Storage Centric IT production

Storage technology is business technology

Virtualization is turning infrastructure and application environments into files on your SAN thus putting your storage boxes at the center of your entire IT production. Servers and switches and other equipment become peripherals to the SAN. What you can do with your SAN storage is what you can do for your customers and for your business. Advanced SAN technologies enable systems administrators to create virtual copies of the entire production systems in mere seconds thus providing an optimal environment for testing and development. The same technology allows for a company to easily create disaster recovery and replication of critical data to off-site locations and thereby enabling low cost means of business continuity. This reduces risks and enables companies to offer enterprise class services to their customers.

The way storage infrastructure integrates with applications takes the capabilities for disk storage even further. With applications like databases and email servers integrated with the storage systems it has never been easier to manage and cope with large amount of data. Traditional backup seems to become more and more obsolete when advanced SAN copy services gets the job done in spilt seconds and when restores from snapshots is done with a few click of the mouse.

Controlling IT capex/opex and aligning the IT budget to what the business requires becomes easier when new technology is available at low cost. This is the case with the more advanced features for SAN and storage management. Companies no longer need to compromise on features and functionality to meet a restricted budget as storage products which earlier only were available for the high-end IT budgets becomes a part of the standard SMB offerings.

The recent consolidations of various storage vendors into the likes of Dell, HP and EMC creates a marketplace where relatively exotic solutions becomes almost commodity and the prices and availability of both skills and product overnight improves.
These are exciting times to be working in the storage business. Data is everything!

What virtualization technology to focus on?

Virtualization is the art of creating an abstraction layer between the physical constraints of infrastructure while maintaining an equal or better end-user experience. The abstraction layer provides greater flexibility for companies in order to adapt to changing market situations, new IT service requirements, regulatory compliance, budget cuts and other challenges.

So therefore the virtualization technology you should focus on are the ones that have the greatest beneficial impact on your business.

That being said I would say focus on storage virtualization. Data is everything. Not only documents, databases and applications but with virtualized server environments data is also infrastructure. What you can do with your data is what you can do with your infrastructure and ultimately what you can do with your business. Cloud storage and grid storage technology is rapidly developing and will change the way we look at data capacity and data management.

Data in the clouds and storage grids

Not too long ago I wrote a small piece for a forum describing view on grid storage. I liked so now I am posting it here as well. Enjoy!

Capacity and performance
Grids can scale to incredibly large capacities as each storage node normally will add more resources to both capacity and computational power. Other framed storage systems relies on a couple of controllers to do all RAID and addressing computation for all disks in all arrays. This limits both capacity and performance.

Data migration
With very large amounts of data you don’t really want to migrate data to a new storage system every time your kit runs out of service and warranty. With the grids you leave the data and instead deploy new nodes or retire old nodes individually as time and wear requires. No more data migrations…

Backup
Vast amounts of data are hard to backup. Policies on data availability in a grid eliminate the need for back-up. For example with point-in-time data replication and a minimum of four copies of each piece of information in the grid you don’t really need to back up your data.

Distribution of information
Grids are by nature made to be scattered all over the place. Therefore global data availability can be achieved relatively cheap and easy and even over WAN lines by putting storage nodes/grid nodes where you need the data.

Discovery
Finding data in a grid is nothing new. Internet search engines are doing that all the time. Storage CAS/FCS will surely help finding your data in the grid (if you know what you are looking for).

For compatibility I know one grid (Caringo) that uses HTTP for communicating with the users. That to me seems to be a protocol that everybody speaks and will speak for some time in the future too.

I think storage grids are great in this age of clouds and globalization but for single applications in our data centres traditional F.C. SAN and even iSCSI deployments are still number one. But for large amounts of files and other fixed data types the grid is really the way to go.

My new mac; converged me?

I finally got myself a new MacBook and it is absolutely fantastic! My trusty old 12″ PowerBook is long overdue for retirement. Even though it is only six years for the past year and a half it have had a DVD stuck in the drive and to be honest the PowerPC just doesn’t deliver the multimedia performance that my web ways require these days. It will be missed…

Luckily Apple understands what I want in my IT equipment. Not only on the hardware side (it is gorgeous!) but also on the software that is installed on the system. It feels so right and it is the kind of stuff that really makes me want to be creative and do stuff. When will I find the time. My first project has to be to import all my photos and music. Then I need to populate my newly acquired web site on www.velasquez.dk It will be great I am sure. Everything just looks better on the Mac.

So now I really feel I have a converged machine. It has got my favourite software for all the home and recreation stuff that I do like photos, web publishing and video editin. It all comes with iLife and for the work stuff I got a very good emulator in Terminal and the MacBook comes with X11 already installed. It is truly a converged system that allows me to live my digital work and home life with ease.

I trying to write some software for my iPhone. Apple provides and entire SDK for doing just that. Following a tutorial I am sure I will have my first “Hello World!” app up and running in now time. I will keep you posted. Hello World!

Converged hardware – virtual hardware

It never fails to make me smile when new “innovative” technology is introduced on the PC server scene. Remember when Citrix desktop revolutionized a whole industry by delivering applications and desktops on remote workstations? UNIX was doing that for a decade before Citrix using X11 and still to this date X is more flexible and easier to use… VMware was cool (and still is!) but mostly because it enables LPAR like functionality on the PC platform. Still it wasn’t really new and still not as integrated as ye old LPAR… or is it?

New VMware software (is it called 3i?) runs from a USB stick or even integrated on the system itself and delivers LPAR functionality for PC servers. Very cool. So converged hardware to me is a PC platform with a build-in hypervisor. I love it!

Converged hardware also include the blade systems with build-in storage. HP has some of those systems out and they seem ideal for closed VMware environments. Perhaps a storage vendor (Hello EMC) will bring a storage box with build-in VMware?

UNIX tribes

Having worked in many different environments I have come into contact with many different administrators. Not being one to stereotype people… well, what can I say. Here are my BOFH stereotypes.

Firstly those who loves UNIX. Those are the xBSD, AIX and HP-UX ‘triebes’. Very efficient folks who gets the work done with ingenious shell scripts that can save the world from a crontab. Have no problems running Windows as long as it saves them some time.

Then there are hard-core Sun tribes. They don’t like anything else than Solaris on SPARC. Very elegant solutions that works perfectly every time. Has nice GUIs and expensive software. Here are some real UNIX snobs.

Then you have the ‘lost boys’ who runs Linux and never wants to grow up. They don’t like UNIX as much as they hate Windows. They will bend over backwards to make Linux run some exotic software and spend hours doing so when it all could have been up and running in 10 minutes on a Windows platform. Linux has a cute logo.

Last you have the Windows admins. Where many of the above are home schooled the Windows crowd have nicely framed certificates and expensive titles that shows they know how things runs in a perfect world where every installation is done by clicking ‘next, next, next, finished’. The Microsoft portfolio includes stuff like a network OS, SQL databases, flight simulators and game consoles.

So there you have it…

What’s up?

The question of if we are up or not can sometimes be a tricky one to answer. Just because your monitoring software says your httpd is running and the database is up does not necessarily mean that all is well in Userland. In fact sluggish response times and or external connectivity problems may cause your services to be deemed down by the users.

To answer the question better and so everybody agrees to whether your services are up or not you will need to develop telemetric parameters that are generally accepted in your company.

It’s a storage storage world

No IT infrastructure is complete without a SAN for consolidated storage services. The importance of storage services are on the rise as more and more infrastructure is virtualized. Software like Xen and VMware transforms our servers and switches from boxes in a rack to files on disks and server deployment or retirement is done by copying or deleting files and without even involving a screwdriver.

Service delivery

When delivering IT services to your customers be they internal or external, it can be very difficult to determine the quality of the products you are providing. Most non-IT companies have little or no knowledge of what is going on in the IT operations department being their patch cables. This even though they are deeply dependent on the services provided.

For whom the bells tolls

When a service crashes and users are effected two things happens: IT staff starts figuring out how to get back to normal operation and users starts calling the IT department to hear what is going on. Having to answer phone calls steals time from getting the service back online and ignoring phone calls keeps users in the dark which is very frustrating.

So what to do?