Storage tips

The great storage chargeback debate

“You need HOW MUCH for storage?!” That question has been heard by many of us currently submitting budgets for the next calendar year, quickly followed by “Are you SURE you need that much disk? Didn’t we just get disk last year? Where did they all go!? I want your house audited. Now!”

Okay, maybe not the audit part, but for most of us, getting the type of disk we need in the quantity we need it is an uphill battle. Add SSD, deduplication, and longer-term retention to the mix, and things are getting a bit hairy with my budgetary requests. I’m at such a point now with a few of my smaller clients, and when they get that “you’re crazy” look, I bring up the chargeback model.

I think I just heard a collective sigh from the interwebs.

I understand both sides of the chargeback dilemma: the accounting side, that has to somehow keep track of all this without keeping track of all this; and the IT side, that is constantly being painted as the cost center only because no one is taking ownership of their parts of the “plumbing.” People (read departments) will request outrageous resources when they don’t have to directly foot the bill. That part I get, but are they so vehemently against accounting for their infrastructure usage?

In my opinion, chargeback would actually lead to better data management habits — at least in the long term — because if you have to pay for everything out of your own budget, then you’ll be more careful about separating what you need from what you want. How many of our managers and accounting folks have processes in place to account for each department’s use of the “utilities” that make up IT and understand that IT isn’t the root of all expenses?

I had an energetic debate with a co-worker about this very issue. I took the stance that chargeback is the way to go. He offered a more community-oriented accounting method. We went back and forth, point and counterpoint, until concluding that it just depends on what your business environment will support and the level of organization that business has in place.

For instance, if you have a well-organized, project-oriented IT environment, and have a project portfolio ready for sizing, you can plan a community budget very well and effectively fund addition to your infrastructure through a single IT budget. The reality from <i>my</I> experience (read, SMB clients) is that most companies are not so well-organized, don’t have a project portfolio for the next 12 months, and will not be able to identify budgetary requirements for infrastructure improvements.

In these cases, chargeback (or, at the very least, departmental accounting) is key to being able to answer my opening question with confidence.

Traditional SAN storage may be easy to bill for, but what of virtualized storage? Take it a step further, how about Softricity/Microsoft’s Softgrid? (Softricity is the company Microsoft acquired not too long ago that allows for application-level virtualization as opposed to host virtualization.) How do you quantify and itemize a streamed, virtualized application?

Then there’s the question floating just below the surface of the chargeback debate: How do I, as a department, know you are giving me what I’m being “billed” for? That question opens a giant can of worms in my mind (and there are already creepy crawlies up there, no need to add worms to the mix).

The crux of what I’m getting at is: Are we as technologists — and storage pros specifically — asking for too much or too little when it comes to chargeback? Are there still companies out there that don’t see the light when it comes to chargeback and departmental accounting. Should we as storage pros be leading the way for other areas of IT to follow our example?

Okay, so where’s the SMB data migration already?

Don’t know if I can compete with militant dolphins and black holes that eat France, but I’m going to give it a shot.

First, I need to define constraints before we dig into the meat: What I consider a small to medium-sized business (SMB) is a company that would have a problem justifying a $50,000 purchase for a product that would perform a migration then have no use for it for 3 to 5 years until they migrate again, or have one to two IT people doing the work, or think a SAN is just a typo for SAN-D that you’d find at a beach. I know IBM, Sun, Symantec et al. have migration services but I’m looking at the smaller business space where people need to store more on tighter budgets that were small to begin with.

We’ve recently upgraded our SAN infrastructure and while our data migration chores aren’t all that intense, I’d still prefer that a computer did it. I’ve built some tools to handle my cleanup work (I’ll share them as soon as some bugs are worked out) but only because I couldn’t easily buy something to do the same or better. Now I’ll admit that sometimes I can be blind or ignorant (or both), but I’ve noticed a HUGE gap in the availability of migration tools for the lower end of the SMB spectrum. With me being a part of The Matrix like I am, or akin to Mr. Universe from Serenity, one would think I’d have caught a whiff of something significant.

Continued »

Buying typical storage for video surveillance? Rethink that!

Up until now you (corporate IT) have not had to worry about video surveillance. That job was up to the security guys, those guys that wore uniforms and pretty much kept to themselves. But be prepared. If you are not already deeply involved in video surveillance equipment RFP creation, acquisition, installation and management, you will be very soon.

The world of video surveillance is changing so rapidly that the user and the traditional supplier are both in a state of frenzy. It is within this transformation that the role of IT is becoming increasingly critical. The reasons for the increase in video surveillance are pretty easy to understand. Post 9/11, enterprises as well as governments are all adding or increasing video surveillance to the security equation. Of course, casinos and banks have always been the leading users of video surveillance, but now everyone is in the game. On a typical day, a person living in a city may be videotaped five or more places, as he drives to work (and passes through specific traffic lights), parks his car in the company parking lot, enters the building, makes a trip to the bank at lunch, grabs a couple of items at the local K-mart and heads home. There are all kinds of privacy issues that can be debated, but I am staying away from that. At least for now. Right now, I am more interested in the technology and IT’s increasing role in video surveillance.

Traditional video surveillance equipment was not designed to deal with this onslaught and is gasping for air. It is being replaced almost completely with IP-based equipment.  That’s where you come in. Until now, most video surveillance equipment was based on CCTV (closed circuit TV), which basically meant the cameras, which recorded analog video, were hooked up via coaxial cable to the central point, where the video was taped on VCRs. Later, DVRs converted the analog signal to digital at the central location before storing it. But, these technologies cannot deal with the onslaught of data from more and more cameras and the fact that cameras are increasingly adding higher resolutions.

The latest crop of cameras records video in a digital format, and compresses it using MJPEG or MPEG before transmitting it over standard IP network to a central location that stores the data on scalable disk arrays. Once in the realm of IP, all the goodies we are used to in IT become available to an industry that still thinks of guards manning physical structures. Centralized management become feasible, data can be accessed asymmetrically, from multiple locations, replicated when appropriate. Another level of sophistication is being added at the end points. Now cameras can be activated when they detect motion or switch into a higher resolution if certain criteria are met. Video analytics allow software to recognize facial characteristics. Searches can be conducted for specific objects or people. You get the idea. It is like James Bond gadgetry becoming available to regular folks. But, that is reflective of the world we live in.

I think you (IT) need to be prepared to play a major role in this transformation that is occurring. You are the resident experts in storage and, at this point, pretty well up on IP technologies as well. Video surveillance simply becomes another application you have to support. So, if you are not already deeply involved in the selection and day to day management of the video surveillance equipment, it is only a matter of time. Security people who used to make decisions on such purchases without any consultation, will now insist on your involvement. You should gladly offer to help.

Another important thing to realize is that the type of storage you end up selecting for these applications will very likely be different than storage for other applications. For video surveillance the attributes that matter for storage include cost effectiveness (dirt cheap), highly scalable across both capacity and performance (cannot afford to create islands of storage), low entry price point, cost effective availability (mirroring may be too expensive), protection from disk drive or nodal failure and, most importantly, it needs to IP-based. Everything else in this environment is IP based, so making storage IP-based makes it easier to understand and manage. FC storage would bring in a level of complexity that is unnecessary here. Also, legacy architectures that have grafted an IP (iSCSI) interface would not cut it here, because they would not meet the other requirements above. Storage players that I believe merit consideration include Pivot3, Intransa, LeftHand Networks and to a lesser degree, EqualLogic (their price point may be too high for this application). There are other inexpensive storage offerings, such as from Nexsan or Xyratex but if an architecture does not allow clustering and presentation of a single system image, as it scales, it misses a criterion that I consider absolutely necessary for this application. However, you may want them in the initial mix as you start the evaluation process. I am sure you have enough on your plate without adding yet another storage-hungry application. But the way the winds are blowing, you either pro-actively plan on this or you will get pulled in pushing and screaming.

How to archive home directories that don’t have AD accounts

My name is Tory Skyers. Through circumstances not entirely beyond my control (!!) I have been deeply involved throughout my career in various types of centralized and distributed storage. Now, at the end of a long chain of events beginning in Long Beach, CA with Curtis Preston and some blinky magnets (I’ll let you use your imagination), I’ve been offered an opportunity to share some of my experiences and insight with you. 

I’ve been agonizing for a week on what to say for my first Blog. I think it has to be earth-shatteringly profound, so of all the catchphrases and tag lines I came up with, this seemed to sum it all up best:

Hello and thanks for reading my Blog.

What do you think? Just imagine a guy smiling ear to ear and waving at you from behind his keyboard :).

An admission: I’m absolutely fascinated by storage. The technology that goes into connecting computers and people to storage today was the stuff of science fiction 20 years ago. Pause for a second and take a look at where we are in storage: 1 TB hard drives, 55GB optical discs, 10Gb Ethernet, 4Gbps Fibre Channel, 3 millisecond seek times, 300MBps throughput… all these numbers add up to wow, at least to me. When I think about all the technology out there, I feel like that kid at the toy store window with my eyes the size of saucers, staring at the GI Joe with the Kung-Fu grip, and the Spiderman Hotwheels set.

Here in my little corner of cyberspace I’ll be blogging about some of those stare-inducing storage technologies from my perspective, which is that of a network administrator (and according to friends is sometimes “warped and twisted” by my own particular brand of logic. I’ll also be touching on the ennui (SAT word I’ve been dying to use in a sentence) that I see creeping into the market. Check back from time to time and let me know if you agree with me. (And dig out that old SAT prep book while you’re at it–send me a word or two I’ll see if I can roll it in.)

One last thing: I gave a presentation on mobile storage at the recent Storage Decisions show in New York, and at the end of the presentation I mentioned a few scripts I wanted to share with the attendees. Below is a copy-and-paste of a simple script using ADfind from Joeware.net to archive users’ home directories that no longer have Active Directory accounts. This script can certainly be more elegant so feel free to expand, expound and extend.  There are a few things on the “to-do” list for it: first, make it self-contained and not need an input file (i.e., do the AD query using ADODB or something similar). Second, provide logic to validate permutations of a username or directory. Third, be a pretty HTA (HTML Application). I’m working on migrating this script to Powershell.

The code is below the jump. Copy it out using notepad (not wordpad) or some script editor and save it as a .vbs. Run it from the command line with an input text file with one username per line. You’ll need to insert specifics for your environment like domain names, etc. 

Again, thanks for the read! Continued »

 

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