VNX array FAST Cache. This will prove to be a huge deal for mission critical applications running on VMware, since I/O will no longer be a bottleneck even for the most demanding applications. Combine this with Sandy Bridge CPUs and the UCS system with the latest M3 servers and you will have the world’s most powerful server virtualization platform!

DataBridge is a “mash-up” of nearly any storage or system management tool into a common pane of glass, not intended to be a discovery or management tool but, rather, to be a place where all of the discovery tools can deliver their data to one place. This combines EMC infrastructure data sources along with non-EMC data sources with business logic from customer organizations. Stay tuned for more on this.

There are lots of other deep technical messages that were talked about in the sessions that ran for three solid days, not counting the unbelievable Lab sessions. Those Lab sessions are now available for demo purposes. You can see any EMC technology from implementation to configuration just by contacting GreenPages and asking for your Friendly Neighborhood Storage Guy!!

One final thought I would like to stress: efficiency. EMC is sending a smart business message of efficiency, using VNX as example. Storage is far outstripping storage advances and IT budgets. All is not hopeless, however. You can improve efficiency with dedupe/compression, auto tiering; Flash allows storage to keep up with Moore’s Law; you can consolidate file servers with virtual file servers (we have done this with many GreenPages customers when consolidating servers in VMware). Files are the main culprit. How will you manage it, quotas or content management? What will you chose? How will you manage your data without the money or work force you think you might need?

Contact GreenPages if you need help answering these questions! Meanwhile, watch for more storage technology breakthroughs to come from EMC in the coming months.