Tag: disk

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The data storage prayer

On a lighter note.

For those who follow or are involved with data storage religiously with a passion, then this is for you. As for others who do not get or understand what this is about, just ask those who are devout data storage followers.

Now I lay my data to sleep
I pray the lord my backups to keep
If a disk should die before I wake
I hope like heck RAID works and my resume is up to date

Nuff said, now get back to work or what ever it was you were doing before reading this and best wishes!

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and coming summer 2011 Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2011 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Securing data at rest: Self Encrypting Disks (SEDs)

Here is a link to a recent guest post that I was invited to do over at The Virtualization Practice (TVP) pertaining to Self Encrypting Disk (SEDs).

Based on the trusted computing group (TCG) DriveTrust and OPAL disk drive security models, SEDs offload encryption to the disk drive while complimenting other encryption security solutions to protect against theft or lost storage devices. There is another benefit however for SEDs which is simplifying the process of decommissioning a storage device safely and quickly.

If you are not familiar with them, SEDs perform encryption within the hard disk drive (HDD) itself using the onboard processor and resident firmware. Since SEDs only protect data at rest, other forms of encryption should be combined to protect data in flight or on the move.

There is also another benefit of SEDs in that for those of you concerned about how to digital destroy, shred or erase large capacity disks in the future, you may have a new option. While intended for protecting data, a byproduct is that when a SED is removed from the system or server or controller that it has established an affinity with, its contents are effectively useless until reattached. If the encryption key for a SED is changed, then the data is instantly rendered useless, or at least for most environments.

Learn more about SEDs here and via the following links:

  • Self-Encrypting Drives for IBM System x
  • Trusted Computing Group OPAL Summary
  • Storage Performance Council (SPC) SED and Non SED benchmarks
  • Seagate SED information
  • Trusted Computing Group SED information

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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What records will EMC break in NYC January 18, 2011?

What records will EMC break in NYC January 18, 2011?

In case you have not seen or heard, EMC is doing an event next week in New York City (NYC) at the AXA Equitable Center winter weather snow storm clouds permitting (and adequate tools or technologies to deal with the snow removal), that has a theme around breaking records. If you have yet to see any of the advertisements, blogs, tweets, facebook, friendfeed, twitter, yourtube or other mediums messages, here (and here and here) are a few links to learn more as well as register to view the event.

Click on the above image to see more

There is already speculation along with IT industry wiki leaks of what will be announced or talked about next week that you can google or find at some different venues.

The theme of the event is breaking records.

What might we hear?

In addition to the advisor, author, blogger and consultant hats that I wear, Im also in the EMCs analysts relations program and as such under NDA, consequently, what the actual announcement will be next week, no comment for now. BTW, I also wear other hats including one from Boeing even though I often fly on Airbus products as well.

If its not Boeing Im not going, except I do also fly Airbus, Embrear and Bombardiar products
Other hats I wear

However, how about some fun as to what might be covered at next weeks event with getting into a wiki leak situation?

  • A no brainier would be product (hardware, software, services) related as it is mid January and if you have been in the industry for more than a year or two, you might recall that EMC tends to a mid winter launch around this time of year along with sometimes an early summer refresh. Guess what time of the year it is.
  • Im guessing lots of superlatives, perhaps at a record breaking pace (e.g. revolutionary first, explosive growth, exponential explosive growth, perfect storm among others that could be candidates for the Storagebrain wall of fame or shame)
  • Maybe we will even hear that EMC has set a new record of number of members in Chads army aka the vspecialists focused on vSphere related topics along with a growing (quietly) number of Microsoft HyperV specialist.
  • That EMC has a record number of twitter tweeps engaged in conversations (or debates) with different audiences, collectives, communities, competitors, customers, individuals, organizations, partners or venues among others.
  • Possibly that their involvement in the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) has resulted in enough savings to offset the impact of hosting the event making it carbon and environment neutral. After all, we already know that EMC has been in the CDP as in Continual or Constant Data Protection as well as Complete or Comprehensive Data Protection along with Cloud Data Protection not to mention Common Sense Data Protection (CSDP) for sometime now.
  • Perhaps something around the number of acquisitions, patents, products, platforms, products and partners they have amassed recently.
  • For investors, wishful thinking that they will be moving their stock into record territories.
  • Im also guessing we will hear or see a record number of tweets, posts, videos and stories.
  • To be fair and balanced, Im also expecting a record number of counter tweets, counter posts, counter videos and counter stories coming out of the event.

Some records I would like to see EMC break however Im not going to hold my breath at least for next week include:

  • Announcement of upping the game in performance benchmarking battles with record setting or breaking various SPC benchmark results submitted on their own (instead of via a competitor or here) in different categories of block storage devices along with entries for SSD based, clustered and virtualized. Of course we would expect to hear how those benchmarks and workload simulations really do not matter which would be fine, at least they would have broken some records.
  • Announcement of having shipped more hard disk drives (HDD) than anyone else in conjunction with shipping more storage than anyone else. Despite being continually declared dead (its not) and SSD gaining traction, EMC would have a record breaking leg to stand on if the qualify amount of storage shipped as external or shared or networked (SAN or NAS) as opposed to collective (e.g. HP with servers and storage among others).
  • Announcement that they are buying Cisco, or Cisco is buying them, or that they and Cisco are buying Microsoft and Oracle.
  • Announcement of being proud of the record setting season of the Patriots, devastated to losing a close and questionable game to the NY Jets, wishing them well in the 2010 NFL Playoffs (Im just sayin…).
  • Announcement of being the first vendor and solution provider to establish SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, DaaS and many other XaaS offerings via their out of this world new moon base (plans underway for Mars as part of a federated offering).
  • Announcement that Fenway park will be rebranded as the house that EMC built (or rebuilt).

Disclosure: I will be in NYC on Tuesday the 18th as one of EMCs many guests that they have picked up airfare and lodging, thanks to Len Devanna and the EMC social media crew for reaching out and extending the invitation.

Other guests of the event will include analysts, advisors, authors, bloggers, beat writers, consultants, columnist, customers, editors, media, paparazzi, partners, press, protesters (hopefully polite ones), publishers, pundits, twitter tweepps and writers among others.

I wonder if there will also be a record number of disclosures made by others attending the event as guests of EMC?

More after (or maybe during) the event.

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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Have VTLs or VxLs become Zombies, Declared dead yet still alive?

Have you heard or read the reports and speculation that VTLs (Virtual Tape Libraries) are dead?

It seems that in IT the all to popular trend is to declare something dead so that your new product or technology can have a chance of making it in to the market or perhaps seen in a better light.

Sometimes this approach works to temporary freeze the market until common sense and clarity returns to the market or until something else fun to talk about comes along and in other cases, the messages can fall on deft ears.

The approach of declaring something dead tends to play well for those who like shiny new toys (SNT) or new shiny toys (NST) and being on the popular, cool trendy bandwagon.

Not surprisingly, while some actual IT customers can fall into the SNT or NST syndrome, its often the broader industry including media, bloggers, analysts, consultants and other self proclaimed or anointed pundits as well as vendors who latch on to the declare it dead movement. After all, who wants to talk about something that is old, boring and already being sold to paying customers who are using it. Now this is not a bad thing as we need a balance of up and coming challengers to keep the status quo challenged, likewise we need a balance of the new to avoid death grips on the old and what is working.

Likewise, many IT customers particularly larger ones tend to be very risk averse and conservative with their budgets protecting their investments thus they may only go leading bleeding edge if there is a dual redundant blood bank with a backup on hot standby (thats some HA humor BTW).

Another reason that declaring items dead in support of SNT and NST is that while many of the commonly declared dead items are on the proverbial plateau of productivity for IT customers, that also can mean that they are on the plateau of profitability for the vendors.

However, not all good things last and at sometime, there is the need to transition from the old to the new and this is where things like virtualization including virtual tape libraries or virtual disk libraries or virtual storage library or what ever you want to call a VxL (more on what a VxL is in a moment) can come into play.

I realize that for some, particularly those who like to grasp on to SNT, NST and ride the dead pool bandwagons this will probably appear as snarky or cynical which is fine, after all, for some, you should be laughing to the bank and if not, you may in fact be missing out on an opportunity for playing in the dead pool marketing game.

Now back to VxL.

In the case of VTLs, for some it is the T word that bothers them, you know T as in Tape which is not a SNT or NST in an age where SSD has supposedly killed the disk drive which allegedly terminated tape (yeah right). Sure tape is not being used as much for backup as it has in the past with its role shifting to that of longer term retention, something that it is well suited for.

For tape fans (or cynics) you can read more here, here and here. However there is still a large amount of backup/restore along with other data protection or preservation (e.g. archiving) processing (software tools, processes, procedures, skill sets, management tools) that still expects to see tape.

Hence this is where VTLs or VxLs come into play leveraging virtualization in an Life Beyond Consolidation (and here) scenario providing abstraction, transparency, agility and emulation and IMHO are still very much alive and evolving.

Ok, for those who do not like or believe in or of its continued existence and evolving role, substitute the T (tape) with X and you get a VxL. That is, plug in what ever X word that makes you happy or marketable or a Shiny New TLA. For example Virtual Disk Library, Virtual Storage Library, Virtual Backup Library, Virtual Compression Library, Virtual Dedupe Library, Virtual ILM Library, Virtual Archive Library, Virtual Cloud Library and so forth. Granted some VxLs only emulate tape and hence are VTLs while others support NAS and other protocols (or personalities) not to mention functionality ranging from replication, DFR as well as automated policy management.

However, keep in mind that if your preference is VTL, VxL or what ever other buzzword bingo name that you want to use or come up with, look at how virtualization in the form of abstraction, transparency and emulation can bridge the gap between the new (disk based data protection) combined with DFR (Data Footprint Reduction) and the old (existing backup/restore, archive or other management tools and processes.

Here are some additional links pertaining to VTLs (excuse me, VxLs):

  • Virtual tape libraries: Old backup technology holdover or gateway to the future?
  • Not to mention here, here, here, here or here.

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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Industry Trends and Perspectives: Tape, Disk and Dedupe Coexistence

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageioblog.com/reports.

The topic of this post is a trend that I am seeing and hearing about during discussions with IT professionals pertaining to how tape is still alive despite common industry FUD.

Not only is tape still very much alive with recent enhancements including LTO5 with an extended range roadmap, it is also finding new roles. In addition to being deployed in new roles, tape is coexisting and complimenting dedupe or other disk based backup and data protection approaches and vice versa.

Hearing tape is alive in the same sentence as dedupe deployments continuing may sound counter intuitive if you only listen to some vendor pitches.

However if you talk with IT customers particularly those in larger environments or with VARs that provide complete solution offering focus you will hear a different tune than tape is dead and dedupe rules. Tape is still alive however its roll is changing. Watch for more on this and related topics.

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

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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What do NAS NASA NASCAR have in common?

What do NAS NASA NASCAR have in common?

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Updated 2/10/2018

The other day it dawned on me what do NAS, NASA NASCAR have in common?

Several things in addition to all starting with the letters NAS it turns out.

For example, they all deal with round objects, NAS or Network Attached storage involved with circular spinning disk drives, NASA or National Aeronautical Space Administration besides involved with aircraft that have tires that go round and round, or airplanes circling waiting for landing.

In the case of NASA they are also involved with sending craft or devices to circle other planets or moons and land or crash into them. Sometimes NAS along with other storage systems have disk drives that crash, similar to how NASCAR events see accidents.
NAS

Ceder Lake 3M NASCAR at dirt track - Photo (C) 2008 Karen Schulz all rights reserved

Ceder Lake dirt track 3M NASCAR night (Photo (C) 2008 Karen Schulz)

NASCAR is also involved with vehicles that dont or at least should not fly, however they do go round and round on a track, often paved however sometimes mud or dirt tracks plus high tech exists with computers and various data models, not to mention the NASCAR air force.

In addition to being involved with round objects and activities, all three are also involved in computing, generating, processing, storing and retrieving for analysis of data, not to mention high performance requirements.

NAS based storage can also be relied upon for serving the needs of NASA and NASCAR data and informational needs.

And FWIW, just for fun, look at what you get when you spell NAS, NASA or NASCAR backwards:

RACSAN
ASAN
SAN

Where To Learn More

View additional NAS, NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and HDD related topics via the following links.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

Not much actually other than to stimulate some thought, discussion as well as perhaps have some fun with technology during the holiday season.

Im sure if I put some more thought to it, more similarities would or will come to mind.

However, for now, thats it for a quick thought, what similarities do you see or know about with NAS, NASA and NASCAR?

Ok, nuf fun for now, time to work on some other posts, content and projects.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Is MAID Storage Dead? I Dont Think So!

Some vendors are doing better than others and first generation MAID (Massive or monolithic Array of Idle Disks) might be dead or about to be deceased, spun down or put into a long term sleep mode, it is safe to say that second generation MAID (e.g. MAID 2.0) also known as intelligent power management (IPM) is alive and doing well.

In fact, IPM is not unique to disk storage or disk drives as it is also a technique found in current generation of processors such as those from Intel (e.g. Nehalem) and others.

Other names for IPM include adaptive voltage scaling (AVS), adaptive voltage scaling optimized (AVSO) and adaptive power management (APM) among others.

The basic concept is to vary the amount of power being used to the amount of work and service level needed at a point in time and on a granular basis.

For example, first generation MAID or drive spin down as deployed by vendors such as Copan, which is rumored to be in the process of being spun down as a company (see blog post by a former Copan employee) were binary. That is, a disk drive was either on or off, and, that the granularity was the entire storage system. In the case of Copan, the granularly was that a maximum of 25% of the disks could ever be spun up at any point in time. As a point of reference, when I ask IT customers why they dont use MAID or IPM enabled technology they commonly site concerns about performance, or more importantly, the perception of bad performance.

CPU chips have been taking the lead with the ability to vary the voltage and clock speed, enabling or disabling electronic circuitry to align with amount of work needing to be done at a point in time. This more granular approach allows the CPU to run at faster rates when needed, slower rates when possible to conserve energy (here, here and here).

A common example is a laptop with technology such as speed step, or battery stretch saving modes. Disk drives have been following this approach by being able to vary their power usage by adjusting to different spin speeds along with enabling or disabling electronic circuitry.

On a granular basis, second generation MAID with IPM enabled technology can be done on a LUN or volume group basis across different RAID levels and types of disk drives depending on specific vendor implementation. Some examples of vendors implementing various forms of IPM for second generation MAID to name a few include Adaptec, EMC, Fujitsu Eternus, HDS (AMS), HGST (disk drives), Nexsan and Xyratex among many others.

Something else that is taking place in the industry seems to be vendors shying away from using the term MAID as there is some stigma associated with performance issues of some first generation products.

This is not all that different than what took place about 15 years ago or so when the first purpose built monolithic RAID arrays appeared on the market. Products such as the SF2 aka South San Francisco Forklift company product called Failsafe (here and here) which was bought by MTI with patents later sold to EMC.

Failsafe, or what many at DEC referred to as Fail Some was a large refrigerator sized device with 5.25” disk drives configured as RAID5 with dedicated hot spare disk drives. Thus its performance was ok for the time doing random reads, however writes in the pre write back cache RAID5 days was less than spectacular.

Failsafe and other early RAID (and here) implementations received a black eye from some due to performance, availability and other issues until best practices and additional enhancements such as multiple RAID levels appeared along with cache in follow on products.

What that trip down memory (or nightmare) lane has to do with MAID and particularly first generation products that did their part to help establish new technology is that they also gave way to second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and beyond generations of RAID products.

The same can be expected as we are seeing with more vendors jumping in on the second generation of MAID also known as drive spin down with more in the wings.

Consequently, dont judge MAID based solely on the first generation products which could be thought of as advanced technology production proof of concept solutions that will have paved the way for follow up future solutions.

Just like RAID has become so ubiquitous it has been declared dead making it another zombie technology (dead however still being developed, produced, bought and put to use), follow on IPM enabled generations of technology will be more transparent. That is, similar to finding multiple RAID levels in most storage, look for IPM features including variable drive speeds, power setting and performance options on a go forward basis. These newer solutions may not carry the MAID name, however the sprit and function of intelligent power management without performance compromise does live on.

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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EMC Storage and Management Software Getting FAST

EMC has announced the availability of the first phase of FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) functionality for their Symmetrix VMAX, CLARiiON and Celerra storage systems.

FAST was first previewed earlier this year (see here and here).

Key themes of FAST are to leverage policies for enabling automation to support large scale environments, doing more with what you have along with enabling virtual data centers for traditional, private and public clouds as well as enhancing IT economics.

This means enabling performance and capacity planning analysis along with facilitating load balancing or other infrastructure optimization activities to boost productivity, efficiency and resource usage effectiveness not to mention enabling Green IT.

Is FAST revolutionary? That will depend on who you talk or listen to.

Some vendors will jump up and down similar to donkey in shrek wanting to be picked or noticed claiming to have been the first to implement LUN or file movement inside of storage systems, or, as operating system or file system or volume manager built in. Others will claim to have done it via third party information lifecycle management (ILM) software including hierarchal storage management (HSM) tools among others. Ok, fair enough, than let their games begin (or continue) and I will leave it up to the variou vendors and their followings to debate whos got what or not.

BTW, anyone remember system manage storage on IBM mainframes or array based movement in HP AutoRAID among others?

Vendors have also in the past provided built in or third party add on tools for providing insight and awareness ranging from capacity or space usage and allocation storage resource management (SRM) tools, performance advisory activity monitors or charge back among others. For example, hot files analysis and reporting tool have been popular in the past, often operating system specific for identifying candidate files for placement on SSD or other fast storage. Granted the tools provided insight and awareness, there was still the time and error prone task of decision making and subsequently data movement, not to mention associated down time.

What is new here with FAST is the integrated approach, tools that are operating system independent, functionality in the array, available for different product family and price bands as well as that are optimized for improving user and IT productivity in medium to high-end enterprise scale environments.

One of the knocks on previous technology is either the performance impact to an application when data was moved, or, impact to other applications when data is being moved in the background. Another issue has been avoiding excessive thrashing due to data being moved at the expense of taking performance cycles from production applications. This would also be similar to having too many snapshots or raid rebuild that are not optimized running in the background on a storage system lacking sufficient performance capability. Another knock has been that historically, either 3rd party host or appliance based software was needed, or, solutions were designed and targeted for workgroup, departmental or small environments.

What is FAST and how is it implemented
FAST is technology for moving data within storage systems (and external for Celerra) for load balancing, capacity and performance optimization to meet quality of service (QoS) performance, availability, capacity along with energy and economic initiatives (figure1) across different tiers or types of storage devices. For example, moving data from slower SATA disks where a performance bottleneck exists to faster Fibre Channel or SSD devices. Similarly, cold or infrequently data on faster more expensive storage devices can be marked as candidates for migration to lower cost SATA devices based on customer policies.

EMC FAST
Figure 1 FAST big picture Source EMC

The premise is that policies are defined based on activity along with capacity to determine when data becomes a candidate for movement. All movement is performed in the background concurrently while applications are accessing data without disruptions. This means that there are no stub files or application pause or timeouts that occur or erratic I/O activity while data is being migrated. Another aspect of FAST data movement which is performed in the actual storage systems by their respective controllers is the ability for EMC management tools to identify hot or active LUNs or volumes (files in the case of Celerra) as candidates for moving (figure 2).

EMC FAST
Figure 2 FAST what it does Source EMC

However, users specify if they want data moved on its own or under supervision enabling a deterministic environment where the storage system and associated management tools makes recommendations and suggestions for administrators to approve before migration occurs. This capacity can be a safeguard as well as a learn mode enabling organizations to become comfortable with the technology along with its recommendations while applying knowledge of current business dynamics (figure 3).

EMC FAST
Figure 3 The Value proposition of FAST Source EMC

FAST is implemented as technology resident or embedded in the EMC VMAX (aka Symmetrix), CLARiiON and Cellera along with external management software tools. In the case of the block (figure 4) storage systems including DMX/VMAX and CLARiiON family of products that support FAST, data movement is on a LUN or volume basis and within a single storage system. For NAS or file based Cellera storage systems, FAST is implanted using FMA technology enabling either in the box or externally to other storage systems on a file basis.

EMC FAST
Figure 4 Example of FAST activity Source EMC

What this means is that data at the LUN or volume level can be moved across different tiers of storage or disk drives within a CLARiiON instance, or, within a VMAX instance (e.g. amongst the nodes). For example, Virtual LUNs are a building block that is leveraged for data movement and migration combined with external management tools including Navisphere for the CLARiiON and Symmetrix management console along with Ionix all of which has been enhanced.

Note however that initially data is not moved externally between different CLARiiONs or VMAX systems. For external data movement, other existing EMC tools would be deployed. In the case of Celerra, files can be moved within a specific CLARiiON as well as externally across other storage systems. External storage systems that files can be moved across using EMC FMA technology includes other Celleras, Centera and ATMOS solutions based upon defined policies.

What do I like most and why?

Integration of management tools providing insight with ability for user to setup polices as well as approve or intercede with data movement and placement as their specific philosophies dictate. This is key, for those who want to, let the system manage it self with your supervision of course. For those who prefer to take their time, then take simple steps by using the solution for initially providing insight into hot or cold spots and then helping to make decisions on what changes to make. Use the solution and adapt it to your specific environment and philosophy approach, what a concept, a tool that works for you, vs you working for it.

What dont I like and why?

There is and will remain some confusion about intra and inter box or system data movement and migration, operations that can be done by other EMC technology today for those who need it. For example I have had questions asking if FAST is nothing more than EMC Invista or some other data mover appliance sitting in front of Symmetrix or CLARiiONs and the answer is NO. Thus EMC will need to articulate that FAST is both an umbrella term as well as a product feature set combining the storage system along with associated management tools unique to each of the different storage systems. In addition, there will be confusion at least with GA of lack of support for Symmetrix DMX vs supported VMAX. Of course with EMC pricing is always a question so lets see how this plays out in the market with customer acceptance.

What about the others?

Certainly some will jump up and down claiming ratification of their visions welcoming EMC to the game while forgetting that there were others before them. However, it can also be said that EMC like others who have had LUN and volume movement or cloning capabilities for large scale solutions are taking the next step. Thus I would expect other vendors to continue movement in the same direction with their own unique spin and approach. For others who have in the past made automated tiering their marketing differentiation, I would suggest they come up with some new spins and stories as those functions are about to become table stakes or common feature functionality on a go forward basis.

When and where to use?

In theory, anyone with a Symmetrix/VMAX, CLARiiON or Celerra that supports the new functionality should be a candidate for the capabilities, that is, at least the insight, analysis, monitoring and situation awareness capabilities Note that does not mean actually enabling the automated movement initially.

While the concept is to enable automated system managed storage (Hmmm, Mainframe DejaVu anyone), for those who want to walk before they run, enabling the insight and awareness capabilities can provide valuable information about how resources are being used. The next step would then to look at the recommendations of the tools, and if you concur with the recommendations, then take remedial action by telling the system when the movement can occur at your desired time.

For those ready to run, then let it rip and take off as FAST as you want. In either situation, look at FAST for providing insight and situational awareness of hot and cold storage, where opportunities exist for optimizing and gaining efficiency in how resources are used, all important aspects for enabling a Green and Virtual Data Center not to mention as well as supporting public and private clouds.

FYI, FTC Disclosure and FWIW

I have done content related projects for EMC in the past (see here), they are not currently a client nor have they sponsored, underwritten, influenced, renumerated, utilize third party off shore swiss, cayman or south american unnumbered bank accounts, or provided any other reimbursement for this post, however I did personally sign and hand to Joe Tucci a copy of my book The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) ;).

Bottom line

Do I like what EMC is doing with FAST and this approach? Yes.

Do I think there is room for improvement and additional enhancements? Absolutely!

Whats my recommendation? Have a look, do your homework, due diligence and see if its applicable to your environment while asking others vendors what they will be doing (under NDA if needed).

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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Storage Efficiency and Optimization – The Other Green

For those of you in the New York City area, I will be presenting live in person at Storage Decisions September 23, 2009 conference The Other Green, Storage Efficiency and Optimization.

Throw out the "green“: buzzword, and you’re still left with the task of saving or maximizing use of space, power, and cooling while stretching available IT dollars to support growth and business sustainability. For some environments the solution may be consolation while others need to maintain quality of service response time, performance and availability necessitating faster, energy efficient technologies to achieve optimization objectives.

To accomplish these and other related issues, you can turn to the cloud, virtualization, intelligent power management, data footprint reduction and data management not to mention various types of tiered storage and performance optimization techniques. The session will look at various techniques and strategies to optimize either on-line active or primary as well as near-line or secondary storage environment during tough economic times, as well as to position for future growth, after all, there is no such thing as a data recession!

Topics, technologies and techniques that will be discussed include among others:

  • Energy efficiency (strategic) vs. energy avoidance (tactical), whats different between them
  • Optimization and the need for speed vs. the need for capacity, finding the right balance
  • Metrics & measurements for management insight, what the industry is doing (or not doing)
  • Tiered storage and tiered access including SSD, FC, SAS, tape, clouds and more
  • Data footprint reduction (archive, compress, dedupe) and thin provision among others
  • Best practices, financial incentives and what you can do today

This is a free event for IT professionals, however space I hear is limited, learn more and register here.

For those interested in broader IT data center and infrastructure optimization, check out the on-going seminar series The Infrastructure Optimization and Planning Best Practices (V2.009) – Doing more with less without sacrificing storage, system or network capabilities Seminar series continues September 22, 2009 with a stop in Chicago. This is also a free Seminar, register and learn more here or here.

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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Data Center I/O Bottlenecks Performance Issues and Impacts

This is an excerpt blog version of the popular Server and StorageIO Group white paper "IT Data Center and Data Storage Bottlenecks" originally published August of 2006 that is as much if not more relevant today than it was in the past.

Most Information Technology (IT) data centers have bottleneck areas that impact application performance and service delivery to IT customers and users. Possible bottleneck locations shown in Figure-1 include servers (application, web, file, email and database), networks, application software, and storage systems. For example users of IT services can encounter delays and lost productivity due to seasonal workload surges or Internet and other network bottlenecks. Network congestion or dropped packets resulting in wasteful and delayed retransmission of data can be the results of network component failure, poor configuration or lack of available low latency bandwidth.

Server bottlenecks due to lack of CPU processing power, memory or under sized I/O interfaces can result in poor performance or in worse case scenarios application instability. Application including database systems bottlenecks due to excessive locking, poor query design, data contention and deadlock conditions result in poor user response time. Storage and I/O performance bottlenecks can occur at the host server due to lack of I/O interconnect bandwidth such as an overloaded PCI interconnect, storage device contention, and lack of available storage system I/O capacity.

These performance bottlenecks, impact most applications and are not unique to the large enterprise or scientific high compute (HPC) environments. The direct impact of data center I/O performance issues include general slowing of the systems and applications, causing lost productivity time for users of IT services. Indirect impacts of data center I/O performance bottlenecks include additional management by IT staff to trouble shoot, analyze, re-configure and react to application delays and service disruptions.


Figure-1: Data center performance bottleneck locations

Data center performance bottleneck impacts (see Figure-1) include:

  • Under utilization of disk storage capacity to compensate for lack of I/O performance capability
  • Poor Quality of Service (QoS) causing Service Level Agreements (SLA) objectives to be missed
  • Premature infrastructure upgrades combined with increased management and operating costs
  • Inability to meet peak and seasonal workload demands resulting in lost business opportunity

I/O bottleneck impacts
It should come as no surprise that businesses continue to consume and rely upon larger amounts of disk storage. Disk storage and I/O performance fuel the hungry needs of applications in order to meet SLAs and QoS objectives. The Server and StorageIO Group sees that, even with efforts to reduce storage capacity or improve capacity utilization with information lifecycle management (ILM) and Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) enabled infrastructures, applications leveraging rich content will continue to consume more storage capacity and require additional I/O performance. Similarly, at least for the next few of years, the current trend of making and keeping additional copies of data for regulatory compliance and business continue is expected to continue. These demands all add up to a need for more I/O performance capabilities to keep up with server processor performance improvements.


Figure-2: Processing and I/O performance gap

Server and I/O performance gap
The continued need for accessing more storage capacity results in an alarming trend: the expanding gap between server processing power and available I/O performance of disk storage (Figure-2). This server to I/O performance gap has existed for several decades and continues to widen instead of improving. The net impact is that bottlenecks associated with the server to I/O performance lapse result in lost productivity for IT personal and customers who must wait for transactions, queries, and data access requests to be resolved.

Application symptoms of I/O bottlenecks
There are many applications across different industries that are sensitive to timely data access and impacted by common I/O performance bottlenecks. For example, as more users access a popular file, database table, or other stored data item, resource contention will increase. One way resource contention manifests itself is in the form of database “deadlock” which translates into slower response time and lost productivity. 

Given the rise and popularity of internet search engines, search engine optimization (SEO) and on-line price shopping, some businesses have been forced to create expensive read-only copies of databases. These read-only copies are used to support more queries to address bottlenecks from impacting time sensitive transaction databases.

In addition to increased application workload, IT operational procedures to manage and protect data help to contribute to performance bottlenecks. Data center operational procedures result in additional file I/O scans for virus checking, database purge and maintenance, data backup, classification, replication, data migration for maintenance and upgrades as well as data archiving. The net result is that essential data center management procedures contribute to performance challenges and impacting business productivity.

Poor response time and increased latency
Generally speaking, as additional activity or application workload including transactions or file accesses are performed, I/O bottlenecks result in increased response time or latency (shown in Figure-3). With most performance metrics more is better; however, in the case of response time or latency, less is better.  Figure-3 shows the impact as more work is performed (dotted curve) and resulting I/O bottlenecks have a negative impact by increasing response time (solid curve) above acceptable levels. The specific acceptable response time threshold will vary by applications and SLA requirements. The acceptable threshold level based on performance plans, testing, SLAs and other factors including experience serves as a guide line between acceptable and poor application performance.

As more workload is added to a system with existing I/O issues, response time will correspondingly decrease as was seen in Figure-3. The more severe the bottleneck, the faster response time will deteriorate (e.g. increase) from acceptable levels. The elimination of bottlenecks enables more work to be performed while maintaining response time below acceptable service level threshold limits.


Figure-3: I/O response time performance impact

Seasonal and peak workload I/O bottlenecks
Another common challenge and cause of I/O bottlenecks is seasonal and/or unplanned workload increases that result in application delays and frustrated customers. In Figure-4 a workload representing an eCommerce transaction based system is shown with seasonal spikes in activity (dotted curve). The resulting impact to response time (solid curve) is shown in relation to a threshold line of acceptable response time performance. For example, peaks due holiday shopping exchanges appear in January then dropping off increasing near mother’s day in May, then back to school shopping in August results in increased activity as does holiday shopping starting in late November.


Figure-4: I/O bottleneck impact from surge workload activity

Compensating for lack of performance
Besides impacting user productivity due to poor performance, I/O bottlenecks can result in system instability or unplanned application downtime. One only needs to recall recent electric power grid outages that were due to instability, insufficient capacity bottlenecks as a result of increased peak user demand.

I/O performance improvement approaches to address I/O bottlenecks have been to do nothing (incur and deal with the service disruptions) or over configure by throwing more hardware and software at the problem. To compensate for lack of I/O performance and counter the resulting negative impact to IT users, a common approach is to add more hardware to mask or move the problem.

However, this often leads to extra storage capacity being added to make up for a short fall in I/O performance. By over configuring to support peak workloads and prevent loss of business revenue, excess storage capacity must be managed throughout the non-peak periods, adding to data center and management costs. The resulting ripple affect is that now more storage needs to be managed, including allocating storage network ports, configuring, tuning, and backing up of data. This can and does result in environments that have storage utilization well below 50% of their useful storage capacity. The solution is to address the problem rather than moving and hiding the bottleneck elsewhere (rather like sweeping dust under the rug).

Business value of improved performance
Putting a value on the performance of applications and their importance to your business is a necessary step in the process of deciding where and what to focus on for improvement. For example, what is the value of reducing application response time and the associated business benefit of allowing more transactions, reservations or sales to be made? Likewise, what is the value of improving the productivity of a designer or animator to meet tight deadlines and market schedules? What is business benefit of enabling a customer to search faster for and item, place an order, access media rich content, or in general improve their productivity?

Server and I/O performance gap as a data center bottleneck
I/O performance bottlenecks are a wide spread issue across most data centers, affecting many applications and industries. Applications impacted by data center I/O bottlenecks to be looked at in more depth are electronic design automation (EDA), entertainment and media, database online transaction processing (OLTP) and business intelligence. These application categories represent transactional processing, shared file access for collaborative work, and processing of shared, time sensitive data.

Electronic design
Computer aided design (CAD), computer assisted engineering (CAE), electronic design automaton (EDA) and other design tools are used for a wide variety of engineering and design functions. These design tools require fast access to shared, secured and protected data. The objective of using EDA and other tools is to enable faster product development with better quality and improved worker productivity. Electronic components manufactured for the commercial, consumer and specialized markets rely on design tools to speed the time-to-market of new products as well as to improve engineer productivity.

EDA tools, including those from Cadence, Synopsis, Mentor Graphics and others, are used to develop expensive and time sensitive electronic chips, along with circuit boards and other components to meet market windows and suppler deadlines. An example of this is a chip vendor being able to simulate, develop, test, produce and deliver a new chip in time for manufacturers to release their new products based on those chips. Another example is aerospace and automotive engineering firms leveraging design tools, including CATIA and UGS, on a global basis relying on their suppler networks to do the same in a real-time, collaborative manner to improve productivity and time-to-market. These results in contention of shared file and data access and, as a work-around, more copies of data kept as local buffers.

I/O performance impacts and challenges for EDA, CAE and CAD systems include:

  • Delays in drawing and file access resulting in lost productivity and project delays
  • Complex configurations to support computer farms (server grids) for I/O and storage performance
  • Proliferation of dedicated storage on individual servers and workstations to improve performance

Entertainment and media
While some applications are characterized by high bandwidth or throughput, such as streaming video and digital intermediate (DI) processing of 2K (2048 pixels per line) and 4K (4096 pixels per line) video and film, there are many other applications that are also impacted by I/O performance time delays. Even bandwidth intensive applications for video production and other applications are time sensitive and vulnerable to I/O bottleneck delays. For example, cell phone ring tone, instant messaging, small MP3 audio, and voice- and e-mail are impacted by congestion and resource contention.

Prepress production and publishing requiring assimilation of many small documents, files and images while undergoing revisions can also suffer. News and information websites need to look up breaking stories, entertainment sites need to view and download popular music, along with still images and other rich content; all of this can be negatively impacted by even small bottlenecks.  Even with streaming video and audio, access to those objects requires accessing some form of a high speed index to locate where the data files are stored for retrieval. These indexes or databases can become bottlenecks preventing high performance storage and I/O systems from being fully leveraged.

Index files and databases must be searched to determine the location where images and objects, including streaming media, are stored. Consequently, these indices can become points of contention resulting in bottlenecks that delay processing of streaming media objects. When cell phone picture is taken phone and sent to someone, chances are that the resulting image will be stored on network attached storage (NAS) as a file with a corresponding index entry in a database at some service provider location. Think about what happens to those servers and storage systems when several people all send photos at the same time.

I/O performance impacts and challenges for entertainment and media systems include:

  • Delays in image and file access resulting in lost productivity
  • Redundant files and storage local servers to improve performance
  • Contention for resources causing further bottlenecks during peak workload surges

OLTP and business intelligence
Surges in peak workloads result in performance bottlenecks on database and file servers, impacting time sensitive OLTP systems unless they are over configured for peak demand. For example, workload spikes due to holiday and back-to-school shopping, spring break and summer vacation travel reservations, Valentines or Mothers Day gift shopping, and clearance and settlement on peak stock market trading days strain fragile systems. For database systems maintaining performance for key objects, including transaction logs and journals, it is important to eliminate performance issues as well as maintain transaction and data integrity.

An example tied to eCommerce is business intelligence systems (not to be confused with back office marketing and analytics systems for research). Online business intelligence systems are popular with online shopping and services vendors who track customer interests and previous purchases to tailor search results, views and make suggestions to influence shopping habits.

Business intelligence systems need to be fast and support rapid lookup of history and other information to provide purchase histories and offer timely suggestions. The relative performance improvements of processors shift the application bottlenecks from the server to the storage access network. These applications have, in some cases, resulted in an exponential increase in query or read operations beyond the capabilities of single database and storage instances, resulting in database deadlock and performance problems or the proliferation of multiple data copies and dedicated storage on application servers.

A more recent contribution to performance challenges, caused by the increased availability of on-line shopping and price shopping search tools, is low cost craze (LCC) or price shopping. LCC has created a dramatic increase in the number of read or search queries taking place, further impacting database and file systems performance. For example, an airline reservation system that supports price shopping while preventing impact to time sensitive transactional reservation systems would create multiple read-only copies of reservations databases for searches. The result is that more copies of data must be maintained across more servers and storage systems thus increasing costs and complexity. While expensive, the alternative of doing nothing results in lost business and market share.

I/O performance impacts and challenges for OLTP and business intelligence systems include:

  • Application and database contention, including deadlock conditions, due to slow transactions
  • Disruption to application servers to install special monitoring, load balance or I/O driver software
  • Increased management time required to support additional storage needed as a I/O workaround

Summary/Conclusion
It is vital to understand the value of performance, including response time or latency, and numbers of I/O operations for each environment and particular application. While the cost per raw TByte may seem relatively in-expensive, the cost for I/O response time performance also needs to be effectively addressed and put into the proper context as part of the data center QoS cost structure.

There are many approaches to address data center I/O performance bottlenecks with most centered on adding more hardware or addressing bandwidth or throughput issues. Time sensitive applications depend on low response time as workload including throughput increase and thus latency can not be ignored. The key to removing data center I/O bottlenecks is to find and address the problem instead of simply moving or hiding it with more hardware and/or software. Simply adding fast devices such as SSD may provide relief, however if the SSDs are attached to high latency storage controllers, the full benefit may not be realized. Thus, identify and gain insight into data center and I/O bottleneck paths eliminating issues and problems to boost productivity and efficiency.

Where to Learn More
Additional information about IT data center, server, storage as well as I/O networking bottlenecks along with solutions can be found at the Server and StorageIO website in the tips, tools and white papers, as well as news, books, and activity on the events pages. If you are in the New York area on September 23, 2009, check out my presentation on The Other Green – Storage Optimization and Efficiency that will touch on the above and other related topics. Download your copy of "IT Data Center and Storage Bottlenecks" by clicking here.

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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Upcoming Out and About Events

Following up on previous Out and About updates ( here and here ) of where I have been, heres where I’m going to be over the next couple of weeks.

On September 15th and 16th 2009, I will be the keynote speaker along with doing a deep dive discussion around data deduplication in Minneapolis, MN and Toronto ON. Free Seminar, register and learn more here.

The Infrastructure Optimization and Planning Best Practices (V2.009) – Doing more with less without sacrificing storage, system or network capabilities Seminar series continues September 22, 2009 with a stop in Chicago. Free Seminar, register and learn more here.

On September 23, 2009 I will be in New York City at Storage Decisions conference participating in the Ask the Experts during the expo session as well as presenting The Other Green — Storage Efficiency and Optimization.

Throw out the "green“: buzzword, and you’re still left with the task of saving or maximizing use of space, power, and cooling while stretching available IT dollars to support growth and business sustainability. For some environments the solution may be consolation while others need to maintain quality of service response time, performance and availability necessitating faster, energy efficient technologies to achieve optimization objectives. To accomplish these and other related issues, you can turn to the cloud, virtualization, intelligent power management, data footprint reduction and data management not to mention various types of tiered storage and performance optimization techniques. The session will look at various techniques and strategies to optimize either on-line active or primary as well as near-line or secondary storage environment during tough economic times, as well as to position for future growth, after all, there is no such thing as a data recession!

Topics, technologies and techniques that will be discussed include among others:

  • Energy efficiency (strategic) vs. energy avoidance (tactical)
  • Optimization and the need for speed vs. the need for capacity
  • Metrics and measurements for management insight
  • Tiered storage and tiered access including SSD, FC, SAS and clouds
  • Data footprint reduction (archive, compress, dedupe) and thin provision
  • Best practices, financial incentives and what you can do today

Free event, learn more and register here.

Check out the events page for other upcoming events and hope to see you this fall while Im out and about.

Cheers – gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIOblog, twitter @storageio Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

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March and Mileage Mania Wrap-up

Today’s flight to Santa Ana (SNA) Orange County California for an 18 hour visit marks my 3rd trip to the left coast in the past four weeks that started out with a trip to Los Angeles. The purpose of today’s trip is to deliver a talk around Business Continuance (BC) and Disaster recovery (DR) topics for virtual server and storage environments along with related data transformation topics themes, part of a series of on-going events.

Planned flight path from MSP to SNA, note upper midwest snow storms. Thanks to Northwest Airlines, now part of Delta!
Planned flight path from MSP to SNA courtesy of Northwest Airlines, now part of Delta

This is a short trip to southern California in that I have to be back in Minneapolis for a Wednesday afternoon meeting followed by keynoting at an IT Infrastructure Optimization Seminar downtown Minneapolis Thursday morning. Right after Thursday morning session, its off to the other coast for some Friday morning and early afternoon sessions in the Boston area, the results of which I hope to be able to share with you in a not so distant future posting.

Where has March gone? Its been a busy and fun month out on the road with in-person seminars, vendor and user group events in Minneapolis, Los Angles, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Atlanta, St. Louis, Birmingham, Minneapolis for CMG user group, Cincinnati and Orange County not to mention some other meetings and consulting engagements elsewhere including participating in a couple of webcast and virtual conference/seminars while on the road. Coverage and discussion around my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) continues expand, read here to see what’s being said.

What has made the month fun in addition to traveling around the country is the interaction with the hundreds of IT professionals from organizations of all size hearing what they are encountering, what their challenges are, what they are thinking, and in general what’s on their mind.

Some of the common themes include:

  • There’s no such thing as a data recession, however the result is doing more with less, or, with what you have
  • Confusion abounds around green hype including carbon footprints vs. core IT and business issues
  • There is life beyond consolidation for server and storage virtualization to enable business agility
  • Security and encryption remain popular topic as does heterogeneous and affordable key management
  • End to end IT resource management for virtual environments is needed that is scalable and affordable
  • Performance and quality of service can not be sacrificed in the quest to drive up storage utilization
  • Clouds, SSD (FLASH), Dedupe, FCoE and Thin Provisioning among others are on the watch list
  • Tape continues to be used complimenting disks in tiered storage environments along with VTLs
  • Dedupe continues to be deployed and we are just seeing the very tip of the ice-berg of opportunity
  • Software licensing cost savings or reallocation should be a next step focus for virtual environments

    • Now, for a bit of irony and humor, overheard was a server sales person talking to a storage sales person comparing notes on how they are missing their forecasts as their customers are buying fewer servers and storage now that they are consolidating with virtualization, or using disk dedupe to eliminate disk drives. Doh!!!

    Now if those sales people can get their marketing folks to get them the play book for virtualization for business agility, improving performance and enabling business growth in an optimized, transformed environment, they might be able to talk a different story with their customers for new opportunities…

    What’s on deck for April? More of the same, however also watch and listen for some additional web based content including interviews quotes and perspectives on industry happenings, articles, tips and columns, reports, blogs, videos, podcasts, webcasts and twitter activity as well as appearances at events in Boston, Chicago, New Jersey and Providence among other venues.

    To all of those who came out to the various events in March, thank you very much and look forward to future follow-up conversations as well as seeing you at some of the upcoming future events.

    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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    Will 6Gb SAS kill Fibre Channel?

    Storage I/O trends

    With the advent of 6Gb SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) which doubles the speed from earlier 3Gb along with other enhancements including longer cable distances up to 10m, does this mean that Fibre Channel will be threatened? Well, I’m sure some conspiracy theorist or iSCSI die hards might jump up and down and say yes, finally, even though some of the FCoE cheering section has already arranged a funeral or wake for FC even while Converged enhanced Ethernet based Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and its complete ecosystem completely evolves.

    Needless to say, SAS will be in your future, it may not be as a host server to storage system interconnect, however look for SAS high performance drives to appear sometime in the not so distant future. While over time, Fibre Channel based high performance disk drives can be expected to give way to SAS based disks, similar to how Parralel SCSI or even IBM SSA drives gave way to FC disks, SAS as a server to storage system interconnect will at leat for the forseeable future be more for smaller configurations, direct connect storage for blade centers, two server clusters, extremely cost sensitive environments that do not need or can afford a more expensive iSCSI, NAS let alone an FC or FCoE based solution.

    So while larger storage systems over time can be expected to support high performance 3.5″ and 2.5″ SAS disks to replace FC disks, those systems will be accessed via FCoE, FC, iSCSI or NAS while mid-range and entry-level systems as they do today will see a mix of SAS, iSCSI, FC, NAS and in the future, some FCoE as well not to mention some InfiniBand based NAS or SRP for block access.

    From an I/O virtualization (IOV) standpoint, keep an eye on whats taking place with the PCI SIG and Single Root IOV and multi-root IOV from a server I/O and I/O virtualization standpoint.

    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

    Links to Upcoming and Recent Webcasts and Videocasts

    Here are links to several recent and upcoming Webcast and video casts covering a wide range of topics. Some of these free Webcast and video casts may require registration.

    Industry Trends & Perspectives – Data Protection for Virtual Server Environments

    Next Generation Data Centers Today: What’s New with Storage and Networking

    Hot Storage Trends for 2008

    Expanding your Channel Business with Performance and Capacity Planning

    Top Ten I/O Strategies for the Green and Virtual Data Center

    Cheers
    Greg Schulz – StorageIO