A couple months ago we had a client that needed to migrate production data from one data center to another across geographies. There were a couple of complications, so our team put their heads together on a solution.

A Client’s Need
We determined it would be faster (and cheaper) to replicate the data from Data Center A’s production environment to some sort of storage repository. Then we would truck/plane that repository to Data Center B – which had a much faster transfer rate than sending the data over the network (given the amount of data we were dealing with). Once at Data Center B, we could copy the data from our storage repository to its new home. But the production data at Data Center A would have changed over the time the replicated copy was on its trip. So once were up at Data Center B, we would need to sync the delta in data to capture all these changes. This could happen over a network line, as the delta in data would be much smaller than the entire production environment.

It sounded like a good plan – and we had everything we needed to do it but a unified appliance that could handle iSCSI, FC, and NAS protocols as well as WAN replication.

Enter RELDATA
We sat down with the folks at RELDATA, troubleshot the problem, threw a couple tough questions their way, and…were very impressed. What stood out to me was the following:

• RELDATA is really a unified storage appliance/gateway built from the ground up – they offer iSCSI, FC SAN, and NAS in a virtualized appliance – in 1GbE and 10GbE flavors. They weren’t a NAS company moving into the SAN market; or a SAN company moving into the NAS market – they set out to build a virtual/unified appliance.
• They offer local & WAN data replication & snapshot functionality. Additionally, the appliance looks very simple to install/manage. In fact, their management council was pretty simple and slick with some cool wizard functionality.
• One for the kickers for me was cost/value. It is priced well (website says MSRP is $40k for a 12TB iSCSI SAN, $85k for a 48TB system with SAS under the hood.) But the real value is in software licensing. It is very simple and has NO capacity licensing, which is refreshing in a world where every new feature seems to come with a complex licensing price tag. In fact, they have all inclusive software pricing – NAS, IP SAN, Global WAN Replication, and Virtualization come included. Pretty cool.

RELDATA is a young company, and its roots started in Europe (although they are now HQ’d in NJ). But they are old enough to have several successful implementations under their belt, and newer versions of their systems are coming out. I also found the people and support in the company to be very good and responsive.

RELDATA’s 9240i System

The 9240i is their latest system, some quick specs and highlights:

• Includes 12TB SAS Storage in 2U that can scale from there. Storage can be added via JBOD expansion shelf. Systems can also be clustered.
• They claim 70,000 IOPS and 820MBps performance.
• You can choose the licensed functionality you need right away (iSCSI SAN, NAS, etc.) and turn on optional licenses when needed.
• Block-level replication + snapshot included with software.
• Offers heterogeneous virtualization to play with existing assets.
• Mix 1GbE and 10GbE connectivity with either six 1GbE ports (expandable up to 16) or up to eight 10GbE ports.

A Solid Appliance
So, if you are looking for a practical, solid unified appliance for iSCSI SAN, NAS, replication, migration, consolidation, etc. take a look at RELDATA. It may not have all the bells and whistles as larger vendors, but it looks to be a well-built and designed gateway/appliance that can get the job done – simply and affordably.

Economic Downturn Hits Storage Spending
Ok – so I think we all know that our IT budgets will be flat or cut next year. We also know that data will continue to grow (and grow fast) regardless of what we do with our budgets. So what to do? Optimize, optimize, optimize. If you haven’t run a formal efficiency and optimization program in your storage infrastructure environment, then you are overlooking a huge chuck of wasted capacity and space. The storage utilization and allocation rates are far worse than most vendors are telling us (I know b/c I came from one!) It’s not in their best interested to sell less storage, but it is in yours to buy less…

The state of data backup in 2009, Part 3
Good reading in Beth’s Data Backup series – this issue covers disaster recovery and the emergence of Cloud backup. Amazon was first to market with S3, EMC came out with Mozy, and Beth writes about Symantec’s offering…

Symantec adds change management to SRM
Symamtec mentions making agentless options available too. When I work with IT admins this is top of their list – they don’t like agents crawling all over their environment. I understand – but agents will still be around, maybe minimized. ESG says that SRM tools aren’t viewed as a must-have – this is unfortunate. There is HUGE value in them – but you need to know (or have a partner that knows) how to deploy them, interpret them, and ACT upon the data. If you don’t take this step, you just bought shelf-ware. You do this, and you can free between 30% – 70% of your capacity – I’ve seen this done with multiple infrastructures and count THAT as a must have.

Brocade Buys Foundry Networks for $3B
Brocade drops $3B to pick up Foundry – a good move on the surface. This will make them more competitive with Cisco – offering LAN and WAN equip. 10GbE still looks to be a great bet, and networking companies are investing in it. See Stephen Foskett’s blog.

HDS embraces SSDs
HDS is a little late to the party (EMC led the charge, followed by Sun and others). But USP is a great disk system, and SSD will make it better. STEC is making out as the SSD partner to have. Again – if you have any apps that live or die by latency times, you need to be researching SSD options.

“Despereaux” uses clustered storage
For you HPC junkies, the movie “Despereaux” had to chunk through 1,700 shots and 90 million images. They did it the way most do, Linux clusters running an HPC filesystem – this one Lustre. They stored 200TB of generated data on Infortrend’s EonStor RAID system (comment if you know anything about EonStor – I don’t). I’ll probably take my boy to the movie and bore him on the details on how it was made…

The title itself has generated some industry buzz for obvious reasons, and several blog posts from SAN providers. Check out Chuck Hollis’ (EMC), Hu Yoshida’s (HDS), Tony Asaro’s, and Chris Evans’.

My partner-in-crime Randy Chalfant has also commented on the report and blogs – but I’ll give you fair warning that my friend’s storage knowledge is only surpassed by his passion – and he holds no punches!

The premise:

In a nutshell, Andrew discusses the benefits and challenges of SANs. He concludes that SANs have not lived up to their expectations, and a new approach should be evaluated. This new alternative is “Application-Centric Storage” in which he defines as storage infrastructure managed by applications like mail, database, or hypervisor apps. If data management functionality (snapshots, replication, provisioning, de-dup, etc.) lives in the application layer – then you only need commodity disk (JBOD or RAID) on the backend. (This is not unlike Sun’s “Open Storage” message of which I used to blog often on when I was with them.)

What’s wrong with SAN?

The report lists four current-day SAN challenges: On the first issue with SANs (low utilization rates) I give Andrew kudos for because he hits the nail on the head. The second issue he lists (limited workload-sharing) is really not a SAN issue at all. Same with his third issue (vendor heterogeneity) – not a SAN issue, in fact it’s an issue with ANY storage solution. His last point (block storage has limited information context) is also valid.

Poor Utilization: On low SAN utilization rates, a distinction and definition needs to be made clear:

1. Allocation = How efficiently you use what you buy – allocated storage space vs. how much storage you bought. BUT if you over-allocate your storage, or do not allocate space efficiently, this rate can look good. This can be misleading if not measured the right way – you can overlook a significant amount of wasted space.

2. Utilization = How frequently data is re-referenced (i.e. utilized). We have found that up to 40% of a primary disk array’s capacity holds data that is inert – data that has not been referenced in 6 months or more. Does anyone want to spend tier 1, disk/SAN prices on data that is not referenced for over 6 months?

Some storage vendors use the terms incorrectly or interchangeably – so if a storage manufacturer says their arrays offer great utilization rates, make sure they are not just talking about allocation. Mr. Reichman gets this right – and his numbers show utilization rates around 20% to 40%. This is absolutely what we see in the industry.

But I disagree on what he says the root cause is – SANs!?!? You can find utilization challenges on DAS and NAS. Randy rants on the root causes here – but lack of good data management practices, good storage technology implementation, and other process issues are the root cause – not SANs.

Limited workload-sharing: I commented on a good point Chuck Hollis makes – the Forrester report mixes technology issues with people issues. The report says SANs are challenged because individual departments silo their storage infrastructure and applications. Storage silos have to do with data management practices (or lack thereof) and little to nothing to do with SAN technology.

The New Solution?

Another kudos for Forrester – they proposed a solution. A pet peeve of mine is when someone critiques something without offering an alternative approach.

The new approach according to Forrester is Application-Centric Storage: Basically, embed data management software in an application and directly attach cheap RAID or JBOD to it. And if you wanted to get creative you could cluster these systems together at the file system level.

The Benefit: One of the largest benefits to this approach is that applications give data context and support business objectives directly – so they are in a better position to manage and tier data (i.e. ILM). I couldn’t agree more.

The Challenge: I don’t think Application-Centric Storage will disrupt the current SAN model anytime soon and here is why:

Storage as a Feature: First of all, Forrester gives a list of storage software that can make its way into applications like Oracle, Exchange, etc. (snapshots, replication, reporting, thin provisioning, deduplication, etc.). While some applications and file systems are starting to offer this functionality, I have a hard time believing they will offer all of these features at a level that storage manufactures do currently. I came from StorageTek’s RD&E department and have seen my fair share of development roadmaps. The first items to work on are the software’s core value and offering. The first items to go are the ones that are “nice to haves” but don’t significantly enhance the core offering. Storage management technology will always be secondary to most app vendors and receive less resource than other application features. This will also hamper storage innovation…

An application vendor didn’t come up with data deduplication, a storage start-up did!

App admins take on storage: A second point made is that application admins can manage storage better than storage admins because they know what the data is being used for. Same problem as above – storage is not their core competency nor do they want it to be (otherwise they’d be storage admins!). One needs to know storage process and technology – even if your storage is directly attached. There is a way to prove my point as well – take all the tasks of an overworked storage admin and give them to an overworked application admin and see what happens…

The solution is not to throw out SANs and their storage administrators with them.

The answer is for application managers and storage managers to work better together. And I put the responsibility on the storage people to do this – storage should support application requirements which support business requirements – so storage departments should be surveying application departments monthly on what their requirements are.

Application-Centric Storage Availability:

So what’s available today? Some approaches mentioned include:

1. Microsoft Exchange: They have a whitepaper on an Exchange + DAS solution.

2. Oracle Exadata: They use an application-based data volume manager. This is a great feature, but only good for your BI and data warehouse needs. What’s more, they use a proprietary Infiniband network which doesn’t show much more cost benefit over FC SAN.

3. VMware: I am getting excited about the new storage features that are popping up here. Another point here was made by a brilliant colleague of mine at Sun:

Several customers have deployed SANs specifically to support growing VMware environments!

The Bottom Line:

Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore? YES.

If you are running Exchange or Oracle ExaData and want storage solely dedicated to these apps, then check out Application-Centric Storage. For everything else, look at networked storage as a viable option.

With that said, I can almost guarantee that the allocation and utilization rates for your storage systems (including SAN and everything else) are not where they need to be. The solution is NOT to throw out your SAN and deploy something else. The answer is best stated by Randy’s blog on this subject:

“The best answer for you is to better manage what you already have against a criterion that actually means something to the business. In other words – not technology for technology’s sake, but infrastructure for business’s sake.”