Tag: SAS

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On The Road Again: An Update

A while back, I posted about a busy upcoming spring schedule of activity and events, and then a few weeks ago, posted an update, so this can be considered the latest "On The Road Again" update. While the economy continues to be in rough condition and job reductions or layoffs continuing, or, reduction in hours or employees being asked to take time off without pay or to take sabbaticals, not to mention the race to get the economic stimulus bill passed, for many people, business and life goes on.

Airport parking lots have plenty of cars in them, airplanes while not always full, are not empty (granted there has been some fleet optimization aka aligning capacity to best suited tier of aircraft and other consolidation or capacity improvements). Many organizations cutting back on travel and entertainment (T&E) spending, either to watch the top and bottom line, avoid being perceived or seen on the news as having employees going on junkets when they may in fact being going to conferences, seminars, conventions or other educational and related events to boost skills and seek out ways to improve business productivity.

One of the reason that I have a busy travel schedule in addition to my normal analyst and consulting activities is that many events and seminars are being scheduled close to, or in the cities where IT professionals are located who might otherwise have T&E restrictions or other constraints from traveling to industry events, some of which are or will be impacted by recent economic and business conditions.

Last week I was invited to attend and speak at the FujiFilm Executive Seminar, no private jets were used or seen, travel was via scheduled air carriers (coach air-fare). FujiFilm has a nice program for those interested in or involved with tape whether for disk to tape backup, disk to disk to tape, long term archive, bulk storage and other scenarios involving the continued use and changing roles of tape as a green data storage medium for in-active or off-line data. Check out FujiFilm TapePower Center portal.

This past week I was in the big "D", that’s Dallas Texas to do another TechTarget Dinner event around the theme of BC/DR, Virtualization and IT optimization. The session was well attended by a diverse audience of IT professionals from around the DFW metroplex. Common themes included discussions about business and economic activity as well as the need to keep business and IT running even when budgets are being stretched further and further. Technology conversations included server and storage virtualization, tiered storage including SSD, fast FC and SAS disk drives, lower performance high capacity "fat" disk drives as well as tape not to mention tiered data protection, tiered servers and other related items.

The Green Gap continues to manifest itself in that when asked, most people do not have Green IT initiatives, however, when asked they do have power, cooling, floor-space, environmental (PCFE) or business economic sustainability concerns, aka, the rest of the Green story.

While some attendees have started to use some new technologies including dedupe technology, most I find are still using a combination of disk and tape with some considering dedupe for the future for certain applications. Other technologies and trends being watched, however also ones with concerns as to their stability and viability for enterprise use include FLASH based SSD, Cloud computing and thin provisioning among others. Common themes I hear from IT professionals are that these are technologies and tools to keep an eye on, or, use on a selective basis and are essentially tiered resources to have in a tool box of technologies to apply to different tasks to meet various service requirements. Hopefully the Cowboys can put a fraction of the amount of energy and interest into and improving their environment that the Dallas area IT folks are applying to their environments, especially given the strained IT budgets vs. the budget that the Cowboys have to work with for their player personal.

I always find it interesting when talking to groups of IT professionals which tend to be enterprise, SME and SMB hearing what they are doing and looking at or considering which often is in stark contrast to some of the survey results on technology adoption trends one commonly reads or hears about. Hummm, nuff said, what say you?

Hope to see you at one of the many upcoming events perhaps coming to a venue near you.

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

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Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?

Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
Updated 9/28/18

There are many faces and thus functionalities of virtualization beyond the one most commonly discussed which is consolidation or aggregation. Other common forms of virtualization include emulation (which is part of enabling consolidation) which can be in the form of a virtual tape library for storage to bridge new disk technology to old software technology, processes, procedures and skill sets. Other forms of virtualization functionality for life beyond consolidation include abstraction for transparent movement of applications or operating systems on servers, or data on storage to support planned and un-planned maintenance, upgrades, BC/DR and other activities.

So the gist is that there are many forms of virtualization technologies and techniques for servers, storage and even I/O networks to address different issues including life beyond consolidation. However the next wave of consolidation could and should be that of reducing the number of logical images, or, the impact of the multiple operating systems and application images, along with their associated management costs.

This may be easier said than done, however, for those looking to cut costs even further than from what can be realized by reducing physical footprints (e.g. going from 10 to 1 or from 250 to 25 physical servers), there could be upside however it will come at a cost. The cost is like that of reducing data and storage footprint impacts with such as data management and archiving.

Savings can be realized by archiving and deleting data via data management however that is easier said than done given the cost in terms of people time and ability to decide what to archive, even for non-compliance data along with associated business rules and policies to be defined (for automation) along with hardware, software and services (managed services, consulting and/or cloud and SaaS).

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

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. 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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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

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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Did someone forget to tell Dell that Tape is dead?

Storage I/O trends

Did someone forget to send a memo to Dell that magnetic tape is dead, or, perhaps pre-occupied with other activities? Maybe no body at Dell read the “virtual” or “fictional” memo that tape is dead?

Ok, enough with the cynicism and joking around, tape is not dead (See recent Computerworld and Dell story) and Dell is one of several vendors including IBM who still find time to talk about tape as part of a solution to different customer and environment needs.

Sure, tape might be in or heading into its golden years or what can also be called the plateau of productivity (for customers) or profitability (for some vendors), tape does not get the marketing dollars and media coverage as its been around as a technology for a long time and their are cooler and niftier (techno term) things to discuss including disk based backup and data protection, CDP, VTLs, de-dupe debates, clusters, grids and clouds, FCoE vs. iSCSI, NAS, SAS, virtualization, OSD and pretty much anything except tape.

However, the reality is that many organizations, particular larger organizations still use and rely on tape based data protection for backup/BC/DR as well as archive for compliance and non-compliance data retention or data preservation activities, in some cases complimenting and co-existing with disk based solutions.

Disk to disk (D2D) based backups and data protection certainly continue to gain adoption and deployments in both large and small environments, however, the shift to disk based data protection, or, clinging to tape with a death grip does not have to be, nor should it be an all or nothing value proposition, that is, they can and do co-exist for different uses and purposes leveraging the various economics and benefits of the technologies to address various tasks and requirements.

New and emerging technologies certainly need to be discussed, dissected, developed and deployed as they are the future for maintaining and sustaining business growth via IT service delivery in economical and reliable fashion, that is, apply what technologies makes economic and business sense at a given point in time to minimize risk while maximizing useful benefits to your business.

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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DAS, SAS, FCoE, Green Efficient Storage and I/O Podcast & FAQs

Storage I/O trends

Here are some links to several recent podcast and FAQs pertaining to various popular technolgies and trends.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) FAQs

Direct Attached Storage for SMB and other enviromnets that do not need networked (SAN or NAS) storage.

Green and Energy Efficient Storage as well as FCoE and related topics

Along with several other topics found 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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SAS Disk Drives Appearing in Larger Mid-Range Arrays

Storage I/O trends

2.5″ and 3.5″ 10,000RPM (10K) and 15,000RPM (15K) SAS disk drives have been available for entry level and SMB solutions from the likes of Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Infotrend, LSI, NetApp, Promise, Sun and Xyratex among others for some time now. HDS recently introduced a new mid-range solution the AMS 2000 that supports up to 480 3G SAS drives in place of traditional 2G or 4G Fibre Channel disk drives.

The benefit of supporting SAS disk drives moving forward is that as volume production and adoption increases, price will decline making the drives more affordable not to mention that the controller and interface chip sets and internal adapters support both SAS and SATA disk drives removing additional cost and complexity from storage systems. Similar to how Fibre Channel disk drives replaced parallel SCSI, SSA or other propriety disk drives, and how SATA replaced parallel ATA (PATA) drives, dual ported SAS disk drives continue the cycle of replacing Fibre Channel disk drives at the entry level and mid-range and eventually finding their way into high-end and ultra-high-end storage arrays over the next couple of years as 6G SAS drives begin to appear.

Watch for a SAS drive to appear in a storage system or server near you soon.

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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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

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Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go In The Water Again!

In the shark infested waters where I/O and networking debates often rage, the Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI, or, is that iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel debates continue which is about as surprising as an ice berg melting because it floated into warmer water or hot air in the tropics.

Here’s a link to an article at Processor.com by Kurt Marko “iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel: A Cost Comparison iSCSI Targets the Low-End SAN, But Are The Cost Advantages Worth The Performance Trade-offs?” that looks at a recent iSCSI justification report and some additional commentary about apples to oranges comparisons by me.

Here’s the thing, no one in their right mind would try to refute that iSCSI at 1GbE levering built-in server NICs and standard Ethernet switches and operating system supplied path managers is cheaper than say 4Gb Fibre Channel or even legacy 1Gb and 2Gb Fibre Channel. However that’s hardly an apple to apples comparison.

A more interesting comparison is for example 10GbE iSCSI compared to 1GbE iSCSI (again not a fair comparison), or, look at for example the new solution from HP and Qlogic that for about $8,200 USD, you get a 8Gb FC switch with a bunch of ports for expansion, four (4) PCIe 8Gb FC adapters plus cables plus transceiver optics which while not as cheap as 1GbE ports built into a server or an off the shelf Ethernet switch, is a far cry from the usual apples to oranges no cost Ethernet NICs vs. $1,500 FC adapters and high price FC director ports.

To be fair, put this into comparison with 10GbE adapters (and probably not a real apples to apples comparison at that) which on CDW go from about $600 USD (without no transceivers) to $1,100 to $1,500 for single port with transceivers or about $2,500 to $3,000 or more for dual or multi-port.

So the usual counter argument to trying to make a more apples to apples comparison is that iSCSI deployments do not need the performance of 10GbE or 8GbE Fibre Channel which is very valid, however then a comparison should be iSCSI vs. NAS.

Here’s the bottom line, I like iSCSI for its target markets and see lots of huge upside and growth opportunity just like I see a continued place for Fibre Channel and moving forward FCoE leveraging Ethernet as the common denominator (at least for now) as well as NAS for data sharing and SAS for small deployments requiring shared storage (assuming a shared SAS array that is).

I?m a fan of using the right technology or tool for the task at hand and if that gets me in trouble with the iSCSI purist who wants everything on iSCSI, well, too bad, so be it. Likewise, if the FC police are not happy that I?m not ready and willing to squash out the evil iSCSI, well, too bad, get over it, same with NAS, InfiniBand and SAS and that’s not to mean I don?t take a side or preference, rather, applied to the right task at hand, I?m a huge fan of these and other technologies and hence the discussion about apples to apples comparisons and applicability.

Cheers
GS