Tag: QoS

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Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)

Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)

server storage I/O trends

In case you missed it, Dell recently announced Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7) with several enhancements for their SC series storage systems (e.g. Compellent). For those who are under maintenance agreements, the new features are no charge upgrades. Most of the SCOS 7 features should be generally available now (or soon) for the SC9000 series with other platform support phased in over time.

Summary of Dell SC07 enhancements features

  • Block level dedupe in addition to previous file dedupe
  • Enhanced compression as a companion to dedupe of HDD and SSD data
  • Single volumes or LUN can span across HDD and SSD tiers
  • Live migration and volume management with load balancing
  • Ability to move volumes between arrays
  • Quality of Service (QoS) for performance across volumes and volume groups
  • QoS set by IOPs, bandwidth and latency of standard volumes and VMware VVOL
  • New Storage Manager replaces SC Enterprise Manager for unified management
  • Delivers on promise of a unified SC and FS NAS management
  • Ability to replicate data between PS (EqualLogic) and SC (Compellent)
  • HTML 5 interface and non-disruptive implementation

Where To Learn More

Learn more about Dell SC Series enhancements here and here.

What This All Means

Dell is following through on its previous commitments to both PS (e.g. EqualLogic) and SC (e.g. Compellent) customers with enhancements to increase functionality along with simplify management. These features will become more important to add continued to value to the SC and PS platforms independently of the impending Dell acquisition of EMC (e.g. Dell EMC). The elephant in the room discussion is with the impending Dell acquisition of EMC, and the new Dell EMC division (e.g. essentially the existing EMC plus the Dell Server group) what happens with the midrange storage products from both parties.

Dell has the SC and PS as well as lower end direct attached storage (DAS) based Powervault series as well as the Exanet based Fluid file System among other technologies including Ocarina based data footprint reduction (DFR). If you recall, the Ocarina technology acquired by Dell enables not only dedupe, also compression and other DFR (here and here) capabilities. Meanwhile EMC has the VNX and Unity (announced in May 2016) among other offerings.

Both Dell and EMC will need to continue to articulate the value of their midrange solutions prior to the acquisition closing. Likewise once the deal closes, the joint entities need to be crystal clear on where the different technologies fit for various markets or customer segments, as well as their future.

Overall a good set of enhancements for the Dell SC (and PS) series.

Ok, nuff said, for now…

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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What do you do when your service provider drops the ball

Do you have a web, internet, backup or other IT cloud service provider of some type?

Do you pay for it, or is it a free service?

Do you take your service provider for granted?

Does your service provider take you or your data for granted?

Does your provider offer some form of service level objectives (SLO)?

For example, Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), Quality of Service (QOS) or if a backup service alternate forms of recovery among others?

So what happens when there is a service disruption, do you threaten to leave the provider and if so, how much does that (or would it) cost you to move?

A couple of weeks ago I was using on a Delta airlines flight from LAX to MSP returning from a west coast speaking engagement event.

During the late evening three hour flight, I was using the gogo inflight wifi service to get caught up on some emails, blog items along with other work items in addition to doing a few twitter tweets while flying high over the real clouds from my virtual office.

During that time, I saw a twitter tweet from Devang Panchigar (@storageNerve) commenting that his hosting service provider Bluehost was down or offline. This caught my attention as Bluehost is also my service provider and a quick check verified that my sites and services were still working. I subsequently sent a tweet to Devang indicating that Bluehost or at least from looking at my sites and services were still functioning, or at least for the time being as I was about to find out. Long story short, about 20 to 25 minutes later, I noticed that I could not longer get to any of my sites, low and behold my Bluehost services were also now offline.

Bluehost

Overall, I have been pleased with Bluehost as a service provider including finding their call support staff very accommodating and easy to work with when I have questions or need something taken care of. Normally I would have simply called Bluehost to see what was going on, however being at about 38,000 feet above the clouds, a quick conversation was not going to be possible. Instead, I checked some forums that revealed Bluehost was experiencing some electrical power issues with their data center (I believe in Utah). Looking at some of the forums as well as various twitter comments, I also decided to check to see if Bluehost CEO Matt Heaton blog was functioning (it was).

It would have been too easy to do one of those irate customer type posts telling them how bad they were, how I was dropping them like a hot potato and then doing a blog post telling everyone to never use them again or along those lines that are far to common and often get deleted as spam.

Instead, I took a different approach (you could have read it here however I just checked and it has been deleted). My comment on Matts blog post took a week or so to be moderated (now since deleted). Essentially my post took the opposite approach of going off on the usual customer tirade instead commenting how ironic that a hosting service for my web site which contains content information about resilient data infrastructure themes was offline.

Now I realize that I am not paying for a high end no downtime always available hosting service, however I also realize that I am paying for a more premium package vs. a basic subscription or even a for free service. While I was not happy about the one hour of downtime around midnight, it was comforting to know that no data was lost and my sites were only offline for a short period of time.

What does all of this mean?

There have been some widely publicized and discussed internet and cloud service related disruptions.

I hope Bluehost continues to improve on their services to stay out of the news for a major disruption as well as minimize or eliminate downtime for their for fee based services.

I also hope that Bluehost CEO Matt Heaton continues to listen to what his customers have to say while improving his services to keep us as customers instead of taking us for granted as some providers or vendors do.

Thanks again to Devang for the tip that there was a service disruption, after all, sometimes we take services for granted and in other situations some service providers take their customers for granted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the essence of the green gap or disconnect!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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