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HP Buys one of the seven networking dwarfs and gets a bargain

Last week EMC and Cisco announced their VCE collation and Acadia.

The other day, HP continued its early holiday shopping by plucking down $2.7B USD and bought 3COM, one of the networking seven dwarfs (e.g. when compared to networking giant Cisco).

Some of the other so called networking dwarfs when compared to Cisco include Brocade, Ciena and Juniper among others.

Why is 3COM a bargain at $2.7B

Sure HP paid a slight multiplier premium on 3COM trailing revenues or a slight small multiplier on their market cap.

Sure HP gets to acquire one of the networking seven dwarfs at a time when Cisco is flexing its muscles to move into the server space.

Sure HP gets to extend their networking groups capabilities including additional offerings for HPs broad SMB and lower-end SOHO and even consumer markets not to mention enterprise ROBO or workgroups.

Sure HP gets to extend their security and Voice over IP (VoIP) via 3COM and their US Robotics brand perhaps to better compete with Cisco at the consumer, prosumer, SOHO or low-end of SMB markets.

Sure HP gets access to H3C as a means of further its reach into China and the growing Asian market, perhaps even getting closer to Huawei as a future possible partner.

Sure HP could have bought Brocade however IMHO that would have cost a few more deceased presidents (aka very large dollar bills) and assumed over a billion dollars in debt, however lets leave the Brocadians and that discussion on the back burner for a different discussion on another day.

Sure HP gets to signal to the world that they are alive, they have a ton of money in their war chest, and last I checked, actually more cash in the 11B range (minus about 2.7B being spent on 3COM) that exceeds the $5B USD cash position of Cisco.

Sure HP could have done and perhaps will still do some smaller networking related deals in couple of hundreds of million dollar type range to beef up product offerings such as a Riverbed or others, or, perhaps wait for some fire sales or price shop on those shopping themselves around.

ROI is the bargin IMHO, not to mention other pieces including H3C!

3COM was and is a bargain for all of the above, plus given the revenues of about 1.3B, HP CEO Mark Hurd stands to reap a better return on cash investment than having it sitting in a bank account earning a few points. Plus, HP still has around 8-9B in cash leaving room for some other opportunistic holiday shopping, who knows, maybe adopt yet another networking or storage or server related dwarf!

Stay tuned, this game is far from being over as there are plenty of days left in the 2009 holiday shopping season!

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Poll: EMC and Cisco Acadia VCE, what does it mean?

EMC and Cisco recently announced their new Acadia VCE coalition along with Intel and VMware.

As part of the VCE the collation or joint venture is also providing to market pre-acted vblocks that include Cisco servers power by Intel and network switches, EMC storage and management tools (Inonx and RSA for security), VMware vsphere virtualization along with pre-post sales services.

How does this move from a technology, packaging, integration as well as business or alliance perspective change the server, storage, networking, hardware, software and services game?

Whats your take?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIO, Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

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Acadia VCE: VMware + Cisco + EMC = Virtual Computing Environment

Was today the day the music died? (click here or here if you are not familar with the expression)

Add another three letter acronym (TLA) to your IT vocabulary if you are involved with server, storage, networking, virtualization, security and related infrastructure resource management (IRM) topics.

That new TLA is Virtual Computing Environment (VCE), a coalition formed by EMC and Cisco along with partner Intel called Acadia that was announced today. Of course, EMC who also happens to own VMware for virtualization and RSA for security software tools bring those to the coalition (read press release here).

For some quick fun, twittervile and the blogosphere have come up with other meanings such as:

VCE = Virtualization Communications Endpoint
VCE = VMware Cisco EMC
VCE = Very Cash Efficient
VCE = VMware Controls Everything
VCE = Virtualization Causes Enthusiasm
VCE = VMware Cisco Exclusive

Ok, so much for some fun, at least for now.

With Cisco, EMC and VMware announcing their new VCE coalition, has this signaled the end of servers, storage, networking, hardware and software for physical, virtual and clouding computing as we know it?

Does this mean all other vendors not in this announcement should pack it up, game over and go home?

The answer in my perspective is NO!

No, the music did not end today!

NO, servers, storage and networking for virtual or cloud environments has not ended.

Also, NO, other vendors do not have to go home today, the game is not over!

However a new game is on, one that some have seen before, for others it is something new, exciting perhaps revolutionary or an industry first.

What was announced?
Figure 1 shows a general vision or positioning from the three major players involved along with four tenants or topic areas of focus. Here is a link to a press release where you can read more.

CiscoVirtualizationCoalition.png
Figure 1: Source: Cisco, EMC, VMware

General points include:

  • A new coalition (e.g. VCE) focused on virtual compute for cloud and non cloud environments
  • A new company Acadia owned by EMC and Cisco (1/3 each) along with Intel and VMware
  • A new go to market pre-sales, service and support cross technology domain skill set team
  • Solution bundles or vblocks with technology from Cisco, EMC, Intel and VMware

What are the vblocks and components?
Pre-configured (see this link for a 3D model), tested, and supported with a single throat to choke model for streamlined end to end management and acquisition. There are three vblocks or virtual building blocks that include server, storage, I/O networking, and virtualization hypervisor software along with associated IRM software tools.

Cisco is bringing to the game their Unified Compute Solution (UCS) server along with Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Director (MDS) switches, EMC is bringing storage (Symmetrix VMax, CLARiiON and unified storage) along with their RSA security and Ionix IRM tools. VMware is providing their vSphere hypervisors running on Intel based services (via Cisco).

The components include:

  • EMC Ionix management tools and framework – The IRM tools
  • EMC RSA security framework software – The security tools
  • EMC VMware vSphere hypervisor virtualization software – The virtualization layer
  • EMC VMax, CLARiiON and unified storage systems – The storage
  • Cisco Nexus 1000v and MDS switches – The Network and connectivity
  • Cisco Unified Compute Solution (UCS) – The physical servers
  • Services and support – Cross technology domain presales, delivery and professional services

CiscoEMCVMwarevblock.jpg
Figure 2: Source: Cisco vblock (Server, Storage, Networking and Virtualization Software) via Cisco

The three vblock models are:
Vblock0: entry level system due out in 2010 supporting 300 to 800 VMs for initial customer consolidation, private clouds or other diverse applications in small or medium sized business. You can think of this as a SAN in a CAN or Data Center in a box with Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000v, EMC unified storage secured by RSA and VMware vSphere.

Vblock1: mid sized building block supporting 800 to 3000 VMs for consolidation and other optimization initiatives using Cisco UCS, Nexus and MDS switches along with EMC CLARiiON storage secured with RSA software hosting VMware hypervisors.

Vblock2 high end supporting up 3000 to 6000 VMs for large scale data center transformation or new virtualization efforts combing Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus 1000v and MDS switches and EMC VMax Symmetix storage with RSA security software hosting VMware vSpshere hypervisor.

What does this all mean?
With this move, for some it will add fuel to the campfire that Cisco is moving closer to EMC and or VMware with a pre-nuptial via Acadia. For others, this will be seen as fragmentation for virtualization particularly if other vendors such as Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Microsoft among others are kept out of the game, not to mention their channels of vars or IT customers barriers.

Acadia is a new company or more precisely, a joint venture being created by major backers EMC and Cisco with minority backers being VMware and Intel.

Like any other joint ventures, for examples those commonly seen in the airline industry (e.g. transportation utility) where carriers pool resources such as SkyTeam whose members include Delta who had a JV with Airframe owner of KLM who had a antitrust immunity JV with northwest (now being digested by Delta).

These joint ventures can range from simple marketing alliances like you see with EMC programs such as their Select program to more formal OEM to ownership as is the case with VMware and RSA to this new model for Acadia.

An airline analogy may not be the most appropriate, yet there are some interesting similarities, least of which that air carriers rely on information systems and technologies provided by members of this collation among others. There is also a correlation in that joint ventures are about streamlining and creating a seamless end to end customer experience. That is, give them enough choice and options, keep them happy, take out the complexities and hopefully some cost, and with customer control come revenue and margin or profits.

Certainly there are opportunities to streamline and not just simply cut corners, perhaps that’s another area or analogy with the airlines where there is a current focus on cutting, nickel and dimming for services. Hopefully the Acadia and VCE are not just another example of vendors getting together around the campfire to sing Kumbaya in the name of increasing customer adoption, cost cutting or putting a marketing spin on how to sell more to customers for account control.

Now with all due respect to the individual companies and personal, at least in this iteration, it is not as much about the technology or packaging. Likewise, while important, it is also not just about bundling, integration and testing (they are important) as we have seen similar solutions before.

Rather, I think this has the potential for changing the way server, storage and networking hardware along with IRM and virtualization software are sold into organizations, for the better or worse.

What Im watching is how Acadia and their principal backers can navigate the channel maze and ultimately the customer maze to sell a cross technology domain solution. For example, will a sales call require six to fourteen legs (e.g. one person is a two legged call for those not up on sales or vendor lingo) with a storage, server, networking, VMware, RSA, Ionix and services representative?

Or, can a model to drive down the number of people or product specialist involved in a given sales call be achieved leveraging people with cross technology domain skills (e.g. someone who can speak server and storage hardware and software along with networking)?

Assuming Acadia and VCE vblocks address product integration issues, I see the bigger issue as being streamlining the sales process (including compensation plans) along with how partners are dealt with not to mention customers.

How will the sales pitch be to the Cisco network people at VARs or customer sites, or too the storage or server or VMware teams, or, all of the above?

What about the others?
Cisco has relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle/Sun among others that they will be stepping even more on the partner toes than when they launched the UCS earlier this year. EMC for its part if fairly diversified and is not as subservient to IBM however has a history of partnering with Dell, Oracle and Microsoft among others.

VMware has a smaller investment and thus more in the wings as is Intel given that both have large partnership with Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft. Microsoft is of interest here because on one front the bulk of all servers virtualized into VMware VMs are Windows based.

On the other hand, Microsoft has their own virtualization hypervisor HyperV that depending upon how you look at it, could be a competitor of VMware or simply a nuisance. Im of the mindset that its still to early and don’t judge this game on the first round which VMware has won. Keep in mind the history such as desktop and browser wars that Microsoft lost in the first round only to come back strong later. This move could very well invigorate Microsoft, or perhaps Oracle, Citrix among others.

Now this is far from the first time that we have seen alliances, coalitions, marketing or sales promotion cross technology vendor clubs in the industry let alone from the specific vendors involved in this announcement.

One that comes to mind was 3COMs failed attempt in the late 90s to become the first traditional networking vendor to get into SANs, that was many years before Cisco could spell SAN let alone their Andiamo startup incubated. The 3COM initiative which was cancelled due to financial issues literally on the eve of rollout was to include the likes of STK (pre-sun), Qlogic, Anchor (People were still learning how to spell Brocade), Crossroads (FC to SCSI routers for tape), Legato (pre-EMC), DG CLARiiON (Pre-EMC), MTI (sold their patents to EMC, became a reseller, now defunct) along with some others slated to jump on the bandwagon.

Lets also not forget that while among the traditional networking market vendors Cisco is the $32B giant and all of the others including 3Com, Brocade, Broadcom, Ciena, Emulex, Juniper and Qlogic are the seven plus dwarfs. However, keep the $23B USD Huawei networking vendor that is growing at a 45% annual rate in mind.

I would keep an eye on AMD, Brocade, Citrix, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, Juniper, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle/Sun, Rackable and Symantec among many others for similar joint venture or marketing alliances.

Some of these have already surfaced with Brocade and Oracle sharing hugs and chugs (another sales term referring to alliance meetings over beers or shots).

Also keep in mind that VMware has a large software (customer business) footprint deployed on HP with Intel (and AMD) servers.

Oh, and those VMware based VMs running on HP servers also just happen to be hosting in their neighbor of 80% or more Windows based guests operating systems, I would say its game on time.

When I say its game on time, I dont think VMware is brash enough to cut HP (or others) off forcing them to move to Microsoft for virtualization. However the game is about control, control of technology stacks and partnerships, control of vars, integrators and the channel, as well as control of customers.

If you cannot tell, I find this topic fun and interesting.

For those who only know me from servers they often ask when did I learn about networking to which I say check out one of my books (Resilient Storage Networks-Elsevier). Meanwhile for others who know me from storage I get asked when did I learn about or get into servers to which I respond about 28 years ago when I worked in IT as the customer.

Bottom line on Acadia, vblocks and VCE for now, I like the idea of a unified and bundled solution as long as they are open and flexible.

On the other hand, I have many questions and even skeptical in some areas including of how this plays out for Cisco and EMC in terms of if it can be a unifier or polarized causing market fragmentation.

For some this is or will be dejavu, back to the future, while for others it is a new, exciting and revolutionary approach while for others it will be new fodder for smack talk!

More to follow soon.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Saving Money with Green IT: Time To Invest In Information Factories

There is a good and timely article titled Green IT Can Save Money, Too over at Business Week that has a familiar topic and theme for those who read this blog or other content, articles, reports, books, white papers, videos, podcasts or in-person speaking and keynote sessions that I have done..

I posted a short version of this over there, here is the full version that would not fit in their comment section.

Short of calling it Green IT 2.0 or the perfect storm, there is a resurgence and more importantly IMHO a growing awareness of the many facets of Green IT along with Green in general having an economic business sustainability aspect.

While the Green Gap and confusion still exists, that is, the difference between what people think or perceive and actual opportunities or issues; with growing awareness, it will close or at least narrow. For example, when I regularly talk with IT professionals from various sized, different focused industries across the globe in diverse geographies and ask them about having to go green, the response is in the 7-15% range (these are changing) with most believing that Green is only about carbon footprint.

On the other hand, when I ask them if they have power, cooling, floor space or other footprint constraints including frozen or reduced budgets, recycling along with ewaste disposition or RoHS requirements, not to mention sustaining business growth without negatively impacting quality of service or customer experience, the response jumps up to 65-75% (these are changing) if not higher.

That is the essence of the green gap or disconnect!

Granted carbon dioxide or CO2 reduction is important along with NO2, water vapors and other related issues, however there is also the need to do more with what is available, stretch resources and footprints do be more productive in a shrinking footprint. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as an information, data or processing recession with all indicators pointing towards the need to move, manage and store larger amounts of data on a go forward basis. Thus, the need to do more in a given footprint or constraint, maximizing resources, energy, productivity and available budgets.

Innovation is the ability to do more with less at a lower cost without compromise on quality of service or negatively impacting customer experience. Regardless of if you are a manufacturer, or a service provider including in IT, by innovating with a diverse Green IT focus to become more efficient and optimized, the result is that your customers become more enabled and competitive.

By shifting from an avoidance model where cost cutting or containment are the near-term tactical focus to an efficiency and productivity model via optimization, net unit costs should be lowered while overall service experience increase in a positive manner. This means treating IT as an information factory, one that needs investment in the people, processes and technologies (hardware, software, services) along with management metric indicator tools.

The net result is that environmental or perceived Green issues are addressed and self-funded via the investment in Green IT technology that boosts productivity (e.g. closing or narrowing the Green Gap). Thus, the environmental concerns that organizations have or need to address for different reasons yet that lack funding get addressed via funding to boost business productivity which have tangible ROI characteristics similar to other lean manufacturing approaches.

Here are some additional links to learn more about these and other related themes:

Have a read over at Business Week about how Green IT Can Save Money, Too while thinking about how investing in IT infrastructure productivity (Information Factories) by becoming more efficient and optimized helps the business top and bottom line, not to mention the environment as well.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Poll: Whats Your Take on Windows 7


Microsoft finally officially released Windows 7 recently, whats your take?

Have you already taken the jump to be the first on the block or neighbored to be on Windows 7, getting ready to make the leap, have it on the back burner for next year, no plans, or perhaps already dumped Windows for Mac or Linux or getting ready to pull the plug?

Cheers – gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIO, Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

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Optimize Data Storage for Performance and Capacity Efficiency

This post builds on a recent article I did that can be read here.

Even with tough economic times, there is no such thing as a data recession! Thus the importance of optimizing data storage efficiency addressing both performance and capacity without impacting availability in a cost effective way to do more with what you have.

What this means is that even though budgets are tight or have been cut resulting in reduced spending, overall net storage capacity is up year over year by double digits if not higher in some environments.

Consequently, there is continued focus on stretching available IT and storage related resources or footprints further while eliminating barriers or constraints. IT footprint constraints can be physical in a cabinet or rack as well as floorspace, power or cooling thresholds and budget among others.

Constraints can be due to lack of performance (bandwidth, IOPS or transactions), poor response time or lack of availability for some environments. Yet for other environments, constraints can be lack of capacity, limited primary or standby power or cooling constraints. Other constraints include budget, staffing or lack of infrastructure resource management (IRM) tools and time for routine tasks.

Look before you leap
Before jumping into an optimization effort, gain insight if you do not already have it as to where the bottlenecks exist, along with the cause and effect of moving or reconfiguring storage resources. For example, boosting capacity use to more fully use storage resources can result in a performance issue or data center bottlenecks for other environments.

An alternative scenario is that in the quest to boost performance, storage is seen as being under-utilized, yet when capacity use is increased, low and behold, response time deteriorates. The result can be a vicious cycle hence the need to address the issue as opposed to moving problems by using tools to gain insight on resource usage, both space and activity or performance.

Gaining insight means looking at capacity use along with performance and availability activity and how they use power, cooling and floor-space. Consequently an important tool is to gain insight and knowledge of how your resources are being used to deliver various levels of service.

Tools include storage or system resource management (SRM) tools that report on storage space capacity usage, performance and availability with some tools now adding energy usage metrics along with storage or system resource analysis (SRA) tools.

Cooling Off
Power and cooling are commonly talked about as constraints, either from a cost standpoint, or availability of primary or secondary (e.g. standby) energy and cooling capacity to support growth. Electricity is essential for powering IT equipment including storage enabling devices to do their specific tasks of storing data, moving data, processing data or a combination of these attributes.

Thus, power gets consumed, some work or effort to move and store data takes place and the by product is heat that needs to be removed. In a typical IT data center, cooling on average can account for about 50% of energy used with some sites using less.

With cooling being a large consumer of electricity, a small percentage change to how cooling consumes energy can yield large results. Addressing cooling energy consumption can be to discuss budget or cost issues, or to enable cooling capacity to be freed up to support installation of extra storage or other IT equipment.

Keep in mind that effective cooling relies on removing heat from as close to the source as possible to avoid over cooling which requires more energy. If you have not done so, have a facilities review or assessment performed that can range from a quick walk around, to a more in-depth review and thermal airflow analysis. A means of removing heat close to the sort are techniques such as intelligent, precision or smart cooling also known by other marketing names.

Powering Up, or, Powering Down
Speaking of energy or power, in addition to addressing cooling, there are a couple of ways of addressing power consumption by storage equipment (Figure 1). The most popular discussed approach towards efficiency is energy avoidance involving powering down storage when not used such as first generation MAID at the cost of performance.

For off-line storage, tape and other removable media give low-cost capacity per watt with low to no energy needed when not in use. Second generation (e.g. MAID 2.0) solutions with intelligent power management (IPM) capabilities have become more prevalent enabling performance or energy savings on a more granular or selective basis often as a standard feature in common storage systems.

GreenOptionsBalance
Figure 1:  How various RAID levels and configuration impact or benefit footprint constraints

Another approach to energy efficiency is seen in figure 1 which is doing more work for active applications per watt of energy to boost productivity. This can be done by using same amount of energy however doing more work, or, same amount of work with less energy.

For example instead of using larger capacity disks to improve capacity per watt metrics, active or performance sensitive storage should be looked at on an activity basis such as IOP, transactions, videos, emails or throughput per watt. Hence, a fast disk drive doing work can be more energy-efficient in terms of productivity than a higher capacity slower disk drive for active workloads, where for idle or inactive, the inverse should hold true.

On a go forward basis the trend already being seen with some servers and storage systems is to do both more work, while using less energy. Thus a larger gap between useful work (for active or non idle storage) and amount of energy consumed yields a better efficiency rating, or, take the inverse if that is your preference for smaller numbers.

Reducing Data Footprint Impact
Data footprint impact reduction tools or techniques for both on-line as well as off-line storage include archiving, data management, compression, deduplication, space-saving snapshots, thin provisioning along with different RAID levels among other approaches. From a storage access standpoint, you can also include bandwidth optimization, data replication optimization, protocol optimizers along with other network technologies including WAFS/WAAS/WADM to help improve efficiency of data movement or access.

Thin provisioning for capacity centric environments can be used to achieving a higher effective storage use level by essentially over booking storage similar to how airlines oversell seats on a flight. If you have good historical information and insight into how storage capacity is used and over allocated, thin provisioning enables improved effective storage use to occur for some applications.

However, with thin provisioning, avoid introducing performance bottlenecks by leveraging solutions that work closely with tools that providing historical trending information (capacity and performance).

For a technology that some have tried to declare as being dead to prop other new or emerging solutions, RAID remains relevant given its widespread deployment and transparent reliance in organizations of all size. RAID also plays a role in storage performance, availability, capacity and energy constraints as well as a relief tool.

The trick is to align the applicable RAID configuration to the task at hand meeting specific performance, availability, capacity or energy along with economic requirements. For some environments a one size fits all approach may be used while others may configure storage using different RAID levels along with number of drives in RAID sets to meet specific requirements.


Figure 2:  How various RAID levels and configuration impact or benefit footprint constraints

Figure 2 shows a summary and tradeoffs of various RAID levels. In addition to the RAID levels, how many disks can also have an impact on performance or capacity, such as, by creating a larger RAID 5 or RAID 6 group, the parity overhead can be spread out, however there is a tradeoff. Tradeoffs can be performance bottlenecks on writes or during drive rebuilds along with potential exposure to drive failures.

All of this comes back to a balancing act to align to your specific needs as some will go with a RAID 10 stripe and mirror to avoid risks, even going so far as to do triple mirroring along with replication. On the other hand, some will go with RAID 5 or RAID 6 to meet cost or availability requirements, or, some I have talked with even run RAID 0 for data and applications that need the raw speed, yet can be restored rapidly from some other medium.

Lets bring it all together with an example
Figure 3 shows a generic example of a before and after optimization for a mixed workload environment, granted you can increase or decrease the applicable capacity and performance to meet your specific needs. In figure 3, the storage configuration consists of one storage system setup for high performance (left) and another for high-capacity secondary (right), disk to disk backup and other near-line needs, again, you can scale the approach up or down to your specific need.

For the performance side (left), 192 x 146GB 15K RPM (28TB raw) disks provide good performance, however with low capacity use. This translates into a low capacity per watt value however with reasonable IOPs per watt and some performance hot spots.

On the capacity centric side (right), there are 192 x 1TB disks (192TB raw) with good space utilization, however some performance hot spots or bottlenecks, constrained growth not to mention low IOPS per watt with reasonable capacity per watt. In the before scenario, the joint energy use (both arrays) is about 15 kWh or 15,000 watts which translates to about $16,000 annual energy costs (cooling excluded) assuming energy cost of 12 cents per kWh.

Note, your specific performance, availability, capacity and energy mileage will vary based on particular vendor solution, configuration along with your application characteristics.


Figure 3: Baseline before and after storage optimization (raw hardware) example

Building on the example in figure 3, a combination of techniques along with technologies yields a net performance, capacity and perhaps feature functionality (depends on specific solution) increase. In addition, floor-space, power, cooling and associated footprints are also reduced. For example, the resulting solution shown (middle) comprises 4 x 250GB flash SSD devices, along with 32 x 450GB 15.5K RPM and 124 x 2TB 7200RPM enabling an 53TB (raw) capacity increase along with performance boost.

The previous example are based on raw or baseline capacity metrics meaning that further optimization techniques should yield improved benefits. These examples should also help to discuss the question or myth that it costs more to power storage than to buy it which the answer should be it depends.

If you can buy the above solution for say under $50,000 (cost to power), or, let alone, $100,000 (power and cool) for three years which would also be a good acquisition, then the myth of buying is more expensive than powering holds true. However, if a solution as described above costs more, than the story changes along with other variables include energy costs for your particular location re-enforcing the notion that your mileage will vary.

Another tip is that more is not always better.

That is, more disks, ports, processors, controllers or cache do not always equate into better performance. Performance is the sum of how those and other pieces working together in a demonstrable way, ideally your specific application workload compared to what is on a product data sheet.

Additional general tips include:

  • Align the applicable tool, technique or technology to task at hand
  • Look to optimize for both performance and capacity, active and idle storage
  • Consolidated applications and servers need fast servers
  • Fast servers need fast I/O and storage devices to avoid bottlenecks
  • For active storage use an activity per watt metric such as IOP or transaction per watt
  • For in-active or idle storage, a capacity per watt per footprint metric would apply
  • Gain insight and control of how storage resources are used to meet service requirements

It should go without saying, however sometimes what is understood needs to be restated.

In the quest to become more efficient and optimized, avoid introducing performance, quality of service or availability issues by moving problems.

Likewise, look beyond storage space capacity also considering performance as applicable to become efficient.

Finally, it is all relative in that what might be applicable to one environment or application need may not apply to another.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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EPA Energy Star for Data Center Storage Update

EPA Energy Star

Following up on a recent post about Green IT, energy efficiency and optimization for servers, storage and more, here are some additional  thoughts, perspectives along with industry activity around the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Energy Star for Server, Data Center Storage and Data Centers.

First a quick update, Energy Star for Servers is in place with work now underway on expanding and extending beyond the first specification. Second is that Energy Star for Data Center storage definition is well underway including a recent workshop to refine the initial specification along with discussion for follow-on drafts.

Energy Star for Data Centers is also currently undergoing definition which is focused more on macro or facility energy (notice I did not say electricity) efficiency as opposed to productivity or effectiveness, items that the Server and Storage specifications are working towards.

Among all of the different industry trade or special interests groups, at least on the storage front the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Green Storage Initiative (GSI) and their Technical Work Groups (TWG) have been busily working for the past couple of years on taxonomies, metrics and other items in support of EPA Energy Star for Data Center Storage.

A challenge for SNIA along with others working on related material pertaining to storage and efficiency is the multi-role functionality of storage. That is, some storage simply stores data with little to no performance requirements while other storage is actively used for reading and writing. In addition, there are various categories, architectures not to mention hardware and software feature functionality or vendors with different product focus and interests.

Unlike servers that are either on and doing work, or, off or in low power mode, storage is either doing active work (e.g. moving data), storing in-active or idle data, or a combination of both. Hence for some, energy efficiency is about how much data can be stored in a given footprint with the least amount of power known as in-active or idle measurement.

On the other hand, storage efficiency is also about using the least amount of energy to produce the most amount of work or activity, for example IOPS or bandwidth per watt per footprint.

Thus the challenge and need for at least a two dimensional  model looking at, and reflecting different types or categories of storage aligned for active or in-active (e.g. storing) data enabling apples to apples, vs. apples to oranges comparison.

This is not all that different from how EPA looks at motor vehicle categories of economy cars, sport utility, work or heavy utility among others when doing different types of work, or, in idle.

What does this have to do with servers and storage?

Simple, when a server powers down where does its data go? That’s right, to a storage system using disk, ssd (RAM or flash), tape or optical for persistency. Likewise, when there is work to be done, where does the data get read into computer memory from, or written to? That’s right, a storage system. Hence the need to look at storage in a multi-tenant manner.

The storage industry is diverse with some vendors or products focused on performance or activity, while others on long term, low cost persistent storage for archive, backup, not to mention some doing a bit of both. Hence the nomenclature of herding cats towards a common goal when different parties have various interests that may conflict yet support needs of various customer storage usage requirements.

Figure 1 shows a simplified, streamlined storage taxonomy that has been put together by SNIA representing various types, categories and functions of data center storage. The green shaded areas are a good step in the right direction to simplify yet move towards realistic and achievable befits for storage consumers.


Figure 1 Source: EPA Energy Star for Data Center Storage web site document

The importance of the streamlined SNIA taxonomy is to help differentiate or characterize various types and tiers of storage (Figure 2) products facilitating apples to apples comparison instead of apples or oranges. For example, on-line primary storage needs to be looked at in terms of how much work or activity per energy footprint determines efficiency.


Figure 2: Tiered Storage Example

On other hand, storage for retaining large amounts of data that is in-active or idle for long periods of time should be looked at on a capacity per energy footprint basis. While final metrics are still being flushed out, some examples could be active storage gauged by IOPS or work or bandwidth per watt of energy per footprint while other storage for idle or inactive data could be looked at on a capacity per energy footprint basis.

What benchmarks or workloads to be used for simulating or measuring work or activity are still being discussed with proposals coming from various sources. For example SNIA GSI TWG are developing measurements and discussing metrics, as have the storage performance council (SPC) and SPEC among others including use of simulation tools such as IOmeter, VMware VMmark, TPC, Bonnie, or perhaps even Microsoft ESRP.

Tenants of Energy Star for Data Center Storage overtime hopefully will include:

  • Reflective of different types, categories, price-bands and storage usage scenarios
  • Measure storage efficiency for active work along with in-active or idle usage
  • Provide insight for both storage performance efficiency and effective capacity
  • Baseline or raw storage capacity along with effective enhanced optimized capacity
  • Easy to use metrics with more in-depth back ground or disclosure information

Ultimately the specification should help IT storage buyers and decision makers to compare and contrast different storage systems that are best suited and applicable to their usage scenarios.

This means measuring work or activity per energy footprint at a given capacity and data protection level to meet service requirements along with during in-active or idle periods. This also means showing storage that is capacity focused in terms of how much data can be stored in a given energy footprint.

One thing that will be tricky however will be differentiating GBytes per watt in terms of capacity, or, in terms of performance and bandwidth.

Here are some links to learn more:

Stay tuned for more on Energy Star for Data Centers, Servers and Data Center Storage.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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I/O Virtualization (IOV) Revisited

Is I/O Virtualization (IOV) a server topic, a network topic, or a storage topic (See previous post)?

Like server virtualization, IOV involves servers, storage, network, operating system, and other infrastructure resource management areas and disciplines. The business and technology value proposition or benefits of converged I/O networks and I/O virtualization are similar to those for server and storage virtualization.

Additional benefits of IOV include:

    • Doing more with what resources (people and technology) already exist or reduce costs
    • Single (or pair for high availability) interconnect for networking and storage I/O
    • Reduction of power, cooling, floor space, and other green efficiency benefits
    • Simplified cabling and reduced complexity for server network and storage interconnects
    • Boosting servers performance to maximize I/O or mezzanine slots
    • reduce I/O and data center bottlenecks
    • Rapid re-deployment to meet changing workload and I/O profiles of virtual servers
    • Scaling I/O capacity to meet high-performance and clustered application needs
    • Leveraging common cabling infrastructure and physical networking facilities

Before going further, lets take a step backwards for a few moments.

To say that I/O and networking demands and requirements are increasing is an understatement. The amount of data being generated, copied, and retained for longer periods of time is elevating the importance of the role of data storage and infrastructure resource management (IRM). Networking and input/output (I/O) connectivity technologies (figure 1) tie facilities, servers, storage tools for measurement and management, and best practices on a local and wide area basis to enable an environmentally and economically friendly data center.

TIERED ACCESS FOR SERVERS AND STORAGE
There is an old saying that the best I/O, whether local or remote, is an I/O that does not have to occur. I/O is an essential activity for computers of all shapes, sizes, and focus to read and write data in and out of memory (including external storage) and to communicate with other computers and networking devices. This includes communicating on a local and wide area basis for access to or over Internet, cloud, XaaS, or managed services providers such as shown in figure 1.

PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
Figure 1 The Big Picture: Data Center I/O and Networking

The challenge of I/O is that some form of connectivity (logical and physical), along with associated software is required along with time delays while waiting for reads and writes to occur. I/O operations that are closest to the CPU or main processor should be the fastest and occur most frequently for access to main memory using internal local CPU to memory interconnects. In other words, fast servers or processors need fast I/O, either in terms of low latency, I/O operations along with bandwidth capabilities.

PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
Figure 2 Tiered I/O and Networking Access

Moving out and away from the main processor, I/O remains fairly fast with distance but is more flexible and cost effective. An example is the PCIe bus and I/O interconnect shown in Figure 2, which is slower than processor-to-memory interconnects but is still able to support attachment of various device adapters with very good performance in a cost effective manner.

Farther from the main CPU or processor, various networking and I/O adapters can attach to PCIe, PCIx, or PCI interconnects for backward compatibility to support various distances, speeds, types of devices, and cost factors.

In general, the faster a processor or server is, the more prone to a performance impact it will be when it has to wait for slower I/O operations.

Consequently, faster servers need better-performing I/O connectivity and networks. Better performing means lower latency, more IOPS, and improved bandwidth to meet application profiles and types of operations.

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)
Having established that computers need to perform some form of I/O to various devices, at the heart of many I/O and networking connectivity solutions is the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) interface. PCI is an industry standard that specifies the chipsets used to communicate between CPUs and memory and the outside world of I/O and networking device peripherals.

Figure 3 shows an example of multiple servers or blades each with dedicated Fibre Channel (FC) and Ethernet adapters (there could be two or more for redundancy). Simply put the more servers and devices to attach to, the more adapters, cabling and complexity particularly for blade servers and dense rack mount systems.
PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
Figure 3 Dedicated PCI adapters for I/O and networking devices

Figure 4 shows an example of a PCI implementation including various components such as bridges, adapter slots, and adapter types. PCIe leverages multiple serial unidirectional point to point links, known as lanes, in contrast to traditional PCI, which used a parallel bus design.

PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)

Figure 4 PCI IOV Single Root Configuration Example

In traditional PCI, bus width varied from 32 to 64 bits; in PCIe, the number of lanes combined with PCIe version and signaling rate determine performance. PCIe interfaces can have 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32 lanes for data movement, depending on card or adapter format and form factor. For example, PCI and PCIx performance can be up to 528 MB per second with a 64 bit, 66 MHz signaling rate, and PCIe is capable of over 4 GB (e.g., 32 Gbit) in each direction using 16 lanes for high-end servers.

The importance of PCIe and its predecessors is a shift from multiple vendors’ different proprietary interconnects for attaching peripherals to servers. For the most part, vendors have shifted to supporting PCIe or early generations of PCI in some form, ranging from native internal on laptops and workstations to I/O, networking, and peripheral slots on larger servers.

The most current version of PCI, as defined by the PCI Special Interest Group (PCISIG), is PCI Express (PCIe). Backwards compatibility exists by bridging previous generations, including PCIx and PCI, off a native PCIe bus or, in the past, bridging a PCIe bus to a PCIx native implementation. Beyond speed and bus width differences for the various generations and implementations, PCI adapters also are available in several form factors and applications.

Traditional PCI was generally limited to a main processor or was internal to a single computer, but current generations of PCI Express (PCIe) include support for PCI Special Interest Group (PCI) I/O virtualization (IOV), enabling the PCI bus to be extended to distances of a few feet. Compared to local area networking, storage interconnects, and other I/O connectivity technologies, a few feet is very short distance, but compared to the previous limit of a few inches, extended PCIe provides the ability for improved sharing of I/O and networking interconnects.

I/O VIRTUALIZATION(IOV)
On a traditional physical server, the operating system sees one or more instances of Fibre Channel and Ethernet adapters even if only a single physical adapter, such as an InfiniBand HCA, is installed in a PCI or PCIe slot. In the case of a virtualized server for example, Microsoft HyperV or VMware ESX/vSphere the hypervisor will be able to see and share a single physical adapter, or multiple adapters, for redundancy and performance to guest operating systems. The guest systems see what appears to be a standard SAS, FC or Ethernet adapter or NIC using standard plug-and-play drivers.

Virtual HBA or virtual network interface cards (NICs) and switches are, as their names imply, virtual representations of a physical HBA or NIC, similar to how a virtual machine emulates a physical machine with a virtual server. With a virtual HBA or NIC, physical NIC resources are carved up and allocated as virtual machines, but instead of hosting a guest operating system like Windows, UNIX, or Linux, a SAS or FC HBA, FCoE converged network adapter (CNA) or Ethernet NIC is presented.

In addition to virtual or software-based NICs, adapters, and switches found in server virtualization implementations, virtual LAN (VLAN), virtual SAN (VSAN), and virtual private network (VPN) are tools for providing abstraction and isolation or segmentation of physical resources. Using emulation and abstraction capabilities, various segments or sub networks can be physically connected yet logically isolated for management, performance, and security purposes. Some form of routing or gateway functionality enables various network segments or virtual networks to communicate with each other when appropriate security is met.

PCI-SIG IOV
PCI SIG IOV consists of a PCIe bridge attached to a PCI root complex along with an attachment to a separate PCI enclosure (Figure 5). Other components and facilities include address translation service (ATS), single-root IOV (SR IOV), and multiroot IOV (MR IOV). ATS enables performance to be optimized between an I/O device and a servers I/O memory management. Single root, SR IOV enables multiple guest operating systems to access a single I/O device simultaneously, without having to rely on a hypervisor for a virtual HBA or NIC.

PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)

Figure 5 PCI SIG IOV

The benefit is that physical adapter cards, located in a physically separate enclosure, can be shared within a single physical server without having to incur any potential I/O overhead via virtualization software infrastructure. MR IOV is the next step, enabling a PCIe or SR IOV device to be accessed through a shared PCIe fabric across different physically separated servers and PCIe adapter enclosures. The benefit is increased sharing of physical adapters across multiple servers and operating systems not to mention simplified cabling, reduced complexity and resource utilization.

PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
Figure 6 PCI SIG MR IOV

Figure 6 shows an example of a PCIe switched environment, where two physically separate servers or blade servers attach to an external PCIe enclosure or card cage for attachment to PCIe, PCIx, or PCI devices. Instead of the adapter cards physically plugging into each server, a high performance short-distance cable connects the servers PCI root complex via a PCIe bridge port to a PCIe bridge port in the enclosure device.

In figure 6, either SR IOV or MR IOV can take place, depending on specific PCIe firmware, server hardware, operating system, devices, and associated drivers and management software. For a SR IOV example, each server has access to some number of dedicated adapters in the external card cage, for example, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, Ethernet, or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and converged networking adapters (CNA) also known as HBAs. SR IOV implementations do not allow different physical servers to share adapter cards. MR IOV builds on SR IOV by enabling multiple physical servers to access and share PCI devices such as HBAs and NICs safely with transparency.

The primary benefit of PCI IOV is to improve utilization of PCI devices, including adapters or mezzanine cards, as well as to enable performance and availability for slot-constrained and physical footprint or form factor-challenged servers. Caveats of PCI IOV are distance limitations and the need for hardware, firmware, operating system, and management software support to enable safe and transparent sharing of PCI devices. Examples of PCIe IOV vendors include Aprius, NextIO and Virtensys among others.

InfiniBand IOV
InfiniBand based IOV solutions are an alternative to Ethernet-based solutions. Essentially, InfiniBand approaches are similar, if not identical, to converged Ethernet approaches including FCoE, with the difference being InfiniBand as the network transport. InfiniBand HCAs with special firmware are installed into servers that then see a Fibre Channel HBA and Ethernet NIC from a single physical adapter. The InfiniBand HCA also attaches to a switch or director that in turn attaches to Fibre Channel SAN or Ethernet LAN networks.

The value of InfiniBand converged networks are that they exist today, and they can be used for consolidation as well as to boost performance and availability. InfiniBand IOV also provides an alternative for those who do not choose to deploy Ethernet.

From a power, cooling, floor-space or footprint standpoint, converged networks can be used for consolidation to reduce the total number of adapters and the associated power and cooling. In addition to removing unneeded adapters without loss of functionality, converged networks also free up or allow a reduction in the amount of cabling, which can improve airflow for cooling, resulting in additional energy efficiency. An example of a vendor using InfiniBand as a platform for I/O virtualization is Xsigo.

General takeaway points include the following:

  • Minimize the impact of I/O delays to applications, servers, storage, and networks
  • Do more with what you have, including improving utilization and performance
  • Consider latency, effective bandwidth, and availability in addition to cost
  • Apply the appropriate type and tiered I/O and networking to the task at hand
  • I/O operations and connectivity are being virtualized to simplify management
  • Convergence of networking transports and protocols continues to evolve
  • PCIe IOV is complimentary to converged networking including FCoE

Moving forward, a revolutionary new technology may emerge that finally eliminates the need for I/O operations. However until that time, or at least for the foreseeable future, several things can be done to minimize the impacts of I/O for local and remote networking as well as to simplify connectivity.

PCIe Fundamentals Server Storage I/O Network Essentials

Learn more about IOV, converged networks, LAN, SAN, MAN and WAN related topics in Chapter 9 (Networking with your servers and storage) of The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) as well as in Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures (Elsevier).

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Should Everything Be Virtualized?

Storage I/O trends

Should everything, that is all servers, storage and I/O along with facilities, be virtualized?

The answer not surprisingly should be it depends!

Denny Cherry (aka Mrdenny) over at ITKE did a great recent post about applications not being virtualized, particularly databases. In general some of the points or themes we are on the same or similar page, while on others we slightly differ, not by very much.

Unfortunately consolidation is commonly misunderstood to be the sole function or value proposition of server virtualization given its first wave focus. I agree that not all applications or servers should be consolidated (note that I did not say virtualized).

From a consolidation standpoint, the emphasis is often on boosting resource use to cut physical hardware and management costs by boosting the number of virtual machines (VMs) per physical machine (PMs). Ironically, while VMs using VMware, Microsoft HyperV, Citrix/Xen among others can leverage a common gold image for cloning or rapid provisioning, there are still separate operating system instances and applications that need to be managed for each VM.

Sure, VM tools from the hypervisor along with 3rd party vendors help with these tasks as well as storage vendor tools including dedupe and thin provisioning help to cut the data footprint impact of these multiple images. However, there are still multiple images to manage providing a future opportunity for further cost and management reduction (more on that in a different post).

Getting back on track:

Some reasons that all servers or applications cannot be consolidated include among others:

  • Performance, response time, latency and Quality of Service (QoS)
  • Security requirements including keeping customers or applications separate
  • Vendor support of software on virtual or consolidated servers
  • Financial where different departments own hardware or software
  • Internal political or organizational barriers and turf wars

On the other hand, for those that see virtualization as enabling agility and flexibility, that is life beyond consolidation, there are many deployment opportunities for virtualization (note that I did not say consolidation). For some environments and applications, the emphasis can be on performance, quality of service (QoS) and other service characteristics where the ratio of VMs to PMs will be much lower, if not one to one. This is where Mrdenny and me are essentially on the same page, perhaps saying it different with plenty of caveats and clarification needed of course.

My view is that in life beyond consolidation, many more servers or applications can be virtualized than might be otherwise hosted by VMs (note that I did not say consolidated). For example, instead of a high number or ratio of VMs to PMs, a lower number and for some workloads or applications, even one VM to PM can be leveraged with a focus beyond basic CPU use.

Yes you read that correctly, I said why not configure some VMs on a one to one PM basis!

Here’s the premise, todays current wave or focus is around maximizing the number of VMs and/or the reduction of physical machines to cut capital and operating costs for under-utilized applications and servers, thus the move to stuff as many VMs into/onto a PM as possible.

However, for those applications that cannot be consolidated as outlined above, there is still a benefit of having a VM dedicated to a PM. For example, by dedicating a PM (blade, server or perhaps core) allows performance and QoS aims to be meet while still providing the ability for operational and infrastructure resource management (IRM), DCIM or ITSM flexibility and agility.

Meanwhile during busy periods, the application such as a database server could have its own PM, yet during off-hours, some over VM could be moved onto that PM for backup or other IRM/DCIM/ITSM activities. Likewise, by having the VM under the database with a dedicated PM, the application could be moved proactively for maintenance or in a clustered HA scenario support BC/DR.

What can and should be done?
First and foremost, decide how VMs is the right number to divide per PM for your environment and different applications to meet your particular requirements and business needs.

Identify various VM to PM ratios to align with different application service requirements. For example, some applications may run on virtual environments with a higher number of VMs to PMs, others with a lower number of VMs to PMs and some with a one VM to PM allocation.

Certainly there will be for different reasons the need to keep some applications on a direct PM without introducing a hypervisors and VM, however many applications and servers can benefit from virtualization (again note, I did not say consolation) for agility, flexibility, BC/DR, HA and ease of IRM assuming the costs work in your favor.

Additional general to do or action items include among others:

  • Look beyond CPU use also factoring in memory and I/O performance
  • Keep response time or latency in perspective as part of performance
  • More and fast memory are important for VMs as well as for applications including databases
  • High utilization may not show high hit rates or effectiveness of resource usage
  • Fast servers need fast memory, fast I/O and fast storage systems
  • Establish tiers of virtual and physical servers to meet different service requirements
  • See efficiency and optimization as more than simply driving up utilization to cut costs
  • Productivity and improved QoS are also tenants of an efficient and optimized environment

These are themes among others that are covered in chapters 3 (What Defines a Next-Generation and Virtual Data Center?), 4 (IT Infrastructure Resource Management), 5 (Measurement, Metrics, and Management of IT Resources), as well as 7 (Servers—Physical, Virtual, and Software) in my book “The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) that you can learn more about here.

Welcome to life beyond consolidation, the next wave of desktop, server, storage and IO virtualization along with the many new and expanded opportunities!

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Another StorageIO Appearance on Storage Monkeys InfoSmack

Following up from a previous appearance, I recently had another opportunity to participate in another Storage Monkeys InfoSmack podcast episode.

In the most recent podcast, discussions were centered on the recent service disruption at Microsoft/T-Mobile Side-Kick cloud services, FTC blogger disclosure guidelines, is Brocade up for sale and who should buy them, SNIA and SNW among other topics.

Here are a couple of relevant links pertaining to topics discussed in this InfoSmack session.

If you are involved with servers, storage, I/O networking, virtualization and other related data infrastructure topics, check out Storage Monkeys and InfoSmack.

Cheers – gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIO, Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

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PUE, Are you Managing Power, Energy or Productivity?

With a renewed focus on Green IT including energy Efficiency and Optimization of servers, storage, networks and facilities, is your focus on managing power, energy, or, productivity?

For example, do you use or are interested in metrics such as Greengrid PUE or 80 Plus efficient power supplies along with initiatives such as EPA Energy Star for servers and emerging Energy Star for Data Center for Storage in terms of energy usage?

Or are you interested in productivity such as amount of work or activity that can be done in a given amount of time,or how much information can be stored in a given footprint (power, cooling, floor space, budget, management)?

For many organizations, there tends to be a focus and in both managing power along with managing productivity. The two are or should interrelated, however there are some disconnects with some emphasis and metrics. For example, the Green grid PUE is a macro facilities centric metric that does not show the productivity, quality or measure of services being delivered by a data center or information factory. Instead, PUE provides a gauge of how the habitat, that is the building and power distribution along with cooling are efficient with respect to the total energy consumption of IT equipment.

As a refresher, PUE is a macro metric that is essentially a ratio of how much total power or energy goes into a facility vs. the amount of energy used by IT equipment. For example, if 12Kw (smaller room/site) or 12Mw (larger site) are required to power an IT data center or computer room for that matter, and of that energy load, 6kWh or 6Mw, the PUE would be 2. A PUE of 2 is an indicator that 50% of energy going to power a facility or computer room goes towards IT equipment (servers, storage, networks, telecom and related equipment) with the balance going towards running the facility or environment which typically has had the highest percentage being HVAC/cooling.

In the case of EPA Energy Star for Data Centers which initially is focused on the habitat or facility efficiency, the answer is measuring and managing energy use and facility efficiency as opposed to productivity or useful work. The metric for EPA Energy Star for Data Center initially will be Energy Usage Effectiveness (EUE) that will be used to calculate a ratting for a data center facility. Those data centers in the top25 percentile will qualify for Energy Star certification.

Note the word energy and not power which means that the data center macro metric based on Green grid PUE rating looks at all source of energy used by a data center and not just electrical power. What this means is that a macro and holistic facilities energy consumption could be a combination of electrical power, diesel, propane or natural gas or other fuel sources to generate or create power for IT equipment, HVAC/Cooling and other needs. By using a metric that factor in all energy sources, a facility that uses solar, radiant, heat pumps, economizers or other techniques to reduce demands on energy will make a better rating.

By using a macro metric such as EUE or PUE (ratio = Total_Power_Used / IT_Power_Needs), a starting point is available to decide and compare efficiency and cost to power or energize a facility or room also known as a habitat for technology.

Managing Productivity of Information Factories (E.g. Data Centers)
What EUE and PUE do not reflect or indicate is how much data is processed, moved and stored by servers, storage and networks within a facility. On the other hand or extreme from macro metrics are micro or component metrics that gauge energy usage on an individual device basis. Some of these micro metrics may have activity or productivity indicator measurements associated with them, some don’t. Where these leave a big gap and opportunity is to fill the span between the macro and micro.

This is where work is being done by various industry groups including SNIA GSI, SPC and SPEC among others along with EPA Energy Star among others to move beyond macro PUE indicators to more granular effectiveness and efficiency metrics that reflect productivity. Ultimately productivity is important to gauge,  the return on investment and business value of how much data can be processed by servers, moved via networks or stored on storage devices in a given energy footprint or cost.

In Figure 1 are shown four basic approaches (in addition to doing nothing) to energy efficiency. One approach is to avoid energy usage, similar to following a rationing model, but this approach will affect the amount of work that can be accomplished. Another approach is to do more work using the same amount of energy, boosting energy efficiency, or do same amount of work (or storage data) however with less energy.

Tiered Storage
Figure 1 the Many Faces of Energy Efficiency Source: The Green and Virtual Data Center(CRC)

The energy efficiency gap is the difference between the amount of work accomplished or information stored in a given footprint and the energy consumed. In other words, the bigger the energy efficiency gap, the better, as seen in the fourth scenario, doing more work or storing more information in a smaller footprint using less energy. Clock here to read more about Shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency.

Watch for new metrics looking at productivity and activity for servers, storage and networks ranging from MHz or GHz per watt, transactions or IOPS per watt, bandwidth, frames or packets processed per watt or capacity stored per watt in a given footprint. One of the confusing metrics is Gbytes or Tbytes per watt in that it can mean storage capacity or bandwidth, thus, understand the context of the metric. Likewise watch for metrics that reflect energy usage for active along with in-active including idle or dormant storage common with archives, backup or fixed content data.

What this all means is that work continues on developing usable and relevant metrics and measurement not only for macro energy usage, also, to gauge the effectiveness of delivering IT services. The business value proposition of driving efficiency and optimization including increased productivity along with storing more information in a given footprint is to support density and business sustainability.

 

Additional resources and where to learn in addition to those mentioned above include:

EPA Energy Star for Data Center Storage

Storage Efficiency and Optimization – The Other Green

Performance = Availability StorageIOblog featured ITKE guest blog

SPC and Storage Benchmarking Games

Shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency

Green IT Confusion Continues, Opportunities Missed!

Green Power and Cooling Tools and Calculators

Determining Computer or Server Energy Use

Examples of Green Metrics

Green IT, Power, Energy and Related Tools or Calculators

Chapter 10 (Performance and Capacity Planning)
Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)

Chapter 5 (Measurement, Metrics and Management of IT Resources)
The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Clouds and Data Loss: Time for CDP (Commonsense Data Protection)?

Today SNIA released a press release pertaining to cloud storage timed to coincide with SNW where we can only presume vendors are talking about their cloud storage stories.

Yet chatter on the coconut wire along with various news (here and here and here) and social media sites is how could cloud storage and information service provider T-Mobile/Microsoft/Side-Kick loose customers data?

Data loss is a dangerous phrase, after all, your data may still be intact somewhere, however if you cannot get to it when needed, that may seem like data loss to you.

There are many types of data loss including loss of accessibility or availability along with flat out loss. Let me clarify, loss of data availability or accessibility means that somewhere, your data is still intact, perhaps off-line on a removable disk, optical, tape or at another site on-line, near-line or off-line, its just that you cannot get to it yet. There is also real data loss where both your primary copy and backup as well as archive data are lost, stolen, corrupted or never actually protected.

Clouds or managed service providers in general are getting beat up due to some loss of access, availability or actual data loss, however before jumping on that bandwagon and pointing fingers at the service, how about a step back for a minute. Granted, given all of the cloud hype and proliferation of managed service offerings on the web (excuse me cloud), there is a bit of a lightning rod backlash or see I told you so approach.

Whats different about this story compared to prior disruptions with Amazon, Google, Blackberry among others is that unlike where access to information or services ranging from calendar, emails, contacts or other documents is disrupted for a period of time, it sounds as those data may have been lost.

Lost data you should say? How can you lose data after all there are copies of copies of data that have been snapshot, replicated and deduplicated storage across different tiered storage right?

Certainly anyone involved in data management or data protection is asking the question; why not go back to a snapshot copy, replicated volute, backup copy on disk or tape?

Needless to say, finger pointing aerobics are or will be in full swing. Instead, lets ask the question, is it time for CDP as in Commonsense Data Protection?

However, rather than point blame or spout off about how bad clouds are, or, that they are getting an un-fair shake and un-due coverage, and that just because there might be a few bad ones, not all clouds are bad particularly with recent outages.

I can think of many ways on how to actually lose data, however, to totally lose data requires not a technology failure, it can be something much simpler and is equally applicable to cloud, virtual and physical data centers and storage environments from the largest to the smallest to the consumer. Its simple, common sense, best practices, making copies of all data and keeping extra copies around somewhere, with more frequent or recent data having copies readily available.

Some trends Im seeing include among others:

  • Low cost craze leveraging free or near free services and products
  • Cloud hype and cloud bashing and need to discuss wide area in between those extremes
  • Renewed need for basic data protection including BC/DR, HA, backup and security
  • Opportunity to re-architect data protection in conjunction with other initiatives
  • Lack of adequate funding for continued and proactive data protection

Just to be safe, lets revisit some common data protection best practices:

  • Learn from mistakes, preferable during testing with aim to avoid repeating them again
  • Most disasters in IT and elsewhere are the result of a chain of events not being contained
  • RAID is not a replacement for backup, it simply provides availability or accessibility
  • Likewise, mirroring or replication by themselves is not a replacement for backup.
  • Use point in time RPO based data protection such as snapshots or backup with replication
  • Maintain a master backup or gold copy that can be used to restore to a given point of time
  • Keep backup on another medium, also protect backup catalog or other configuration data
  • If using deduplication, make sure that indexes/dictionary or Meta data is also protected.
  • Moving your data into the cloud is not a replacement for a data protection strategy
  • Test restoration of backed data both locally, as well as from cloud services
  • Employ data protection management (DPM) tools for event correlation and analysis
  • Data stored in clouds need to be part of a BC/DR and overall data protection strategy
  • Have extra copy of data placed in clouds kept in alternate location as part of BC/DR
  • Ask yourself, what will do you when your cloud data goes away (note its not if, its when)
  • Combine multiple layers or rings of defines and assume what can break will break

Clouds should not be scary; Clouds do not magically solve all IT or consumer issues. However they can be an effective tool when of high caliber as part of a total data protection strategy.

Perhaps this will be a wake up call, a reminder, that it is time to think beyond cost savings and a shift back to basic data protection best practices. What good is the best or most advanced technology if you have less than adequate practices or polices? Bottom line, time for Commonsense Data Protection (CDP).

Ok, nuff said for now, I need to go and make sure I have a good removable backup in case my other local copies fail or Im not able to get to my cloud copies!

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

Posted on

Could Huawei buy Brocade?

Disclosure: I have no connection to Huawei. I own no stock in, nor have I worked for Brocade as an employee; however I did work for three years at SAN vendor INRANGE which was acquired by CNT. However I left to become an industry analyst prior to the acquisition by McData and well before Brocade bought McData. Brocade is not a current client; however I have done speaking events pertaining to general industry trends and perspectives at various Brocade customer events for them in the past.

Is Brocade for sale?

Last week a Wall Street Journal article mentioned Brocade (BRCD) might be for sale.

BRCD has a diverse product portfolio for Fibre Channel, Ethernet along with the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) market and a whos who of OEM and channel partners. Why not be for sale, good timing for investors, CEO Mike Klayko and his team have arguably done a good job of shifting and evolving the company.

Generally speaking, lets keep in perspective, everything is always for sale, and in an economy like now, bargains are everywhere. Many business are shopping, its just a matter of how visible the shopping for a seller or buyer is along with motivations and objectives including shareholder value.

Consequently, the coconut wires are abuzz with talk and speculation of who will buy Brocade or perhaps who Brocade might buy among other Merger and Acquisition (M and A) activity of who will buy who. For example, who might buy BRCD, why not EMC (they sold McData off years ago via IPO), or IBM (they sold some of their networking business to Cisco years ago) or HP (currently an OEM partner of BRCD) as possible buyers?

Last week I posted on twitter a response to a comment about who would want to buy Brocade with a response to the effect of why not a Huawei to which there was some silence except for industry luminary Steve Duplessie (have a look to see what Steve had to say).

Part of being an analyst IMHO should be to actually analyze things vs. simply reporting on what others want you to report or what you have read or hear elsewhere. This also means talking about scenarios that are of out of the box or in adjacent boxes from some perspectives or that might not be in-line with traditional thinking. Sometimes this means breaking away and thinking and saying what may not be obvious or practical. Having said that, lets take a step back for a moment as to why Brocade may or might not be for sale and who might or may not be interested in them.

IMHO, it has a lot to do with Cisco and not just because Brocade sees no opportunity to continue competing with the 800lb guerilla of LAN/MAN networking that has moved into Brocades stronghold of storage network SANs. Cisco is upsetting the table or apple cart with its server partners IBM, Dell, HP, Oracle/Sun and others by testing the waters of the server world with their UCS. So far I see this as something akin to a threat testing the defenses of a target before actually full out attacking.

In other words, checking to see how the opposition responds, what defense are put up, collect G2 or intelligence as well as how the rest of the world or industry might respond to an all out assault or shift of power or control. Of course, HP, IBM, Dell and Sun/Oracle will not take this move into their revenue and account control goes un-noticed with initial counter announcements having been made some re-emphasize relationship with Brocade along with their recent acquisition of Ethernet/IP vendor Foundry.

Now what does this have to do with Brocade potentially being sold and why the title involving Huawei?

Many of the recent industry acquisitions have been focused on shoring up technology or intellectual property (IP), eliminating a competitor or simply taking advantage of market conditions. For example, Datadomain was sold to EMC in a bidding war with NetApp, HP bought IBRIX, Oracle bought or is trying to buy Sun, Oracle also bought Virtual Iron, Dell bought Perot after HP bought EDS a year or so ago while Xerox bought ACS and so the M and A game continues among other deals.

Some of the deals are strategic, many being tactical, Brocade being bought I would put in the category of a strategic scenario, a bargaining chip or even pawn if you prefer in a much bigger game that is more than about switches, directors, HBAs, LANs, SANs, MANSs, WANs, POTS and PANs (Checkout my  book “Resilient Storage Networks”-Elsevier)!

So with conversations focused around Cisco expanding into servers to control the data center discussion, mindset, thinking, budgets and decision making, why wouldnt an HP, IBM, Dell let alone a NetApp, Oracle/Sun or even EMC want to buy Brocade as a bargaining chip in a bigger game? Why not a Ciena (they just bought some of Nortels assets), Juniper or 3Com (more of a merger of equals to fight Cisco), Microsoft (might upset their partner Cisco) or Fujitsu (Their Telco group that is) among others?

Then why not Huawei, a company some may have heard of, one that others may not have.

Who is Huawei you might ask?

Simple, they are a very large IT solutions provider who is also a large player in China with global operations including R&D in North America and many partnerships with U.S. vendors. By rough comparison, Cisco most recently reported annual revenue are about 36.1B (All are USD), BRCD about 1.5B, Juniper about $3.5B and 3COM about $1.3B and Huawei at about 23B USD with a year over year sales increase of 45%. Huawei has previous partnerships with storage vendors including Symantec and Falconstor among others. Huawei also has had partnership with 3com (H3C), a company that was first of the LAN vendors to get into SANs (pre-maturely) beating Cisco easily by several years.

Sure there would be many hurdles and issues, similar to the ones CNT and INRANGE had to overcome, or McData and CNT, or Brocade and McData among others. However in the much bigger game of IT account and thus budget control is played by HP, IBM, and Sun/Oracle among others, wouldn’t maintaining a dual-source for customers networking needs make sense, or, at least serve as a check to Cisco expansion efforts? If nothing else, maintaining the status quo in the industry for now, or, if the rules and game are changing, wouldn’t some of the bigger vendors want to get closer to the markets where Huawei is seeing rapid growth?

Does this mean that Brocade could be bought? Sure.
Does this mean Brocade cannot compete or is a sign of defeat? I don’t think so.
Does this mean that Brocade could end up buying or merging with someone else? Sure, why not.
Or, is it possible that someone like Huawei could end up buying Brocade? Why not!

Now, if Huawei were to buy Brocade, which begs the question for fun, could they be renamed or spun off as a division called HuaweiCade or HuaCadeWei? Anything is possible when you look outside the box.

Nuff said for now, food for thought.

Cheers – gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIO, Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

Posted on

Poll: Whats Your Take on FTC Guidelines For Bloggers?

If you have not heard or read yet, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week released new guidelines pertaining to blogger (or other social media) disclosure of if they are being paid, receiving free products or services, or simply had their costs covered to attend an event that they will be writing, posting or blogging about.

Not surprisingly, there are those who are up in arms, those that are cheering that its about time, and everyone else trying to figure out what the new rules mean, who they apply to and when. For some I expect to see a rash of disclosures by those not sure what it means or being safe while others continue to do what they have been doing, business or blogging or both as usual. As with many things, all bloggers do not get paid or receive renumeration (compensation in some shape or form) for what they write or blog, however there are some that do and is often the case, a few bad apples turn a good thing into a problem or black-eye for everyone else.

Here’s a couple of links for some background:
Discussion over at StorageMonkeys.com pertaining to IT/Storage Analysts
Discussion at Blogher.com what the FTC guides mean to you
FTC blogger guidelines

I interpret the new FTC guidelines as pertaining to me or anyone else who has a blog regardless of if they are a social media elite professional or just for fun blogger, blog on their own time for work our their own other purposes, for profit, as a media or journalist, reporter or freelance writer, consultant or contractor, vendor or customer. My view and its just that, a view is that blogs, along with other forms of social media are tools for communication, collaborating and conversation. Thus, I have a blog, twitter, website, facebook, linkedin along with having material appear in print, on-line as well as in person, all are simply different means for interacting and communications.

As with any new communication venue, there is an era of wide open and what some might call the wide open use such as we are seeing with social media mediums today, the web in general in the past, not to mention print, TV or radio in the past.

I’m reading into these guidelines as a maturing process and acknowledgement that social media including blogs have now emerged into a viable and full fledged communication medium that consumers utilize for making decisions, thus guides need to be in place.

I like other bloggers are wondering abut the details including when to disclose something, how the guidelines will be enforced among other questions, that is unless you are one that does not believe the guidelines apply to yourself.

With all of this in mind, here’s a new poll, what’s your take on the FTC guidelines?

As for my own disclosures, look for them in white papers, articles, blogs and other venues as applicable.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved