SAN's Windows and Servers

In my role I look at storage technologies and try to decide the future strategy for the organisation that I work for.  I am seeing quite a hard push from IBM on their SVC offering.  The device is in band and hides disparate storage behind it, this effectively allows you to present a single LUN to an OS from multiple disk arrays at the back end, the host is none the wiser.  There is also a competing technology from Hitachi in it's USP, the premise is exactly the same although the architectures are quite different.

The IBM SVC is based on a commodity Intel server that has a number of FC interfaces installed and runs a LINUX kernel that does the virtualisation, whereas the Hitachi offering is embedded into it's high end disk array as a feature that can be used.  The main limitation of the IBM solution is that the bandwidth through the device is limited, more SVC's devices can be added up to a total of 8 but 1 LUN = 1 SVC pair.  The Hitachi offering has far greater scalability as the internal bandwidth of the the array is in theory available, the main restriction will be the number of FC interfaces you dedicate, the other advantage is that the full cache of the array can be used.

I have only just started looking into virtualisation and the above are my initial thoughts on the two main devices available.  For my organisation I cannot see that we have a business case for virtualisation, and would struggle to justify the expense of additional infrastructure for the IBM solution, but as we already have a couple of Hitachi devices I could see these being used.

I would be interested to recieve some feedback on anybody's experience with storage virtualisation.

Whilst away on holiday in Hong Kong recently I came across a nice little gadget from Sony the Vaio VGN-UX17GP, it claims to be the worlds smallest and lightest PC.  You can have a look at the spec for yourself over at http://vaio-online.sony.com/prod_info/vgn-ux17gp/ I was quite impressed and had the credit poised to make a purchase when the better half of my conscience (the Girlfriend) stopped me.

Over in HK it was pricing at sub £1000 which for the size and spec I thought was quite impressive, let me know what you think?

Hi

I am going to aim to post more often on this blog, we shall see how things go.

John

The BBC have reported today that AOL has slightly back tracked on it's plan to start to charge for sending bulk email sent to it's users. Effectively they will waive the charges for non-profit organizations and allow these users to bypass AOL's junk mail filters.

I think the concept that AOL are adopting here is good for reducing the levels of spam to AOL users only, but does this still mean I requested the mail message well possibly no. I expect that some large marketing companies may choose to pay to get into your mailbox as they can afford to, and if they get the right conversion rates it may still be cheaper than a traditional paper and post campaign. Allowing charities to bypass the filters for free is a prime example I don't want these types of email clogging up my mail box, just because they are a charity doesn't make it right!

So I my view this compromise weakens even more a pretty weak attempt at reducing spam. 

It was reported in Computer Weekly this week based on Gartner analysis that last year worldwide server shipments were up 12.7%, but interestingly revenues were only up 4.5% which is really making the point that servers are becoming more of a commodity item. HP are leading with a market share of 27.7% over 5% ahead of Dell, interestingly IBM was the leader in terms of revenue with 31.2% compared to HP's 28.2%, to me this suggests IBM are able to charge a premium based on their name!

The other interesting trend that was also mentioned in the article was the fact that Windows servers have now over taken the shipments of UNIX, ending UNIX's 10 year hold on the top spot.

Quite what all these servers will do for power consumption and global warming who knows!

The question I pose is are SAN islands a good thing? feel free to comment. My question is driven around a dilemma I have currently, should I be using Islands as they destroy a large number of the benefits of a SAN.

Where I work currently, first ventured into SAN's back in 2002/3 under the premise that a SAN would save us money through sharing etc. In theory this was great whilst we had a small number of systems on the SAN, and as you would expect the thing grew like the true monster that it is.

Next thing we were looking at splitting bits of the SAN off to give us increased separation for ease of change and fault isolation, the benefit of the SAN is starting to diminish more switches, arrays, more management over head and above all more costs. From a business perspective it is much easier to manage as we can place applications with similar maintenance windows in the same island, but as the architect I look at all the storage and ports I now have that aren't accessible.

So I found myself pondering, Islands have a number of benefits which for my end user are great, but cost me more money, how can I get round the issues? The industry had thankfully met this pain point before me and have such tabled a number of solutions.

• MPRS from Brocade
• Routers from McData
• VSANS from Cisco

After some investigations my conclusions on these are:-

Cisco's VSANS don't offer separation for things like firmware upgrades as their architecture shares common resources such as the processors etc, this also means faults with the common elements could be an issue, they do offer discreet fabric services and as such will provide some fault isolation and finally there doesn't seem to be a way to route between VSANS so storage resources will still be restricted to a VSAN.

McData from my knowledge of the Ultra Net Edge Router doesn't allow for FC to FC routing there has to be some other network in the way IP, SONET or ATM, this does seem a little bizzare as in my case I want to route between two SAN's that are less than 20 metres away from each other, why have to have the overhead of protocol conversion.

Brocade MPRS these seem to offer the best flexibility of the three devices as they allow FC to FC routing and also allow FC over IP if you want need it.

So at the current point in time I will be budgeting for MPRS to hang together my numerous islands and recover those little bits of stranded storage. Not an ideal solution as it is more kit and complexity but is probably the reasonable compromise.

Brocade have produced a good book on how to implement their MPRS.

I find internal politics very draining, the organisation I work for currently is the most political organisation I have ever worked for. I am thinking of going for PM soon.

Came across this video of an overclocked AMD Duron on google the other day, it's quite impressive, maybe the mitiary will be interested in them rather than landmines.

So it's 2006 and Intel are rebranding, after 37 years! Is the change significant, well yes maybe for Intel at least. Traditionally Intel has only been associated by consumers with PC's, whereas Intel actually make chips for lots of digital devices so they want to make that point to consumers.

With the new logo, comes a new tag line "Leap Ahead" not sure how that compares to the old "Intel Inside", will they drop the distinctive tag tune as well?

It has been a while but I intend to make some more posts on here now the dark evenings have arrived.

John

My first impression of the desktop is very similar to Windows XP, no major change here although the start menu does do something different, where by when you click on all programs the menu comes up over the recently used menu not to the right as it used to in XP.

The control panel has had the obligatory overhaul just to confuse everybody and a load of new and revamped icons appear.

Add and remove programs has also had a serious revamp and looks quite different than previous operating systems, they have tried to group programs into categories I suspect this will rely on the installer package categorizing the program at install time.

And onto the biggest thing to debut in the release is Internet Explorer 7, an quick initial look at this the most noticeable thing was the long awaited tabbed browsing and support for RSS feeds. It is quite neat as if you browse to a page that has an RSS feed one of the icons turns red to inform you there is a feed available. One thing that I did find missing was a refresh button from the tool bar, personally this is annoying but I will have to dig deeper to see if one can be added, otherwise it's F5.

In this release outlook express has not been updated to 7 as normally happens so you get version 6, also there is no new media player 10 is the one that is included.

These are my initial thoughts and impressions of the OS and over the next few weeks, I will be looking a bit deeper into the functionality and will post my thoughts.

Microsoft has today announced the official name for the replacement to Windows XP, which was code named "Longhorn", it will be called "Windows Vista" and is due for release in the second half of 2006. The slogan for the product or marketing fluff as I like to call it is "Clear, Confident, Connected; Bringing clarity to your world".

For those who cant wait until 2006 the first beta of the product should be making an appearance on the 3rd of Aug, and I am sure with loads of bugs and functionality that will be removed from the final product. The announcement video can be seen here, and the web announcement here.

The release in late 2006 means that XP will be the longest surviving Windows operating system ever between releases, a lot of the intended functionality for "Longhorn" has been dropped from the product to actually get it out there and boost Microsoft's ever large coffers.

According to Computer Weekly Microsoft is getting the production line rolling with the RTM version of "System Centre Data Protection Manager" 

I have been looking at this product for use within my company as it allows remote sites, which we have a lot of, to back up to the datacenter over the WAN links. You might think bandwidth restrictions would make this a nightmare but the clever bit about DPM is that it works at the block level and only transfers the changed blocks back to the datacenter. The solution does look expensive to implement though as it requires a SQL server somewhere, although you do get a restricted licence of SQL with the product, and a server to run the product at your datacenter as well as a tape solution, but if like me you are in a fairly large enterprise most of this will be lying around somewhere in your computer room.

Now it has been released to manufacture I will get a trail copy and play in the lab at work to see how well it lives up to it's claims. Hopefully it will remove the requirement for tape drives at the remote sites and reduce the burden on our already overworked administrators.

So Dave O has asked what is a SAN?

Well Dave I really need to produce an article on this one as it is a huge area, and far too big to cover in a post, but a little insight to whet the appetite is below.

Well it stands for "Storage Area Network" which is as the name suggests a bunch of storage and servers thats all connected together by some medium. In concept it is very similar to a LAN except the protocol used is not Ethernet, the most common protocols used today are Fibre Channel for open systems and the proprietary FICON for IBM mainframes.

Why do we use SAN's? Well put simply they allow any host connected to communicate with any storage device connected to the SAN. This gives a high degree of flexibility in how your infrastructure is deployed and managed, and should if managed correctly increase the utilization of your storage space. A SAN will also help with the DR strategy that you have in place allowing for cool things like real time data replication to another site. SAN's also allow for technologies such as geographic clustering to be deployed.

So keep your eyes open for my article on "What is a SAN" coming this summer to a blog near you.