Tag Archives: storage

Why not FCoE?

Brocade Cisco Fibre Channel 2 Comments

You may have read my previous articles on FCoE as well as some comments I’ve posted on Brocade’s and Cisco’s blog sites. It won’t surprise you that I’m no fan of FCoE. Not for the technology itself but for the enormous complexity and organisational overhead involved.

So lets take a step back and try to figure out why this has become so much of a buzz in the storage and networking world.

First lets make it clear that FCoE is driven by the networking folks and most notably Cisco. The reason for this is that Cisco has around 90% market share of the data centre networking side but they only have around 10 to 15% of the storage side. (I don’t have the actual numbers at hand but I’ m sure it’s not far off). Brocade with their FC offerings have that part (storage) pretty well covered. Cisco hasn’t been able to eat more out of that pie for quite some time so they had to come up with something else. So FCoE was born. This allowed them (Cisco) to slow but steady get the foot in the storage door by offering a, so called,  “new” way of doing business in the data centre and convince customers to go “converged”.

I already explained that their is no or negligible benefit from an infrastructural and power/cooling perspective so cost-effectiveness from a capex perspective is nil and maybe even negative. I also showed that the organizational overhaul that has to be accomplished is tremendous. Remember you’re trying to glue two different technologies together by adding a new one. The June-2009 FC-BB-5 document (where FCoE is described) is around 1.9 MB and 180 pages give or take a few. FC-BB-6 is 208 pages and 2.4 MB thick. How does this decrease complexity?
Another part that you have to look at is backward compatibility. The Fibre Channel standard went up to 16Gb/s a while ago and most vendors have released product for it already. The FC standard does specify backward compatibility to 2Gb/s. So I’m perfectly safe when linking up an 16G SFP with a 8Gb/s or 4 Gb/s SFP and the speed will be negotiated to the highest possible. This means I don’t have to throw away some older, not yet depreciated, equipment. How does Ethernet play in this game? Well, it doesn’t, 10G Ethernet is incompatible with 1G so they don’t marry up. You have to forklift your equipment out of the data center and get new gear from top to bottom. How’s that for investment protection? The network providers will tell you this migration process comes naturally with equipment refresh but how do you explain that if you have to refresh one or two director class switches were your other equipment can’t connect to it this is a natural process? This means you have buy additional gear that bridges between the old and the new; resulting in you paying even more. This is probably what is meant by “naturally”. “Naturally you have to pay more.”

So it’s pretty obvious that Cisco needs to pursue this path will it ever get more traction in the data center storage networking club. They’ve also proven this with UCS, which looks like to fall off the cliff as well when you believe the publications in the blog-o-sphere. Brocade is not pushing FCoE at all. The only reason they are in the FCoE game is to be risk averse. If for some reason FCoE does take off they can say they have products to support that. Brocade has no intention of giving up an 80 to 85% market share in fibre channel just to be at risk to hand this over the other side being Cisco Networking. Brocade’s strategy is somewhat different than Ciscos’. Both companies have outlined their ideas and plans on numerous occasions so I’ll leave that for you to read on their websites.

“What about the other vendors?”  you’ll say. Well that’s pretty simple. All array vendors couldn’t care less. For them it’s just another transport mechanism like FC and iSCSI and there is no gain nor loss if FCoE makes it or not. They won’t tell you this in your face of course. The other connectivity vendors like Emulex and Qlogic have to be on the train with Cisco as well as Brocade however their main revenue comes out of the server vendors who build products with Emulex or Qlogic chips in them. If the server vendors demand an FCoE chip either party builds one and is happy to sell it to any server vendor. For the connectivity vendors like these it’s just another revenue stream they link into and cannot afford to be outside a certain technology if the competition is picking it up. Given the fact there is some significant R&D required w.r.t. chip development these vendors also have to market their kit to have some ROI. This is normal market dynamics.

“So what alternative do you have for a converged network?” was a question that was asked to me a while ago. My response was “Do you have a Fibre Channel infrastructure? If so, then you already have a converged network.” Fibre Channel was designed from the bottom up to transparently move data back and forth irrespective of the upper protocol used including TCP/IP. Unfortunately SCSI has become the most common but there is absolutely no reason why you couldn’t add a networking driver and the IP protocol stack as well. I’ve done this many times and never have had any troubles with it.

The question is now: “Who do you believe?” and “How much risk am I willing to take to adopt FCoE?”. I’m not on the sales side of the fence not am I in marketing. I work in a support role and have many of you on the phone when something goes wrong. My background is not in the academic world. I worked my way up and have been in many roles where I’ve seen technology evolve and I know when to spot bad ones. FCoE is one of them.

Comments are welcome.

Regards,
Erwin

Open Source Storage

Storage No Comments

Storage vendors are getting nervous. The time has come that SMB/SME level storage systems can be build from scratch with just servers, JBOD’s and some sort of connectivity.

Most notably SUN (or Oracle these days) has been very busy in this area. Most IP was already within SUN, Solaris source code has been made available, they have an excellent file-system (ZFS) which scales enormously and has a very rich feature set. Now extent that with Lustre ** and you’re steaming away. Growth is easily accomplished by adding nodes to the cluster which simultaneously increases the IO processing power as well as throughput.


But for me the absolute killer app is COMSTAR. This way you can create your own storage array with commodity hardware and make your HBA’s fibre channel targets. Present your LUNS and connect other systems to it via a fibre channel network. Better yet even iSCSI and FCOE are part of it now. Absolutely fabulous. These days there would be no reason to buy an expensive proprietary array but use the kit that you have. Ohh yes, talking about scalability, is 8 exabyte enough on one filesystem and over a couple of thousand nodes in a cluster. If you don’t have these requirements it works one a single server as well.

The only thing lacking is Mainframe support but since the majority of systems in data-centres have Windows or some sort of Unix farm anyway this can be an excellent candidate for large scale Open Source storage systems. Now that should make some vendors pretty nervous.

Regards,
Erwin

**ZFS is not yet supported in Luster clusters but on the roadmap for next year

Save money managing storage effectively

Storage Networking No Comments

How much tools do you use to manage your storage environment.

On average the storage admin uses 5 tools to manage a storage infrastructure.

1. Host tools (for getting host info like used capacity, volume configs etc.)
2. HBA tools (some OS’es don’t have a clue around that)
3. Fabric tools (extremely important)
4. Array tools (even more important)
5. Generic tools (for getting some sort of consolidated overview. Mainly Excel worksheets :-))


Sometime storage management is performed like below:

As you can see thing can become quite complicated when storage infrastructures grow and you’ll need a bigger whiteboard. At the point you have an enterprise storage infrastructure you’ll probably need a bigger building and a lot more whiteboards. 🙂

So what is the best way?

One word:

Integration, Integration, Integration, Integration.

The database boys know this for a long time. Don’t store the same information twice. This is called Database Normalization.
The same thing applies to storage management tools. Make sure that you use tools that have an integrated framework which leverages as much components as possible.

In case you’re using Hitachi kit is pretty easy. Their entire Hitachi Storage Command Suite works together and share single configuration repositories. The best thing is they do that even across their entire array product line from SMS to USP-V and even from two generations ago (so that includes the 9900 and 9500 series) This way other modules can make use of this. The other benefit is that you only have to deploy single host agents to obtain host info like volumes, filesystems, capacity usage etc and have that shared across all different products. Now be aware there is no silver bullet for managing all storage from a single pane of glass if you have a heterogenious environment. Every vendor has it own way of doing things and although the SNIA is making good progress with SMI-S it’s still lacking much of the nifty features storage vendors have released lately.

RTFM

Storage Networking No Comments

Yeah its been a while. A lot has happened in two years. One thing that really jumps out is I moved Down Under. Yep, now inhabitant of kangarooland and I’ve loved every day of it.

To storage:
You don’t want to know how many questions I get who’s answers have been perfectly described in all sorts of manuals. This almost leads to the point were my job becomes a manual reader and a walking storage encyclopedia. 🙂 Now that’s something to put on my CV.


The big problem is however with so many different (storage) products and related documentation I can understand the problem storage admins have these days. Storage infrastructures become more and more complex and an ever increasing level of knowledge is required to maintain all of this. Take into account all different updates these guys get from their vendors almost on a monthly basis then you can imagine what their workday looks like. My life is pretty easy. I only have to keep track of around 80 software products and approx 15 storage hardware platforms because I work for one of those vendors. Multiply that by an average of around 17 manuals per product between 10 and over 5000 (yes, five-thousand) pages and …… you do the maths. Take into account that I also need to know what happens on a OS level from an IO stack perspective including all the different virtualisation kit that is out there including Mainframe z/OS so this pretty much sums up my daily life.. 😉

No, I’m not pitying myself. I have a fantastic wife, wonderful kids and good job, so I’m quite happy with what’s going on in my life.

Going back to the storage admins. The big difference between them and myself is I have access to all the information I need plus some competitive information of my com-colleagues. The storage admins totally rely of what the vendors want them to have and that very often is extremely restricted. I can understand that a lot of this is market sensitive and belongs as company confidential behind locks, however I also think that we should give the right information/documentation (in any form you like) in a structured and easy to understand format without the nitty/gritty stuff that is totally irrelevant. This will easy the burden which a lot of you guys out there suffer and believe me I’ve been there.

A second way of sharing experiences and knowledge is user communities. The perfect example for me has always been Encompass or DECUS. The best user community ever, affiliated to Digital Equipment Corporation. (HP still picks the fruit from that). I think it’s extremely important that vendor should provide a platform were their users can share expierences (good or bad) and be able to leverage the knowledge of his/her peers.

One of my primary tasks, besides being a technical conscience to my sales reps, is to provide my customers (you storage admins) with all the information they need and to help them manage the kit I sold them so they can be heroes within their company.

TTY later.

Greetz,
Erwin

Addres space vs. Dynamic allocation

General Info No Comments

This article is somewhat a successor to my first blog “The future of storage”. I discussed my article with Vincent Franceschini personally a while ago and although we have some different opinions on some topics, in general we agree on the setting we have to get more insight on the business value of data. This is the only way we can shift the engineering world to a more business focused mindset. Unfortunately today the engineering departments of all the major storage vendors still rely on old protocols like SCSI, NFS, CIFS which all have some sort of limitation which generally is address space.

To put this in perspective it’s like building a road with a certain amount of length and width which has a capacity for a certain number of cars per hour. This means it cannot adapt dynamically to a higher load i.e. more cars. You have to build new roads, or construct new lanes to existing ones if possible at all, to cater for more cars. With the growth of data and the changes companies are facing today it’s time to come up with something new. Basically this means we have to step away from technologies which have limitations build into their architecture. Although this might look like boiling the ocean I think we cannot afford the luxury of trying to improve current standards while the “data boom” is running like an avalanche.
Furthermore it is becoming too hard for IT department to keep up with the knowledge needed in every segment.

Question is “How do we accomplish this”. In my opinion the academic world together with the IT industry have huge potential in developing the next generation of IT. In current IT environments we run into barriers of all sorts. Performance, capacity, energy supply, etc etc.

So here’s an idea. Basically every word known to mankind has been written millions of times. So why do we need to write it over and over again. Basically what can be done is reference these words to compose an article. This leads to both a reduction of storage capacity needed as well as a reference-able index which can be searched on. The information of the index can be in a SNIA XAM format which also enables storage systems to leverage this information and dynamically allocate the required capacity or put business values to these indexes. This way the only thing that needs to be watched for is the integrity of the indexes and the words catalog. Another benefit of this is when a certain word changes it’s spelling the only thing that needs to be changed is that same word in the catalog. Since all articles just have references to this word the spelling is adjusted accordingly. (I’ll bet I will get some comments about that. :-))

As you can see this kind of information storage and retrieval totally eliminates the use of de-duplication, everything is written once anyway, which in turn has a major benefit on storage infrastructures, data integrity, authority etc etc. Since the indexes itself don’t have to grow because of auto elimination based on business value the concept of Dynamic Allocation has been achieved. OK, there are some caveats on the different formats, languages and overlapping context issues however these can be taken care of by linguists.

The Smarter Storage Admin (Work Smarter not Longer)

General Info No Comments

Lets start off with a question: Who is the best storage admin?
1. The one that starts at 07:00 AM and leaves at 18:00 PM
2. The one that starts at 09:00 AM and leaves at 16:00 PM

Two simple answers but they can make a world of difference to employers. Whenever an employer answers with no. 1 they often have the remark that this admin does a lot more work and is more loyal to the company. They might be right however the daily time spent at work is not a good qualifier for productivity so the amount of work done might be less than no.2. This means that an employer has to measure on other points and define clear milestones that have to be fulfilled.


Whenever I visit customers I often get the complaint that they spend too much time doing day to day administration like digging through log files, checking status messages, restoring files or emails etc. etc. These activities can occupy more than 60% of an administrators day which can be avoided.
To be more efficient one has to change the mindset from knowing all to knowing what doesn’t work. It’s a very simple principle however to get there you have to do a lot planning.
An example is when a server reboots do I want to know if the switch port goes offline? Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. It all depends on what the impact of that server is. Is it planned or not or maybe this server belongs to a test environment in which case I don’t want to get a phone-call in the middle of the night at all.

The software and hardware in a storage environment consists of many different components and they all have to work together. The primary goal of such an environment is to move bytes back and forth to disk, tape or another medium and they do that pretty well nowadays. The problem however is management of all these different components which require all different management tools, learning tracks and operation procedures. Even if we shift our mindset to “What doesn’t work”, we still have to spend a lot of time and effort in thing we often don’t want to know.

Currently there are no tools available who support the whole range of hardware and software so for specific tasks we still need the tools the vendors provide. However for day to day administration there are some good tools which might be very beneficial for administrators. These tools can save more than 40% of an administrators time so they can do more work in less time. It takes a simple calculation to determine the ROI and another pro is that the chances of making mistakes is drastically reduced.

Another thing to consider is if these tools fit into the business processes if these are defined within a company. Does the company have ITIL, Prince2 or any other method of IT service management in place. If so the storage management tool has to align to these processes since we don’t want to do things twice.

Last but not least is the support for open standards. The SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) is an non-profit organization which was founded by some storage vendors in the late 90’s. The SNIA works in conjunction with its members around the globe to make storage networking technologies understandable, simpler to implement, easier to manage, and recognized as a valued asset to business. One of the standards ,which was recently certified by ANSI, is SMI-S. This standard defines a very large subset of storage components which can be managed through a single common methodology. This means that you’ll get one common view of all your storage assets with the ability to manage it through a single interface independent of the vendor. If your storage management tool is based on this standard you do not have a vendor lock-in and day to day operations will be more efficient.
This implies however that the vendor also has to support the SMI-S standard so make sure you make the right choice if you are looking for a storage solution and ask the vendor if he supports the SMI-S standard and to what extend.

Greetz,
Erwin