exploring data storage options

Get the Mostfrom StorageInvestments

Why a SANMakes Sense

Will Unified Storage Work for You?

Data Storage InsightsData storage strategies and insights for growing businesses

Exploring Data Storage

Options

Issue 2, 2011

In this issue:

2 Exploring Data Storage Options for Growing Businesses

3 Get the Most Out of Your Storage Investments

6 Why a Storage Area Network Makes Sense for Your Business

9 Does Unified Storage Make Sense for Your Business?

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9

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6

Contents…

Contributors: Drew Robb and Paul Rubens.

Data Storage Insights

2 Data Storage Insights: Exploring Data Storage Options © 2011, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.Back to Contents


nce your business recognizes it has a problem handling the increasing amount of electronic data it needs to store — or that a problem is looming in the not-too-distant

future — it’s time to explore some storage technologies that can help.

As you begin to explore your data storage options, you’ll notice that the first commitment you need to make is to avoid haphazardly adding storage resources when you need them and commit to a plan. IT administrators that were relying on direct attached storage (DAS) and temporary fixes to keep up with their storage demands can be overwhelmed by the options for networked storage that exist, and it only gets more complicated when you factor in server virtualization, disaster recovery and many other technologies that businesses are using in today’s data centers.

The key to navigating the potentially confusing web of storage technologies is finding the right data storage solution for your business. As we’ll see in the first article in this issue of Data Storage Insights, there are numerous disadvantages to adding storage resources on an ad hoc basis, including management complexity, high costs and bandwidth issues. Instead, consolidating your storage on a centralized storage resource like a storage area network (SAN) leads to lower costs, simplified management and better backup and archiving of business data.

A SAN can provide an affordable long-term solution for your increasing storage requirements, but it provides much more than just raw storage capacity. Also in this issue we’ll take a more in-depth look at the benefits

Exploring Data Storage Optionsfor Growing Businesses

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of a SAN, including high availability, support for virtualized environments and simplified backups.

Another approach worthy of consideration for some businesses is unified storage, which puts both file and block storage on one unified device. Unified storage systems now include such features as deduplication, solid state drives (SSDs), storage tiering and the ability work with large-scale virtualized environments.

Regardless of the technology you choose to help your business deal with its data storage problems, it’s important that you choose a strategy that can scale as your business grows.



any organizations deal with rising storage requirements by investing in additional storage resources for their servers on an ad-hoc basis as the need arises.

While effective in the short term, in the long term this approach has a fundamental flaw: it inevitably leads to an effect known as “storage sprawl,” where data is stored on a large number of servers and storage devices spread throughout the organization. Storage sprawl is a problem because it results in storage resources that are:

• Complex to manage

• Difficult to backup

• Hard to scale

• Costly to run

• Not suited to providing guaranteed quality of service (QoS) levels for applications

• Likely to clog up the local area network (LAN)

• Substantially underutilized

In a word, then, this type of sprawling storage infrastructure is inefficient; it doesn’t provide maximum storage bang for your buck.

One strategy that’s effective at countering the tendency toward storage sprawl is storage consolidation. It’s a strategy that’s increasingly being adopted by businesses of all sizes, and one that could help your company get much more out of its storage investments.

What is Storage Consolidation?

Storage consolidation is the strategy of creating a centralized storage resource that is used by many different servers and end users throughout your

organization. In practical terms this is normally achieved using network attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN), usually located in your company’s server room or data center.

Benefits of Storage Consolidation

Creating a centralized storage resource can bring a number of valuable benefits to your organization, including:

• Lower administrative costs: As a rule of thumb a single administrator can manage up to 20 times more storage capacity in a consolidated environment than in a DAS environment and use a simple administrative

Get the Most Out of Your Storage InvestmentsBy Paul Rubens

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interface to manage the entire storage pool centrally. This higher productivity means businesses need fewer administrators to manage a given level of storage capacity, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a consolidated storage environment and leaving more of the storage budget available to be spent on extra storage capacity.

• Higher storage capacity utilization: Investments in storage capacity that are never used represent money going down the drain, yet DAS environments typically have storage capacity utilization rates of 30 percent or less. In a consolidated environment storage can be allocated to servers from the centralized pool as needed, leading to typical utilization rates of 80 percent or more.

• Easier, faster and lower cost backups: Backing up multiple servers usually involves running numerous backup agents and moving large amounts of data over the LAN or onto backup devices. These backups can take a considerable amount of time to complete, slowing network performance to a crawl and occupying server CPU cycles. By consolidating storage onto a SAN or NAS device you can carry out backups more efficiently, and with a SAN it’s even possible to do a complete backup over the storage area network without any impact on server performance or LAN speeds at all.

• Higher quality of service (QoS) capabilities: Storage consolidation leads to high-performance, highly available storage, thanks to technologies such as RAID and Fibre Channel or iSCSI. This can help ensure that storage is not the bottleneck that prevents application servers from meeting the required QoS levels.

• Reduced power and cooling costs: More efficient use of storage resources and fewer standalone storage servers mean your organization’s power and cooling costs can be reduced significantly in a consolidated storage environment.

Avoiding the Potential Problems of Storage Consolidation

If you consolidate all your storage resources in your server room or data center it’s obvious that any storage problems that occur have the potential to affect all the servers that access the storage. To mitigate this problem it’s important to use enterprise-class storage systems that use RAID to protect data from individual disk failure and to include redundant components such as power supplies. The ability to replace or upgrade components and firmware on the fly, without the need for a reboot, is also helpful. It’s important to ensure that there are multiple routes between your storage resources and individual servers to provide redundancy in case individual physical network cables, switches or host bus adapters fail.

In the case of storage consolidated onto NAS devices that use the main corporate LAN, it is sensible to ensure that there are no choke points or bottlenecks that may become a problem when large amounts of stored data are moved over the LAN between the NAS devices and the servers that use the data. This is not an issue with storage consolidated onto a SAN, as by definition a SAN uses its own high-speed storage network.

Archiving Your Data

If you consolidate your business’ storage into your data center or server room using a SAN or NAS devices, you may be able to get even more benefits from your investment by implementing an archiving solution.Data archiving involves identifying and moving data that is no longer frequently accessed to lower cost storage, freeing up your main storage resources and reducing the need to purchase additional storage capacity. Most archiving solutions automate the process of identifying data that is ready for archiving, and include compression and deduplication capabilities so the archived data can be stored very efficiently in a minimum of archive storage space. Archiving software also carries out comprehensive data indexing so that archives can be searched for individual files or keywords very quickly.



This highlights a key difference between a backup and an archive: backups are designed so that large amounts of data can be restored quickly, while archives are designed for the identification and access of individual files.

There are three types of data that are typically archived. The first is data that is no longer current and frequently accessed, but still needs to be kept for possible future reference and therefore cannot be deleted. The second is data that has to be retained for a number of years to comply with the requirements of regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA, and in some organizations this can be a very large volume of data indeed. The final type includes other data such as email that needs to be archived so that it can be identified and produced promptly when required, for example as part of an e-discovery process.

An effective archiving solution can help you get more from your storage investments in a number of ways. These include:

• Reducing your storage costs by moving infrequently accessed data to lower cost archive storage

• Reducing your overall data storage requirements by taking advantage of compression and data deduplication technologies

• Speeding up your backups, as archived data is not included in your regular backups

• Providing end users with fast, transparent access to archived files — data should appear to users to be where it was originally stored

• Providing the option to archive data to unalterable media such as optical disks to comply with some regulatory requirements

• Enabling your company to respond to e-discovery requests quickly and at minimum cost

Conclusion

Businesses can make the most of their data storage investments by consolidating with networked storage. Consolidating storage lowers administrative costs, increases utilization and delivers a higher quality of service.

Storage consolidation also opens the door to better archiving of data, which moves less valuable data to less expensive forms of storage. Successfully archiving data further ensures that businesses are getting the most from their storage investments.



can be allocated to individual servers, which see their allocated space as local disks. The size of these disks can be increased to provide servers with additional storage space as and when it’s required without the need for a server reboot.

In the past, SANs based on Fibre Channel technology were hugely expensive and were therefore only affordable by very large enterprises. But over the last few years costs have come done very substantially, and using more affordable iSCSI technology SAN solutions such as the Dell EqualLogic series can offer the same benefits at a price that is affordable to small and medium-sized businesses as well.

Benefits of a SAN

A SAN can provide an affordable long-term solution for your

increasing storage requirements, but it provides much more than just raw storage capacity. The benefits that a SAN can offer your company include:

• Simpler storage administration: Assigning more SAN-based storage space to a server is a task that can be carried out in minutes using your SAN’s storage management software. There is no need to install physical disks in servers or other storage devices, or for any cabling or networking reconfiguration.

• More efficient use of storage resources: Storage space can be allocated to (or removed from) servers as required — instead of allocating entire disks to servers

Why a Storage Area NetworkMakes Sense for Your Business

By Paul Rubens

t’s an inescapable fact for most businesses that data storage requirements increase every year. As a short-term solution it may be possible to add internal disks to servers or

to use direct attached storage (DAS) to add capacity, but longer term there are a number of serious problems with this approach.

These include:

• Storage becomes increasingly difficult to manage and maintain

• Available storage space is used inefficiently, with utilization rates in servers often below 50 percent

• Backups are complex and time consuming

• Applications may run slowly because the local area network (LAN) is clogged with data moving to and from storage devices — especially when backups are being carried out

Fortunately there is a long-term solution that could make sense for you business: a storage area network (SAN).

Storage Area Networks

As you probably know, a SAN, at its most basic level, is made up of one or more storage arrays containing spinning or solid state drives. This storage pool is connected via storage switches to one or more servers over a dedicated high-speed storage network , separate from the local area network. Storage space on the SAN

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— ensuring that storage resource utilization rates are uniformly high. This contrasts favorably with internal storage disks or DAS devices that are often significantly underutilized — sometimes for no other reason than that the spare disk space has been forgotten.

• More predictable future storage requirements: Good SAN management software can produce accurate storage utilization reports, making it easier for you to predict and budget for future storage requirements. And by purchasing additional storage “just in time” rather than in bulk, you can take advantage of falling storage costs.

• Highly scalable storage: SANs are highly scalable, as disks can be added to a storage array — and additional storage arrays can be added — as your storage needs increase.

• Highly available server systems: Your servers can be configured to boot from the SAN, allowing you to cope with faulty servers with a minimum of interruption. This is done by replacing a faulty server with a similar one and then reconfiguring the SAN so that the replacement server boots from the same storage space, or LUN, previously used by the faulty server. This operation can be carried out in less than half an hour — far less time than it would take to configure, patch and commission a server from scratch.

• High availability support in virtualized server environments: In virtualized server environments a virtual machine stored in your SAN and running on a server that develops a fault can be transferred from the faulty server to a replacement one automatically and instantly without any interruption to the running of the virtual machine at all, using technology such as VMware’s Vmotion or Microsoft’s Live Migration.

• Better data protection: Using a large storage array containing many disks it is possible to protect your data using higher levels of RAID (such as RAID 50) than may be possible using internal server storage, NAS or DAS devices.

• Simplified backup: Consolidating all your storage resources in a storage array makes it very much easier and faster to carry out backups. You can also carry out “serverless backups” by copying data across the SAN or piping it to a tape storage device for offsite storage without consuming any server CPU resources and without any speed impact on the local area network while the backup is carried out. Many SANs also offer data “snapshotting” to produce images which can be created and reverted to in a matter of seconds.

• Disaster recovery: Your company’s SAN can extend to a remote location with a secondary storage array using Fibre Channel over IP or iSCSI running on an existing WAN link. You can then carry out data replication to the remote site to enable business continuity in the event of an unforeseen disaster.

• Support for heterogeneous operating system environments: SANs are OS agnostic. That means that SAN storage can be shared by servers running different operating systems including Windows, Linux and UNIX.

Buying and Implementing a SAN

When purchasing a SAN, the most important decision is choosing the right storage array with the most appropriate connectivity. For most small and medium-sized businesses iSCSI technology is probably more cost effective than the more expensive Fibre Channel alternative. The array will include a controller to carry out many tasks including data caching and handling RAID operations.

SANs use a logical unit number (LUN) to identify individual logical disks — the storage resources that a server using the SAN sees as its own local storage. That means that when you buy a SAN it is important to ensure that the storage array supports enough LUNs for your needs: an array that supports 16 LUNs can only be used by a maximum of 16 separate servers sharing the storage pool.



It is also prudent when you make your purchasing decision to plan for how you would cope with a disaster that made the data stored in your primary storage array(s) unavailable. If you plan to use a secondary array at a separate location for disaster recovery, make sure that your primary array supports remote replication. If you don’t plan to implement remote replication then an alternative is to copy stored data to tape and transport it offsite manually.

Another important choice is the SAN management software used to administer the SAN, allocate storage space, implement data protection, optimize performance and for many other functions. Without good management software a SAN is effectively useless, and not all SAN hardware is supplied with appropriate software. Dell’s EqualLogic range of SAN storage array devices are supplied with a comprehensive set of SAN management software tools for configuring, assigning and protecting storage quickly and efficiently, as well as Dell’s SAN Headquarters SAN monitoring software.

You will also need a dedicated storage network to move your data between your storage array and your servers and between storage arrays. For an iSCSI SAN this will

usually take the form of a high-bandwidth IP network segment with fast Ethernet switches. By ensuring that a high degree of redundancy is built in to your storage network topology you can help guarantee that your data will be available even in the event of a switch or other networking hardware failure.

Conclusion

A storage area network gives growing businesses a long-term solution to the problem of data growth. SANs provide a scalable storage infrastructure that supports heterogeneous environments and helps IT administrators with storage tasks like backup, disaster recovery and data protection.

Businesses that are struggling to keep up with the demands of data storage and are ready to move beyond direct attached storage should consider a storage area network to help them efficiently manage and protect their data.



Does Unified StorageMake Sense for Your Business?

By Drew Robb

nified storage is many things to different people. It can mean combining Fibre Channel (FC) and Ethernet over one cable, the convergence of a local area network

(LAN) and a storage area network (SAN), or in the case we’re discussing here, the consolidation of file and block storage on one device. The goal of this type of unified storage is to improve utilization, boost productivity and make it far easier to manage the infrastructure.

“Unified file and block storage access in the same product or box means flexibility while reducing complexity and cost,” said Greg Schulz, an analyst with StorageIO Group. “By being flexible, you have the ability and agility to reconfigure the storage for different use scenarios over the lifecycle of the product.”

Not so long ago, however, you either went with file or block storage. File-level storage concerned network attached storage (NAS) systems where the data was stored and retrieved by a file system. Block-level storage, on the other hand, dealt with writing data directly to disk at a physical level. It is typically associated with the SAN. A new breed of unified storage systems combines file and block storage onto one device — along with plenty of additional functionality.

File and block evolved, of course, as they held advantages for specific functions and environments. Block storage is epitomized by the SAN. Vast amounts of data could be

stored and backed up rapidly. But the rise of the file server created another need. IT needed to manage individual files more efficiently, which gave rise to centralized NAS filers optimized for file-based storage.

But the continuing explosion in storage demands has called for yet another concept — both file and block on one unified device. While larger organizations can afford to have one team dealing with block and another one trained in file-based storage, growing businesses are seeking to reduce expenditures by assigning fewer IT staff to cover a wide range of functions. For those organizations, having both types of storage on one box makes economic sense.

“Smaller organizations gain greater flexibility while being able to consolidate and meet the needs of applications that require block while leveraging file access,” said Schulz.

To operate effectively, unified storage has to encompass several protocols. File storage utilizes Common Internet File System (CIFS) or the Network File System (NFS), while block storage uses Internet SCSI (iSCSI) or FC. Each of these protocols can be accommodated on one box.

Purely on the hardware side, placing everything on one machine means fewer cables, a significant drop in auxiliary equipment and a much smaller footprint. Those managing hardware reap the reward of accessing simplified systems

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that disguise much of the esoteric plumbing that has acted as a barrier to broad adoption of technologies such as FC in the IT shops of growing businesses. As a result, a wealth of new features becomes more widely available in a unified storage platform. This includes such features as deduplication, solid state drives (SSDs — also known as Flash), storage tiering and the facilitation of large-scale server virtualization.

Data deduplication, for example, eliminates duplicate files, thereby reducing storage needs by an average of 20 times. Tiered storage, too, can be more easily implemented at relatively low cost by harnessing a unified storage platform. This enables organizations to set up different layers of storage with varying levels of performance: high-performance, FC-based disk for mission critical data and other tiers for less used data. As unified storage systems can scale to hundreds of drives, businesses can assign as many as they need for high performance. The remainder can be divided between fast-spinning SAS drives and slower SATA drives.

Enabling Virtualization

One of the big drivers for unified storage is virtualization. One company in the financial services sector, for example, experienced a doubling of storage needs within an 18-month period. Having data spread across dozens of file servers and NAS boxes was proving inefficient.

The company embarked upon a server virtualization strategy but realized it needed to flank this with a smart way to consolidate storage. Unified storage allowed the IT department to provide the highest levels of performance to the most critical applications while consolidating all storage on a single platform. In addition, the company has plenty of room to scale upwards as needed in the future.

Unified storage also improved the disaster recovery (DR) capabilities of the organization. Vital banking applications, such as check imaging, remote deposits, customer inquiries and online banking were previously spread across multiple servers. Restoring these files in the event of a disaster was a slow and painful process. By harnessing one unified storage array, all data could be restored within

a couple of hours in the event of a disaster as compared to five days in previous DR testing.

Another organization — a college with an almost completely virtualized VMware infrastructure — opted for unified storage as a way of speeding up its virtual machines (VMs). Its aging storage array and NAS boxes were unable to support its storage needs. Therefore, the institution simultaneously consolidated 75 physical servers down to 10 and implemented unified storage. By having VMware on shared storage, the IT staff no longer needs to come in during nights or weekends to resolve server failures. If a VM fails, a new one is on standby and automatically fails over.

Another benefit was being able to serve up data rapidly to college instructors who might require remote access to high-end programming, computer aided design (CAD), multimedia and other applications so they could grade student work or prepare lesson plans at home. Unified storage provided these capabilities while lowering the data center footprint, reducing power and cooling demands and lowering total cost of ownership. At the same time, the amount of storage capacity on hand was greatly increased.

In this case, though, the tiered storage consisted of several 70 GB SSDs, as well as dozens of 450 GB and 600



GB FC drives. Flash was used due to its superfast read I/O potential to support the VMs and VMware-based virtual desktops. FC disk hosted student files, media serving, distance learning data, the student records database and email.

FC disks are faster than the drives found in servers, but their best response time in light traffic is 6 ms. As the workload increases, performance falls off sharply. Flash, however, provides access rates of 1 ms or less no matter how much traffic there is. There are even some kinds of SSDs that provide access rates of around 0.01 ms — 250 times better than regular hard drives. This is achieved

without moving parts so reliability becomes much less of a concern — no more having to deal with hard drive failures. Further, SSDs use far less power than regular disks.

The college IT department reported a major boost in performance, as well as more simplicity, efficiency and flexibility. As a result of built-in file compression, data deduplication, multiple RAID options and support of both 8-gigabyte FC and 10-gigabyte Ethernet, unified storage platforms are designed to accommodate the latest technological developments.

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