Systems Alliance Blog

It’s summer. And with summer comes hot weather, trips to the beach and high electricity bills. Unfortunately, summer also brings hurricanes, heat waves, drought, forest fires, brownouts and other unforeseen challenges that can be threatening to companies all over the world. So, does your organization have a disaster recovery plan in place?

Six ways you can prepare for an unexpected event.

1. Understand the requirements of your operations.  Think about your business and the functions that are critical in terms of their impact on revenue generation, customer satisfaction, and other operational issues. Have a clear view of which functions or sub-functions you must be able to restore in the event of a major catastrophe.
   
2. ...Click here to read more.

File sharing for critical data, a block data target for archive storage, multi-site replication, virtual desktop storage, comprehensive performance analytics, simple administration, straight forward licensing…these were our customer’s requirements. They wanted to know how we could solve their problem. Our answer was unified storage using the Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance.

Storage has traditionally been in “islands”, pools of data isolated to a specific application or function. The storage area network (SAN) was supposed to all fix that, but most shops end up with different arrays that support different interconnects or protocols. Ultimately the expensive array that was purchased to make a storage administrator’s life easier becomes multiple arrays, some serving iSCSI, fibre channel, CIFS, NFS or some other purpose. The storage became heterogeneous and cost and complexity went up. Storage administrators had to contend with different management interfaces and additional training was required.

Getting back to our customer requirement: with the Oracle Sun ZFS Appliance, we could meet these needs in a very affordable manner. Here is a quick glance at some of the features that made this solution possible:

File sharing: NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTP; all of these protocols have been supported by the Appliance since day one, and all of they are included in the base price of the appliance.

Block data for archive storage: Oracle added fibre channel target support in a later firmware upgrade, which all customers received as a free upgrade, allowing the array to function as a block storage fibre channel device. This functionality allowed us to use the array as disk cache for an archive solution.

Multi-site replication: The Appliance features the ability to replicate data between multiple appliances at no additional licensing cost. Our customer will be doing multi-site replication for disaster recovery of critical data.

Virtual desktop storage: Most virtual desktop solutions can utilize iSCSI, NFS or fibre channel for backed server storage. The Appliance can do all three and provide help with boot storms with the use of de-duplication and SSDs.

Analytics: Knowledge is power. The Oracle ZFS Appliance gives you the knowledge to determine how your storage is performing, down to the file level, and that includes looking at individual VMware vmfs file performance for a specific virtual guest server.

Simple administration: A web interface with radio buttons to turn service on and off, Active Directory and LDAP integration are just a few of the integration and administration features that make putting a ZFS Appliance into an environment straightforward. Cop-on-write snapshots save space and make for quick backup images.

Simple licensing: Buy the Appliance once and you get all of the functionality available, now and in the future. When de-duplication came out, you could upgrade your firmware and the new functionality was included.

The Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance met this customer’s needs, maybe it can meet yours.

Contact Systems Alliance and learn how this solution will work for you.

I'm pretty sure data center managers dream of a day when the server platform (hardware or virtual) they buy can come from any manufacturer. And applications can be moved seamlessly from box-to-box with the click of a mouse. That dream is becoming more of a reality every day. HP and Cisco have created hardware platforms that allow application movement from server to server with a simple reboot, albeit only on their hardware. The hypervisor vendors, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft can move servers seamlessly from virtual server to virtual server with little or no downtime. Dell has taken this idea a step further with the Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) product. With AIM, you can move a server “persona” between virtual and physical platforms with the same ease as HP and Cisco offer, but across heterogeneous hardware and hypervisor platforms. Sounds like a dream come true to me.

An AIM persona encapsulates a portable SAN and network server identity and combines it with a bootable shared storage image to enable cross-platform server mobility. They can run on bare-metal hardware or as a virtual machine in a hypervisor. Depending on your view of the value a particular hardware or virtualization software vendor brings to your environment, a solution like this could significantly change the landscape of your data center. Application migrations between hardware platforms can become as easy as bringing the server under AIM management and rebooting the persona into the new computing environment. Painful platform migrations become a thing of the past.

Another great use case for this technology?
The fast deployment of new applications. Envision a scenario where a new application is rolled out and the application owners and IT staff don't understand the server requirements to run the application properly. A virtualized infrastructure persona could be run on a server where the load requirements could be modeled and a determination quickly made whether the computing architecture was correct. If it wasn’t, shutdown the server, boot it on a smaller/larger server or in a virtual machine, and you have a completely new computing environment that is closer to your real-world requirements.

Implementing AIM functionality doesn’t come without some up front work. This technology leverages a shared storage network and in most cases, the ability to boot images from the SAN. Many organizations limit the servers they have attached to shared storage because of the additional expense, and very few implement boot from SAN. Environments where server capacity is dynamic, or quick recovery of a hardware failure is required would provide the most return on investment.

Ok, like all dreams you're going to wake up sooner or later, and then what? Well, how about scheduling a white-board session with our engineering team to evaluate opportunities for deploying AIM in your environment. Ping me here to schedule a session.

Server virtualization through various hypervisor technologies is prevalent in every data center I visit.  There may be one out there somewhere not virtualizing servers, but I haven't seen it.  The efficiencies are just too magnificent to pass up.  Power, cooling, cash, personnel, and floor space all make the list of significant cost savings gained through server virtualization.

What about storage virtualization?  Will you get the same economies virtualizing storage as servers?  Let's examine a few fundamentals first.  Virtualizing a server essentially means  running multiple virtual servers on one physical server, presumably with each one performing different functions.  However, with storage, we're already doing that.  We take our storage subsystem, carve it up into pieces (LUNs, for example) and give it to servers for various uses.  So what is storage virtualization?  My own simple definition is this:  If you can manage and provision all of your individual storage systems (Sun, EMC, IBM, HDS, etc.) from one “pane of glass,” and seamlessly move your data between different systems, then it’s virtualized.  I found a fancier definition on Tech Target, which reads: “Virtualization is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console.”

I believe there's a consensus that storage is next realm of the data center to make the virtualization jump.  Many vendors are starting to offer storage virtualization solutions. FalconStor is working with VMware to combine the virtual server and virtual storage worlds (read http://www.falconstor.com/en/pages/?pn=VMware).  If you need to move data from one array to another, that is a simple task in the virtual environment.  Storage administrators now have the option of provisioning storage from a pool of storage types, offering the right type of storage to the right applications.

In a virtual storage environment, data protection becomes a simple task.  Most storage virtualization vendors provide functionality for in-system replication (snapshots), replication (e.g., for disaster recovery), and thin provisioning, within their core virtualization platform. 

Using FalconStor again as an example, their Network Storage Server (NSS) product provides a virtual storage environment, thin provisioning, and DR replication in a single, low-cost appliance.  This functionality not only simplifies storage management, it creates huge potential cost savings. Because it over-rides and extends the functionality of your storage vendor’s proprietary management software, you no longer need to pay for ongoing licensing and support costs. If you've got a heterogeneous storage environment – and multiple sites – the savings just multiply.

I believe as more IT professionals realize the cost savings, flexibility, and ease of management of virtualized storage, it will become the next hot trend in moving towards a completely virtualized data center.

If you'd like to understand how you can benefit from storage virtualization, click here and request a no-obligation (free) white-board assessment session.

The  move toward widespread virtualization is usually accompanied by new systems architecture. This would address load balancing, failover and high availability, and also support WAN-based access for remote offices and workers (e.g., sales people who work from home).   Because it's designed for efficiently replicating data from one site to another, this architecture streamlines disaster recovery.

Why is this? The data in a virtualized environment usually encompasses virtual machines (VMs), a configuration database and user data. The size of this data depends on your environment – whether it’s desktop or server virtualization. Beyond that, other components of the virtualized environment, such as hypervisors and connection brokers can be easily put in place to accommodate the replicated data from the main site to a DR site. 

Other issues you need to consider when replicating data to your DR site include: network bandwidth, size of your data files and deciding if your DR environment will be a hot or cold site.   Your choice of operating systems makes little difference in terms of DR, because the operating system is part of the overall backed-up data that is sent to a DR site.

In a “traditional” client-server environment without virtualization, backups are usually only done for the actual user data (especially if the data is on a network share) and not for operating systems or applications.  And if your end user devices are PCs, backing up individual PC operating system environments, including individual user customization can be daunting if not impossible.  

Even if your IT department keeps a golden image of the applications loaded on end-user PCs, it typically doesn’t include  customizations.  This is where virtualization can definitely help; each user’s environment is a virtual machine which contains all applications and any customizations (assuming the user is using a persistent desktop). 

From the standpoint of server virtualization, a complete back-up of your server VMs should be easier to execute because the VMs will likely reside on some type of centralize storage.  Most storage systems support storage replication which makes this really easy to accomplish for back up proposes.   The replicated data can be easily sent off site via high speed network to a DR site. 

One of the problems I’ve  seen with sending large amounts of data across the network is the time it takes – some sites don’t have the network bandwidth to handle the data.  This is where WAN optimization becomes your friend! WAN  optimization will let you send large amounts of data across potentially long distances by applying compression, de-duplication and data packet optimization features regardless of the transport protocol or latency sensitivity. This boosts WAN performance and reduces costs by optimizing existing bandwidth. Keep in mind different WAN optimization solutions work better with certain types of data, it's important to do your homework – and perhaps a pilot – before you invest in this technology.

Finally, you need to think about how you configure end user systems to access your DR site if your main site goes down or becomes inaccessible to your staff.