http://youtu.be/0A9codsVqQE 

Similar videos from storage vendors that don’t necessarily fully explain the limitations and problems…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2WqhZuIyo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKKhrI7A7Og

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It’s my job to size storage properly. How do I do that? Well, with a significant amount of faith in the vendors! Clearly we need an understanding of the existing footprint. Not just provisioned storage, but backup routines, actual used storage, database white-space, change-rates, data types and so on. It can actually be fairly complex if you need a detailed and precise sizing done. But let’s be honest, most customers haven’t the time or inclination to pay to do this, they’ll guess at a large growth figure (10% YoY or maybe 50% over 3 years), then we factor in a little contingency space and that gives us our functional capacity requirements that should have enough headroom to allow for any inconsistencies. Sounds like guess work? A certain amount is, yes

The primary use case I still see for vendors is virtualisation, but you can probably suggest that databases are still a key business requirement for most organisations, and whatever we’re told, databases are still physical. So is there any major benefit in having fancy technology at the back-end of the storage with virtualisation in front?

Scale-Out Storage

First lets look at the database, as this is a relatively easy one to address. You could suggest that tiering is a great technology for databases, most data is historic and not read actively, most intensive applications will be accessing a small data set. But this is assuming that an application is written correctly and you aren’t doing full table scans, this is also assuming that you are regularly access this relatively small working set and that its predictable. Another key element is the high write throughout of logs and temporary databases. Tiering may fix a few use cases for data tiering of databases data, but it makes me feel uncomfortable and its not predictable, but this doesn’t fix my write requirements which require something with good write performance.

Really, to make the best use of a database you still need to be manually controlling the data and the disk configuration. High performance flash technology for write workloads, and split the database files up so that the active working set can always be addressed from flash also. This will not only give much more predictable performance, it should in many circumstances be as efficient and as dynamic as any tiering technology, just without the downsides (of which there are a few).

Onto virtualisation. VMware have been doing a fantastic job of putting a lot of intelligence directly into the hypervisor and vCenter directly. Do I need hardware snapshots? I can use Avamar (or VMware Data Protection), Veeam, CommVault, or any other of a hundred backup solutions out there that integrate with VMware’s API and mean I don’t need intelligent storage. Tiering is slowly getting there, I agree storage vendors currently have the lead here but I imagine this won’t last long! Load balancing is already better done at the hypervisor layer, dynamically rebalancing data stores based on capacity or response times. Replication can even be handled fairly well at the hypervisor layer, and some startups have come out with this as their primary replication strategy! It’s also not exactly a secret that VMware are looking at significantly changing, and improving, the way they interact with disk. I’ve also no doubt that Microsoft will be closely behind VMware in this arena as Microsoft have always loved the shared nothing approach and not using a SAN if you can help it (not that anyone listens).

Flash Storage

So what do yo really need from a storage vendor? I think there’s 2 key areas I’m going to be watching closely over the next few years. Cost effective flash strategy, one that is flexible and dynamic without compromising performance for capacity (as is often the case with tiering). A flash strategy is key for me as this is clearly where the market is heading, I also see customers demanding more performance and better response times, especially if the industry gets its wish and everyone starts doing data analytics. Secondly, scale-out architecture, proper scale-out architecture. By proper scale-out architecture I mean add more nodes and get linear increase in capacity and performance (granted any overheads for protection), and this needs to be suitable for all workloads, whether that’s a scale-out workload (lots of small transactions distributed across multiple hosts), or a scale-up workload (a really big database!). I don’t think anyone has truly cracked scale-out arrays yet, there’s definitely some interesting technology but the use cases are fairly specific. I also think that as this area is threatening to the traditional array there is some hesitance to promote it. Scale-out should also leverage commodity hardware wherever possible, this is what makes it so appealing, it also makes the virtualisation market very interesting as suddenly my storage array is a candidate for the hypervisor also! I think what people like Nutanix are doing is incredibly revolutionary at the moment and I know others will follow suite given time.

So is the enterprise storage array dead? No, because I still need a solid and robust foundation for my critical (maybe legacy) applications and databases. Until the major software vendors fully adopt a scale-out architecture of the application, I’m going to need some significant grunt to power the backend, and I’m going to need this to be robust and highly available! I think the mid-market storage is the area that is going to change significantly, I think we’ll see much more commodity based technology coming through and less critical requirements around fancy storage technologies. Space efficiency and/or cost effective capacity are becoming key factors, you can have all the fancy technology in the world, but if another vendor is 25% cheaper against functionally capacity, then I’ll find it difficult to justify the price.

This post was also inspired somewhat by Encrico Signoretti with a similar discussion: http://juku.it/en/articles/netapp-is-a-bore-and-its-not-the-only-one/

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Courtesy of Scott Adams

If you don’t mind entertaining me, go into your data centre please. In fact first of all, when you refer to your data centre, in your head does it have inverted comma’s around it in a sarcastic fashion? Is it a “data centre” (roll eyes)? Now head into your “data centre”, how does the cabling look? Is every server dual connected to power supplies? Do you have a room UPS and advanced environmental monitoring to identify hot spots? You do? Great, stop reading this article as it’s not for you…

If you have a “data centre” and you’d be relatively embarrassed if someone started asking you about redundant power & cooling or when the last time your generator was tested (you have a generator right?) or your last security audit and pen-test, then please read on. I say or, but really that’s and/or but I don’t want this to sound like a census.

At VMworld last year we heard how fantastic SRM 5 is and that it enables service providers to start offering DRaaS (don’t get me started on **aaS) and how businesses will rejoice at this offering. There’s one hole in this concept for me I’m afraid however. You’ll be paying a service provider to host your DR that you use perhaps twice a year. This will be hosted in a top data centre, with fully redundant power, environmentals, fully diverse network, fully monitored, secure, audited, and so on. That’s what hosting providers do, they light up data centres and they choose the best as it’s their business to be the best. And your primary hosting will be out of your “data centre”. I think by now you know where I’m going with this, so I won’t labour the point too much. “Data centre” (roll eyes).

As a concept, DRaaS to a service provider is all backward in my mind. If you have a tier 3 data centre already, you perhaps already have multiple locations, so DRaaS is less appealing or cost effective. If you run a “data centre” chances are you are on a budget and the possibility of a second site seems fairly far-fetched, or perhaps you have a second site but it requires italics and underlining when you say “data centre” to emphasise the sarcasm. Wouldn’t it make more sense to host your primary compute services from a top data centre and for you to host your DR out of your “data centre”? For the 0.1% of the time that you run from DR, is it that important that it’s a tier 3 facility?

First of all this would give you the option to play around with your applications in isolation. You could clone production systems locally without any impact on production as it’s totally isolated. This allows you to do isolated upgrade testing, isolated DR testing, and isolated development. You can also look to improve your data centre facilities, do much-needed maintenance as you won’t need to book in business downtime (although you still need to make the business aware of a loss of resilience during these upgrades).

I just want to point out that I have worked in a lot of “data centres”, I’ve worked in a lot of “data centres” too, so please understand that I am empathizing with your challenges here, not criticizing the fantastic job you’ve done to stand up these facilities and keep them online as long as you have. You sir/madam are a hero of IT, and I applaud you. However I want to save you this burden in the future and allow you to concentrate on the good stuff. I want you to have a bigger impact on the business, not wasting your time running around keeping the lights on. No one remembers the weekends you’ve worked to fix a fix a broken air-con, or the birthday’s you’ve missed (or escaped) from because you were dialed in rebuilding the Exchange server after another mail store corruption. However everyone remembers that they didn’t have email all Friday afternoon and on Monday morning they complained as they had a load of email to go through.

Microsoft System Center 2012

It’s not a secret that traditionally I’ve been a big fan of VMware and it’s product portfolio. But with the latest release of Microsoft’s extensive 2012 portfolio (the Systems Center stack and the Windows stack) I suddenly find myself unable to be dismissive of this stack any more. I’m not dismissing RHEV, Xen or Oracle for a second here either, I’m just focusing on VMware and Microsoft for various reasons (which I won’t go into here). Traditionally it’s been quite easy, although Microsoft had some great marketing around their private cloud technology it just wasn’t quite there for me at the hypervisor level, but 2012 fixes a lot of that! Just a quick overview of HyperV features that make it a contender.

• Live Migration – functionally a good comparison with vMotion
• Cluster Shared Volumes – a great alternative to VMFS and SMB support is exciting!
• Dynamic Memory – we could argue all day as to why VMware’s memory technology is different / better than Microsoft’s and vice-versa. Simply put they do a very similar thing and net gains are going to be very similar. But server memory is cheap! And applications like Oracle, SQL and Java grab it all regardless and prevent any fancy hypervisor techniques.
• Virtual Networking – Always one of my biggest complaints / criticisms with HyperV, but it seems Microsoft might just have finally fixed this.

Sure, there’s a lot of technicalities if we get into the detail, maximum cluster support, maximum vCPU vMemory support, etc. etc. But really, the common IT organisation just isn’t going to care and isn’t going to scale to those levels! Outside of the lab, I’ve never seen a VM with more than 16 vCPUs or more than 32GB RAM. Designing our new Cloud platform at Kelway I had to carefully consider all the cluster and management maximums, but we will be running thousands of virtual machines across hundred of customers. I really don’t mind too much if I have to have 2 management windows if I get to the point of managing 1000’s of VMs, that’s not a bad ratio! I really care little about the pissing contest that is the technical maximums. I care about the stuff I’ll actually be using regularly, namely…

• Hypervisor overhead – minimal with either hypervisor
• Intelligent memory handling – whatever you want to call it, I want to overcommit my memory as it’s always the most competed for resource
• Virtual networking – the network is complex enough already without having dedicated interfaces to different networks
• Virtual machine mobility – I want to minimise downtime due to hardware maintenance and failure
• Simplified management

So it seems that at a basic hypervisor level I no longer have to make major compromises in choosing one of the other. So how do you choose?

VMware have a fantastic cloud portfolio now and the ecosystem around the hypervisor has never been stronger. This is great for the VMware houses that have already invested significant time and money in developing a solid infrastructure. This can continue to grow with VMware products and technologies. vSphere has never been stronger, this year announced better, faster, more optimised platform than ever before.  The vCenter suite is becoming incredibly strong (and as complicated as the Systems Center suite). The various acquisitions over the past few years are finally being tied together in a pretty coherent way. The vCloud suite is also looking very strong. I personally feel it’s strengths still lie in the service providers and not for end-users, but that’s debatable (and I won’t bring that discussion here). The vFabric suite introduces VMware into the application layer which is very interesting and I think is something that will see them through the next 5 years.

Microsoft HyperV 2012 has proven that Microsoft can fix things and do listen to it’s customers (or at least know how to follow the market). But I’m not really that excited about HyperV, great it finally has all the features I need to confidently run it as part of my platform. The key differentiator I think with Microsoft is the whole suite, lets consider a few key things here.

• I already have a Microsoft license agreement, whether select or enterprise, I’m already paying Microsoft for licenses. VMware is always an additional cost, but HyperV is pretty much paid for if I am licensing my guests with Enterprise or Datacenter (if you aren’t paying for Datacenter seriously consider it and look at the net benefits, not just the upfront per-CPU costs). If you are using Standard edition, just the EULA in regards to virtual machine mobility and vMotion / Live Motion (just saying).
• I might already have Systems Center, whether just Operations Manager, or perhaps from a end-user compute project that requires some different elements. Again licensing I think is key. If you buy the full suite you’re more likely to get generous discounts that just picking and choosing.
• Full system lifecycle! Provisioning is create, I can script it, create authorisation workflows and so on, but this is only half the story when it comes to infrastructure. I can’t stress how important lifecycle management is. I need to be patching my systems, checking configuration compliance, doing application lifecycle and so on. VMware have been doing some interesting stuff in this space, but as they aren’t the underlying operating system or the application vendor, there’s only so far they into the stack that you can go. Microsoft has the upperhand here I think as it’s all native integration.
• I don’t need to run the Microsoft hypervisor in order to use the full management suite. I can still use the full Systems Center suite for all the guest side of things, and with VMM I can also do certain operations within vCenter anyway. So from general day-to-day management (provisioning, capacity planning, basic system lifecycle) I have all these boxes ticked.

So to sum things up. I’m finally interested in HyperV, not because of the hypervisor itself, but because of the full 2012 suite. Microsoft are, as ever, a force to be reckoned with, but when you consider the full picture of Microsoft licensing that a business requires, it starts to make a lot more sense! The Enterprise License Agreement also starts to become more appealing, the more products you include, the better the deal and overall the cheaper the cost per single system. For anyone looking at comparing HyperV and ESXi, I would seriously recommend doing a full cost comparison and not just looking at the hypervisor.

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