Tag: IPM

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Green IT goes mainstream: What about data storage environments?

I recently did an interview with the folks over at Infortrend (a RAID storage company) discussing various industry trends and perspectives including RAID, data footprint reduction (DFR) as well as Green IT including how the Green Gap.

The Green Gap is the disconnect between common messaging around carbon and environment vs. IT and business productivity sustainment challenges that continues to result in confusion along with missed opportunities.

  • There is no such thing as a data or information recession
  • Organizations of all size will continue to have to support growth in a denser fashion
  • Doing more in a denser manner also means acquiring as well as managing more usable IT resources per dollar spent
  • Optimization and data footprint reduction (DFR) expands focus from reduction efficiency to productivity effectiveness
  • Energy efficiency shifts from avoidance to energy effectiveness where more work is done to support business productivity and sustainment
  • RAID is alive however it continues to evolve as well as leveraged in conjunction with other techniques

Here is the link to the first of a two part series where you can read my comments on how many organizations are missing out on economic as well as business sustainability benefits due to confusion and the Green Gap among other topics.

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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Does IBM Power7 processor announcement signal storage upgrades?

IBM recently announced the Power7 as the latest generation of processors that the company uses in some of its mid range and high end compute servers including the iSeries and pSeries.


IBM Power7 processor wafers (chips)

 

What is the Power7 processor?
The Power7 is the latest generation of IBM processors (chips) that are used as the CPUs in IBM mid range and high end open systems (pSeries) for Unix (AIX) and Linux as well as for the iSeries (aka AS400 successor). Building on previous Power series processors, the Power7 increases the performance per core (CPU) along with the number of cores per socket (chip) footprint. For example, each Power7 chip that plugs into a socket on a processor card in a server can have up to 8 cores or CPUs. Note that sometimes cores are also known as micro CPUs as well as virtual CPUs not to be confused with their presented via Hypervisor abstraction.

Sometimes you may also here the term or phrase 2 way, 4 way (not to be confused with a Cincinnati style 4 way chili) or 8 way among others that refers to the number of cores on a chip. Hence, a dual 2 way would be a pair of processor chips each with 2 cores while a quad 8 way would be 4 processors chips each with 8 cores and so on.


IBM Power7 with up to eight cores per processor (chip)

In addition to faster and more cores in a denser footprint, there are also energy efficiency enhancements including Energy Star for enterprise servers qualification along with intelligent power management (IPM also see here) implementation. IPM is implanted in what IBM refers to as Intelligent Energy technology for turning on or off various parts of the system along with varying processor clock speeds. The benefit is when there is work to be done, get it down quickly or if there is less work, turn some cores off or slow clock speed down. This is similar to what other industry leaders including Intel have deployed with their Nehalem series of processors that also support IPM.

Additional features of the Power7 include (varies by system solutions):

  • Energy Star for server qualified providing enhanced performance and efficiency.

  • IBM Systems Director Express, Standard and Enterprise Editions for simplified management including virtualization capabilities across pools of Power servers as a single entity.

  • PowerVM (Hypervisor) virtualization for AIX, iSeries and Linux operating systems.

  • ActiveMemory enables effective memory capacity to be larger than physical memory, similar to how virtual memory works within many operating systems. The benefit is to enable a partition to have access to more memory which is important for virtual machines along with the ability to support more partitions in a given physical memory footprint.

  • TurboCore and Intelligent Threads enable workload optimization by selecting the applicable mode for the work to be done. For example, single thread per core along with simultaneous threads (2 or 4) modes per core. The trade off is to have more threads per core for concurrent processing, or, fewer threads to boost single stream performance.

IBM has announced several Power7 enabled or based server system models with various numbers of processors and cores along with standalone and clustered configurations including:

IBM Power7 family of server systems

  • Power 750 Express, 4U server with one to four socket server supporting up to 32 cores (3.0 to 3.5 GHz) and 128 threads (4 threads per core), PowerVM (Hypervisor) along with main memory capacity of 512GB or 1TByte of virtual memory using Active Memory Expansion.
  • Power 755, 32 3.3Ghz Power7 cores (8 cores per processor) with memory up to 256GB along with AltiVec and VSX SIMD instruction set support. Up to 64 755 nodes each with 32 cores can be clustered together for high performance applications.
  • Power 770, Up to 64 Power7 cores providing more performance while consuming less energy per core compared to previous Power6 generations. Support for up to 2TB of main memory or RAM using 32GB DIMM when available later in 2010.
  • Power 780, 64 Power7 cores with TurboCore workload optimization providing performance boost per core. With TurboCore, 64 cores can operate at 3.8 GHz, or, enable up to 32 cores at 4.1 GHz and twice the amount of cache when more speed per thread is needed. Support for up to 2TB of main memory or RAM using 32GB DIMM when available later in 2010.

Additional Power7 specifications and details can be found here.

 

What is the DS8000?
The DS8000 is the latest generation of a family of high end enterprise class storage systems supporting IBM mainframe (zSeries), Open systems along with mixed workloads. Being high end open systems or mainframe, the DS8000 competes with similar systems from EMC (Symmetrix/DMX/VMAX), Fujitsu (Eternus DX8000), HDS (Hitachi) and HP (XP series OEM from Hitachi). Previous generations of the DS8000 (aka predecessors) include the ESS (Enterprise Storage System) Model 2105 (aka Shark) and VSS (Versatile Storage Server). Current generation family members include the Power5 based DS8100 and DS8300 along with the Power6 based DS8700.

IBM DS8000 Storage System

Learn more about the DS8000 here, here, here and here.

 

What is the association between the Power7 and DS8000?
Disclosure: Before I go any further, lets be clear on something, what I am about to post on is based entirely on researching, analyzing, correlating (connecting the dots) of what is publicly and freely available from IBM on the Web (e.g. there is no NDA material being disclosed here that I am aware of) along with prior trends and tendency of IBM and their solutions. In other words, you can call it speculation, a prediction, industry analysis perspective, looking into the proverbial crystal ball or educated guess and thus should not be taken as an indicator of what IBM may actually do or be working on. As to what may actually be done or not done, for that you will need to contact one of the IBM truth squad members.

As to what is the linkage between Power7 and the DS8000?

The linkage between the Power7 and the DS8000 is just that, the Power processors!

At the heart of the DS8000 are Power series processors coupled or clustered together in pairs for performance and availability that run IBM developed storage systems software. While the spin doctors may not agree, essentially the DS8000 and its predecessors are based on and around Power series processors clustered together with a high speed interconnect that combine to host an operating system and IBM developed storage system application software.

Thus IBM has been able to for over a decade leverage technology improvement curve advantages with faster processors, increased memory and I/O connectivity in denser footprints while enhancing their storage system application software.

Given that the current DS8000 family members utilize 2 way (2 core) or 4 way (4 core) Power5 and Power6 processors, similar to how their predecessors utilized previous generation Power4, Power3 and so forth processors, it only makes sense that IBM might possibly use a Power7 processor in a future DS8000 (or derivative perhaps even with a different name or model number). Again, this is just based all on historical trends and patterns of IBM storage systems group leveraging the latest generation of Power processors; after all, they are a large customer of the Power systems group.

Consequently it would make sense for IBM storage folks to leverage the new Power7 processors and features similar to how EMC is leveraging Intel processor enhances along with what other vendors are doing.

There is certainly room in the DS8000 architecture for growth in terms of supporting additional nodes or complexes or controllers (or whatever your term preference of choice is for describing a server) each equipped with multiple processors (chips or sockets) that have multiple cores. While IBM has only commercially released two complex or dual server versions of the DS8000 with various numbers of cores per server, they have come nowhere close to their architecture limit of nodes. In fact with this release of Power7, as an example, the model 755 can be clustered via InfiniBand with up to 64 nodes, with each node having 4 sockets (e.g. 4 way) with up to 8 cores each. That means on paper, 64 x 4 x 8 = 2048 cores and each core could have up to 4 threads for concurrency, or half as many cores for more cache performance. Now will IBM ever come out with a 64 node DS8000 on steroids?

Tough to say, maybe possibly some day to play specmanship vs EMC VMAX 256 node architectural limit, however Im not holding my breath just yet. Thus with more and faster cores per processor, ability to increase number of processors per server or node, along with architectural capabilities to boost the number of nodes in an instance or cluster, on paper alone, there is lots of head room for the DS8000 or a future derivative.

What about software and functionality, sure IBM could in theory simply turn the crank and use a new hardware platform that is faster, more capacity, denser, better energy efficiency, however what about new features?

Can IBM enhance its storage systems application software that it evolved from the ESS with new features to leverage underlying hardware capabilities including TurboCore, PowerVM, device and I/O sharing, Intelligent Energy efficiency along with threads enhancements?

Can IBM leverage those and other features to support not only scaling of performance, availability, capacity and energy efficiency in an economical manner, however also add features for advanced automated tiering or data movement plus other popular industry buzzword functionality?

 

Additional thoughts and perspectives
One of the things I find interesting is that some IBM folks along with their channel partners will go to great lengths to explain why and how the DS8000 is not just a pair of Power enabled based servers tightly coupled together. Yet, on the other hand, some of those folks will go to great lengths touting the advantages of leveraging off the shelf or commercial enabled servers based on Intel or AMD based systems such as IBMs own XIV storage solution.

I can understand in the past when the likes of EMC, Hitachi and Fujitsu were all competing with IBM building bigger and more function rich monolithic systems, however that trend is shifting. The trend now as is being seen with EMC and VMAX is to decouple and leverage more off the shelf commercially available technology combined with custom ASICs where and when needed.

Thus at a time where more attention and discussion is around clustered, grid, scalable storage systems, will we see or hear the IBM folks change their tune about the architectural scale up and out capabilities of the Power enabled DS8000 family?

There had been some industry speculation that the DS8000 would be the end of the line if the Power7 had not been released which will now (assuming that IBM leverages the Power7 for storage) shift to if there will be a Power8 or Power9 and so forth.

From a storage perspective, is the DS8K still relevant?

I say yes given its installed base and need for IBM to have an enterprise solution (sorry, IMHO XIV does not fit that bill just yet) of their own, lest they cut an OEM deal with the likes of Hitachi or Fujitsu which while possible, I do not see it as likely near term. Another soft point on its relevance is to gauge reaction from their competitors including EMC and HDS.

From a server perspective, what is the benefit of the new Power7 enabled servers from IBM?

Simple, increase scale of performance for single thread as well as concurrent or parallel application workloads.

In other words, supporting more web sites, partitions for virtual machines and guest operating system instances, databases, compute and other applications that demand performance and economy of scale.

This also means that IBM has a platform to aggressively go after Sun Solaris server customers with a lifeline during the Oracle transition, not to mention being a platform for running Oracle in addition to its own UDB/DB2 database. In addition to being a platform for Unix AIX as well as Linux, the Power7 series also are at the heart of current generation iSeries (the server formerly known as the AS400).

Additional links and resources:

Closing comments (for now):
Given IBMs history of following a Power chip enhancement with a new upgraded version of the DS8000 (or ESS/2105 aka Shark/VSS) and its predecessors by a reasonable amount of time, I would be surprised if we do not see a new DS8000 (perhaps even renamed or renumbered) within the year.

This is similar to how other vendors leverage new processor chip technology evolution to pace their systems upgrades for example how many vendors who leverage Intel processes have done announcements over the past year since the Nehalem series rolled out including EMC among others.

Lets see what the IBM truth squads have to say, or, not have to say :)

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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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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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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Shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency

Storage I/O trends

I’m continually amazed at the number of people in the IT industry from customers to vendors, vars to media and even analysts who associate Green IT with and only with reducing carbon footprints. I guess I should not be surprised given the amount of rhetoric around Green and carbon both in the IT industry as well as in general resulting in a Green Gap.

The reality as I have discussed in the past is that Green IT while addressing carbon footprint topics, is really more about efficiency and optimization for business economic benefits that also help the environment. From a near-term tactical perspective, Green IT is about boosting productivity and enabling business sustainability during tough economic times, doing more with less, or, doing more with what you have. On a strategic basis, Green IT is about continued sustainability while also improving top and bottom line economics and repositioning IT as a competitive advantage resource.

There is a lot of focus on energy avoidance, as it is relatively easy to understand and it is also easy to implement. Turning off the lights, turning off devices when they are not in use, enabling low-power, energy-savings or Energy Star® (now implemented for servers with storage being a new focus) modes are all means to saving or reducing energy consumption, emissions, and energy bills.

Ideal candidates for powering down when not in use or inactive include desktop workstations, PCs, laptops, and associated video monitors and printers. Turning lights off or implementing motion detectors to turn lights off automatically, along with powering off or enabling energy-saving modes on general-purpose and consumer products has a significant benefit. New generations of processors such as the Intel Xeon 5xxx or 7xxx series (formerly known as Nehalem) provide the ability to boost performance when needed, or, go into various energy conservation modes when possible to balance performance, availability and energy needs to applicable service requirements, a form of intelligent power management.

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 the complement—do the same work using 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.

Given the shared nature of their use along with various intersystem dependencies, not all data center resources can be powered off completely. Some forms of storage devices can be powered off when they are not in use, such as offline storage devices or mediums for backups and archiving. Technologies such as magnetic tape or removable hard disk drives that do not need power when they are not in use can be used for storing inactive and dormant data.

Avoiding energy use can be part of an approach to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) challenges, particularly for servers, storage, and networks that do not need to be used or accessible at all times. However, not all applications, data or workloads can be consolidated, or, powered down due to performance, availability, capacity, security, compatibility, politics, financial and many other reasons. For those applications that cannot be consolidated, the trick is to support them in a more efficient and effective means.

Simply put, when work needs to be done or information needs to be stored or retrieved or data moved, it should be done so in the most energy-efficient manner aligned to a given level of service which can mean leveraging faster, higher performing resources (servers, storage and networks) to get the job done fast resulting in improved productivity and efficiency.

Tiering is an approach that applies to servers, storage, and networks as well as data protection. For example, tiered servers include large frame or mainframes, rack mount as well as blades with various amounts of memory, I/O or expansion slots and number of processor cores at different speeds. Tiered storage includes different types of mediums and storage system architectures such as those shown in figure 2. Tiered networking or tiered access includes 10Gb and 1Gb Ethernet, 2/4/8 Gb Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI, NAS and shared SAS among others. Tiered data protection includes various technologies to meet various recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) such as real-time synchronous mirroring with snapshots, to periodic backup to disk or tape among other approaches, techniques and technologies.

Technology alignment (Figure 2), that is aligning the applicable type of storage or server resource and devices to the task at hand to meet application service requirements is essential to archiving an optimized and efficient IT environment. For example, for very I/O intensive active data as shown in figure 2, leveraging ultra fast tier-0 high-performance SSD (FLASH or RAM) storage, or for high I/O active data, tier-1 fast 15.5K SAS and Fibre Channel storage based systems would be applicable.

For active and on-line data, that’s where energy efficiency in the form of fast disk drives including RAM SSD or FLASH SSD (for reads, writes are another story) and in particular fast 15.5K or 10K FC and SAS energy efficient disks and their associated storage systems come into play. The focus for active data and storage systems should be around more useful work per unit of energy consumed in a given footprint. For example, more IOPS per watt, more transactions per watt, more bandwidth or video streams per watt, more files or emails processed per watt.

Tiered Storage

Figure 2 Tiered Storage: Balancing Performance, Availability, Capacity and Energy to QoS (Source: “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

For low-performance, low activity applications where the focus is around storing as much data as possible with the lowest cost including for disk to disk based backup, slower high capacity SATA based storage systems are the fit (lower right in figure 2). For long-term bulk storage to meet archiving, data retention or other retention needs as well as storing large monthly full backups or long term data preservation, tape remains the ticket for large environments with the best combination of performance, availability capacity and energy efficiency and cost per footprint.

General approaches to boost energy efficiency include:

  • Do more work using the same or less amount of power and subsequently cooling
  • Leverage faster processors/controllers that use the same or less power
  • Apply applicable RAID level to application and data QoS requirements
  • Consolidate slower storage or servers to a faster, more energy-efficient solution
  • Use faster disk drives with capacity boost and that draw less power
  • Upgrade to newer, faster, denser, more energy-efficient technologies
  • Look beyond capacity utilization; keep response time and availability in mind
  • Leverage IPM, AVS, and other techniques to vary performance and energy usage
  • Manage data both locally and remote; gain control and insight before moving problems
  • Leverage a data footprint reduction strategy across all data and storage tiers
  • Utilize multiple data footprint techniques including archive, compression and de-dupe
  • Reduce data footprint impact, enabling higher densities of stored on-line data

Find a balance between energy avoidance and energy efficiency, consolidation and business enablement for sustainably, hardware and software, best practices including policy and producers, as well as leveraging available financial rebates and incentives. Addressing green and PCFE issues is a process; there is no one single solution or magic formula.

Efficient and Optimized IT Wheel of Oppourtunity

Figure 3 Wheel of Opportunity – Various Techniques and Technologies for Infrastructure Optimization (Source: “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

Instead, leverage a combination of technologies, techniques, and best practices to address various issues and requirements is needed (Figure 3). Some technologies and techniques include among others infrastructure resource management (IRM), data management, archiving (including for non-compliance), and compression (on-line and off-line, primary and secondary) as well as de-dupe for backups, space saving snapshots, and effective use of applicable raid levels.

Green washing and green hype may fade away, however power, cooling, footprint, energy (PCFE) and related issues and initiatives that enable IT infrastructure optimization and business sustainability will not fade away. Addressing IT infrastructure optimization and efficiency is thus essential to IT and business sustainability and growth in an environmentally friendly manner which enables shifting from talking about green to being green and efficient.

Learn more on the tips, tools, articles, videos and reports page as well as in “Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking” (CRC) pages, “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC) pages at StorageIO.com.

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 Optimization: Performance, Availability, Capacity, Effectiveness

Storage I/O trends

With the IT and storage industry shying away from green hype, green washing and other green noise, there is also a growing realization that the new green is about effectively boosting efficiency to improve productivity and profitability or to sustain business and IT growth during tough economic times.

This past week while doing some presentations (I’ll post a link soon to the downloads) at the 2008 San Francisco installment of Storage Decisions event focused on storage professionals, as well as a keynote talk at the value added reseller (VAR) channel professional focused storage strategies event, a common theme was boosting productivity, improving on efficiency, stretching budgets and enabling existing personal and resources to do more with the same or less.

During these and other presentations, keynotes, sessions and seminars both here in the U.S. as well as in Europe recently, these common themes of booting efficiency as well as the closing of the green gap, that is, the gap between industry and marketing rhetoric around green hype, green noise, green washing and issues that either do not resonate with, or, can not be funded by IT organizations compared with the disconnect of where many IT organizations issues exist which are around power, cooling, floor space or footprint as well as EH&S (Environmental health and safety) and economics.

The green gap (here, and here, and here) is that many IT organizations around the world have not realized due to green hype around carbon footprints and related themes that in fact, boosting energy efficiency for active and on-line applications, data and workloads (e.g. doing more I/O operations per second-IOPS, transactions, files or messages processed per watt of energy) to address power, cooling, floor space are in fact a form of addressing green issues, both economic and environmental.

Likewise for inactive or idle data, there is a bit more of a linkage that green can mean powering things off, however there is also a disconnect in that many perceive that green storage for example is only green if the storage can be powered off which while true for in-active or idle data and applications, is not true for all data and applications types.

As mentioned already, for active workloads, green means doing more with the same or less power, cooling and floor space impact, this means doing more work per unit of energy. In that theme, for active workload, a slow, large capacity disk may in fact not be energy efficient if it impedes productivity and results in more energy to get the same amount of work done. For example, larger capacity SATA disk drives are also positioned as being the most green or energy efficiency which can be true for idle or in-active or non performance (time) sensitive applications where more data is stored in a denser footprint.

However for active workload, lower capacity 15.5K RPM 300GB and 400GB Fibre Channel (FC) and SAS disk drives that deliver more IOPS or bandwidth per watt of energy can get more work done in the same amount of time.

There is also a perception that FC and SAS disk drives use more power than SATA disk drives which in some cases can be true, however current generations of high performance 10K RPM and 15.5K RPM drives have very similar power draw on a raw spindle or device basis. What differs is the amount of capacity per watt for idle or inactive applications, or, the number of IOPS or amount of performance for active configurations.

On the other hand, while not normally perceived as being green compared to tape or IPM and MAID (1st generation and MAID 2.0) solutions, along with SSD (Flash and RAM), not to mention fast SAS and FC disks or tiered storage systems that can do more IOPS or bandwidth per watt of energy are in fact green and energy efficiency for getting work done. Thus, there are two sides to optimizing storage for energy efficiency, optimizing for when doing work e.g. more miles per gallon per amount of work done, and, how little energy used when not doing work.

Thus, a new form of being green to sustain business growth while boosting productivity is Gaining Realistic Economic Efficiency Now that as a by product helps both business bottom lines as well as the environment by doing more with less. These are themes that are addressed in my new book

“The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach) that will be formerly launched and released for generally availability just after the 1st of the year (hopefully sooner), however you can beat the rush and order your copy now to beat the rush at Amazon and other fine venues around the world.

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

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Intelligent Power Management (IPM) and second generation MAID 2.0 on the rise

Storage I/O trends

In case you missed it today, Adaptec announced that they are the 1st vendor “This Week” to add support for Intelligent Power Management (IPM) to their storage systems. Adaptec joins a growing list of vendors who are deploying, or, who are program announcing some variation of IPM and second generation MAID 2.0 ability including support for different types of tiered disk drives including various combinations of Fibre Channel and SAS as well as SATA.

As a quick refresh, Massive or Monolithic Arrays of Idle or Inactive Disks (MAID) was popularized by 1st generation MAID vendor Copan who spins down disk drives to avoid energy usage. One of the challenges with 1st generation MAID is the poor performance by being able to only have at most 25% of the disk drives spinning at any time to transfer data when needed.

This is a balancing act between achieving energy avoidance and associated benefits vs. maintaining performance to move data when needed particularly for large restoration to support BC/DR or other purposes. Granted, 1st generation MAID systems like those from Copan while positioned as alternatives to high-performance disk storage systems to amplify potential energy savings on one hand, or, to put as an alternative to magnetic tape by providing random restore capability. The reality is that 1st generation MAID systems are finding their niche not for on-line primary or even on-line secondary storage, nor as a direct replacement for tape or even disk based libraries to support large-scale BC/DR, rather, in a sweet spot between secondary and near-line disk libraries and virtual tape libraries with a target application of very infrequently accessed of data.

Second generation MAID, aka MAID 2.0 is an evolution of the general technologies and capabilities extending functionality and flexibility while addressing quality of service (QoS), performance, availability, capacity and energy consumption using IPM also known as Adaptive Power Management (APM), dynamic bandwidth switching or scaling (DBS) among other names. The basic premise is to add flexibility building on 1st generation characteristics including data protection, resiliency and pro-active part or drive monitoring. Another basic premise of IPM. and MAID 2.0. solutions is to allow the performance and subsequent energy usage to vary, which is to cut the amount of performance and energy usage during in-active times, yet, when data needs to be accessed, to allow full performance without penalties for energy savings.

Second generation MAID solutions can be characterized by multiple power saving modes as well as flexible performance to adjust to changing workload and application needs. Another characteristic is the ability to work across different types of disk drives including Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA as opposed to only SATA drives found in 1st generation solutions as well as for the IPM or MAID 2.0 functionality to exist in a standard storage system or array instead of in a purpose-built dedicated storage system. Other capabilities include support for more granular power settings down to a RAID group or LUN level instead of across an entire array or storage system as well as support for different RAID levels among other features.

Examples of vendors who have either announced product or made statements of direction with regard to MAID 2.0 and IPM enabled storage systems include:

Adaptec (Today), Datadirect, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HGST (Hitachi Disk Drives), NEC, Nexsan, and Xyratex among others on a growing list of solutions.

For applications and data storage needs that need good performance and QoS over a range of changing usage conditions to balance good performance when needed to efficiently get work done to boost productivity, while saving or avoiding energy when little or no work needs to be done, take a look at current and emerging IPM and MAID 2.0 enabled storage systems as part of a tiered storage strategy to discuss power, cooling, floor-space and EHS (PCFE) related issues.

To learn more, check out the StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective white paper Intelligent Power Management (IPM) and MAID 2.0 and visit www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com well as www.storageio.com.

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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Airport Parking, Tiered Storage and Latency

Storage I/O trends

Ok, so what do airport parking, tiered storage and latency have in common? Based on some recent travel experience I will assert that there is a bit in common, or at a least an analogy. What got me thinking about this was recently I could not get a parking spot at the airport primary parking ramp next to the terminal (either a reasonable walk or short tram ride) which offers quick access to the departure gate.

Granted there is premium for this ability to park or “store” my vehicle for a few days in near to airport terminal, however that premium is off-set in the time savings and less disruptions enabling me a few extra minutes to get other things done while traveling.

Let me call the normal primary airport parking tier-1 (regardless of what level of the ramp you park on), with tier-0 being valet parking where you pay a fee that might rival the cost of your airline ticket, yet your car stays in a climate controlled area, gets washed and cleaned, maybe an oil change and hopefully in a more secure environment with an even faster access to your departure gate, something for the rich and famous.

Now the primary airport parking has been full lately, not surprising given the cold weather and everyone looking to use up their carbon off-set credits to fly somewhere warm or attend business meetings or what ever it is that they are doing.

Budgeting some extra time, a couple of weeks ago I tried one of those off-site airport parking facilities where the bus picks you up in the parking lot and then whisks you off to the airport, then you on return you wait for the buss to pick you up at the airport, ride to the lot and tour the lot looking at everyone’s car as they get dropped off and 30-40 minutes later, you are finally to your vehicle faced with the challenge of how to get out of the parking lot late at night as it is such a budget operation, they have gone to lights out and automated check-out. That is, put your credit card in the machine and the gate opens, that is, if the credit card reader is not frozen because it about “zero” outside and the machine wont read your card using up more time, however heck, I saved a few dollars a day.

On another recent trip, again the main parking ramp was full, at least the airport has a parking or storage resource monitoring ( aka Airport SRM) tool that you can check ahead to see if the ramps are full or not. This time I went to another terminal, parked in the ramp there, walked a mile (would have been a nice walk if it had not been 1 above zero (F) with a 20 mile per hour wind) to the light rail train station, waited ten minutes for the 3 minute train ride to the main terminal, walked to the tram for the 1-2 minute tram ride to the real terminal to go to my departure gate. On return, the process was reversed, adding what I will estimate to be about an hour to the experience, which, if you have the time, not a bad option and certainly good exercise even if it was freezing cold.

During the planes, trains and automobiles expedition, it dawned on me, airport parking is a lot like tiered storage in that you have different types of parking with different cost points, locality of reference or latency or speed from which how much time to get from your car to your plane, levels of protection and security among others.

I likened the off-airport parking experience to off-line tier-3 tape or MAID or at best, near-line tier-2 storage in that I saved some money at the cost of lost time and productivity. The parking at the remote airport ramp involving a train ride and tram ride I likened to tier-2 or near-line storage over a very slow network or I/O path in that the ramp itself was pretty efficiency, however the transit delays or latency were ugly, however I did save some money, a couple of bucks, not as much as the off-site, however a few less than the primary parking.

Hence I jump back to the primary ramp as being the fastest as tier-1 unless you have someone footing your parking bills and can afford tier-0. It also dawned on me that like primary or tier-1 storage, regardless of if it is enterprise class like an EMC DMX, IBM DS8K, Fujitsu, HDS USP or mid-range EMC CLARiiON, HP EVA, IBM DS4K, HDS AMS, Dell or EqualLogic, 3PAR, Fujitsu, NetApp or entry-level products from many different vendors; people still pay for the premium storage, aka tier-1 storage in a given price band even if there are cheaper alternatives however like the primary airport parking, there are limits on how much primary storage or parking can be supported due to floor space, power, cooling and budget constraints.

With tiered storage the notion is to align different types and classes of storage for various usage and application categories based on service (performance, availability, capacity, energy consumption) requirements balanced with cost or other concerns. For example there is high cost yet ultra high performance with ultra low energy saving and relative small capacity of tier-0 solid state devices (SSD) using either FLASH or dynamic random access memory (DRAM) as part of a storage system, as a storage device or as a caching appliance to meet I/O or activity intensive scenarios. Tier-1 is high performance, however not as high performance as tier-0, although given a large enough budget, large enough power and cooling ability and no constraints on floor space, you can make an total of traditional disk drives out perform even solid state, having a lot more capacity at the tradeoff of power, cooling, floor space and of course cost.

For most environments tier-1 storage will be the fastest storage with a reasonable amount of capacity, as tier-1 provides a good balance of performance and capacity per amount of energy consumed for active storage and data. On the other hand, lower cost, higher capacity and slower tier-2 storage also known as near-line or secondary storage is used in some environments for primary storage where performance is not a concern, yet is typically more for non-performance intensive applications.

Again, given enough money, unlimited power, cooling and floor space not to mention the number of enclosures, controllers and management software, you can sum a large bunch of low-cost SATA drives as an example to produce a high level of performance, however the cost benefits to do a high activity or performance level, either IOPS or bandwidth particular where the excess capacity is not needed would make SSD technology look cheap on an overall cost basis perspective.

Likewise replacing your entire disk with SSD particularly for capacity based environments is not really practical outside of extreme corner case applications unless you have the disposable income of a small country for your data storage and IT budget.

Another aspect of tiered storage is the common confusion of a class of storage and the class of a storage vendor or where a product is positioned for example from a price band or target environment such as enterprise, small medium environment, small medium business (SMB), small office or home office (SOHO) or prosumer/consumer.

I often hear discussions that go along the lines of tier-1 storage being products for the enterprise, tier-1 being for workgroups and tier-3 being for SMB and SOHO. I also hear confusion around tier-1 being block based, tier-2 being NAS and tier-3 being tape. “What we have here is a failure to communicate” in that there is confusion around tiered, categories, classification, price band and product positioning and perception. To add to the confusion is that there are also different tiers of access including Fibre Channel and FICON using 8GFC (coming soon to a device near you), 4GFC, 2GFC and even 1GFC along with 1GbE and 10GbE for iSCSI and/or NAS (NFS and/or CIFS) as well as InfiniBand for block (iSCSI or SRP) and file (NAS) offering different costs, performance, latency and other differing attributes to aligning to various application service and cost requirements.

What this all means is that there is more to tiered storage, there is tiered access, tiered protection, tiered media, different price band and categories of vendors and solutions to be aligned to applicable usage and service requirements. On the other hand, similar to airport parking, I can chose to skip the airport parking and take a cab to the airport which would be analogous to shifting your storage needs to a managed service provider. However ultimately it will come down to balancing performance, availability, capacity and energy (PACE) efficiency to the level of service and specific environment or application needs.

Greg Schulz www.storageio.com and www.greendatastorage.com

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The Many Faces of Solid State Devices/Disks (SSD)

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a recent article I wrote for Enterprise Storage Forum titled “Not a Flash in the PAN” providing a synopsis of the many faces, implementations and forms of SSD based technologies that includes several links to other related content.

A popular topic over the past year or so has been SSD with FLASH based storage for laptops, also sometimes referred to as hybrid disk drives along with announcements late last year by companies such as Texas Memory Systems (TMS) of a FLASH based storage system combining DRAM for high speed cache in their RAMSAN-500 and more recently EMC adding support for FLASH based SSD devices in their DMX4 systems as a tier-0 to co-exist with other tier-1 (fast FC) and tier-2 (SATA) drives.

Solid State Disks/Devices (SSD) or memory based storage mediums have been around for decades, they continue to evolve using different types of memory ranging from volatile dynamic random access (DRAM) memory to persistent or non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) and various derivatives of NAND FLASH among other users. Likewise, the capacity cost points, performance, reliability, packaging, interfaces and power consumption all continue to improve.

SSD in general, is a technology that has been miss-understood over the decades particularly when simply compared on a cost per capacity (e.g. dollar per GByte) basis which is an unfair comparison. The more approaches comparison is to look at how much work or amount of activity for example transactions per second, NFS operations per second, IOPS or email messages that can be processed in a given amount of time and then comparing the amount of power and number of devices to achieve a desired level of performance. Granted SSD and in particular DRAM based systems cost more on a GByte or TByte basis than magnetic hard disk drives however it also requires more HDDs and controllers to achieve the same level of performance not to mention requiring more power and cooling than compared to a typical SSD based device.

The many faces of SSD range from low cost consumer grade products based on consumer FLASH products to high performance DRAM based caches and devices for enterprise storage applications. Over the past year or so, SSD have re-emerged for those who are familiar with the technology, and emerged or appeared for those new to the various implementations and technologies leading to another up swinging in the historic up and down cycles of SSD adoption and technology evolution in the industry.

This time around, a few things are different and I believe that SSD in general, that is, the many difference faces of SSD will have staying power and not fade away into the shadows only to re-emerge a few years later as has been the case in the past.

The reason I have this opinion is based on two basic premises which are economics and ecological”. Given the focus on reducing or containing costs, doing more with what you have and environmental or ecological awareness in the race to green the data center and green storage, improving on the economics with more energy efficiency storage, that is, enabling your storage to do more work with less energy as opposed to avoiding energy consumption, has the by product of improved economics (cost savings and improved resource utilization and better service delivery) along with ecological (better use of energy or less use of energy).

Current implementations of SSD based solutions are addressing both the energy efficiency topics to enable better energy efficiency ranging from maximizing battery life to boosting performance while drawing less power. Consequently we are now seeing SSD in general are not only being used for boosting performance, also we are seeing it as one of many different tools to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental or green storage issues.

Here’s a link to a StorageIO industry trends and perspectives white paper at www.storageio.com/xreports.htm.

Here’s the bottom line, there are many faces to SSD. SSD (FLASH or DRAM) based solutions and devices have a place in a tiered storage environment as a Tier-0 or as an alternative in some laptop or other servers where appropriate. SSD compliments other technologies and SSD benefits from being paired with other technologies including high performance storage for tier-1 and near-line or tier-2 storage implementing intelligent power management (IPM).

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