DST Storage Blog

The world of data storage, business continuity and disaster recovery has gone through tremendous changes in recent years. We have seen; consolidation on a large scale by smaller companies that possessed thought leadership into larger organizations, influx of technology such as SSD into mainstream applications, object-based storage take hold for multi-petabyte size application requirements, virtualization extend from network and server environments to storage, and backup and replication technologies functionality converge.

DST is focused on shining a light on advancements in technologies that can increase productivity, decrease overall cost and simplify the environment, as we believe that data trends in the marketplace warrant the need for a re-think in how we manage and store data.

The first such advancement is Storage Virtualization. Storage Virtualization works in much the same way as server virtualization.  There is an abstraction between the physical hardware (the array) and the processing of the data.  Whether a structured data environment (SAN) or an unstructured data environment (NAS) the data management and ownership is abstracted from the hardware that the data resides on, creating a flexible central point of management for the entire heterogeneous resource pool.  The advantages of virtualization:

• Create unparallel data mobility, fluidly assigning data to storage resources.
• Easily control and manage multiple physical resources from a single pane of glass.
• Flexibly set policies across entire ecosystem or volume by volume.
• Ability to commoditized infrastructure as the intelligence is divorced from hardware.
• Platform agnostic replication and virtualization.

Replication, Disaster Recovery and Backup is another area of technology convergence. All of these functions can be done now in a single piece of software from a single pane of glass more efficiently, with better recovery points and recovery times. Backup vendors are integrating with storage snapshot technology, storage vendors are able to create more snapshots and business continuity/disaster recovery product vendors are integrating file level catalogs – all evidence of several markets collapsing as technology advances.

Another popular topic of conversation is SSD. SSD Augmentation and Cloud-based Storage i.e. “Amazon”-esque storage are two areas of hardware evolution that will dominate the storage industry in the years ahead.  The price point between SAS/FC drives and SSD drives is narrowing.  The SSD technology is improving its longevity of use and addressing other issues that kept it from broad acceptance.  Performance benefits from SSD are game changing in some environments – VDI in particular offers users a much different experience when it is on SSD.

Object based storage which is the productizing of the technologies that Amazon and Rack Space have been using for years offers organizations to rethink how they do business.  Especially in the entertainment industry – the question becomes “what would I do if storage costs went on sale at 70% off or more” – what would you keep on line available for customers or for internal use if cost were not a factor.

DST as an organization works with customers to consultatively look through the emerging technologies and create options that have value to your specific needs.

In the past couple of years, we have seen EMC introduce the VNX and at the same time purchase Isilon, Hitachi purchase BlueArc, Oracle make a push as the proud new owner of ZFS courtesy of SUN, and the introduction of several new vendors enter the unified storage market such as Nexsan, Nimble and IceWEB.

EMC certainly has the broadest addressable market, with the VNX for the mid-tier SAN/NAS customer and Isilon for the scale-out Petabyte imaging applications, however, the VNX is merely a Clariion with 25 year old technology sitting behind a Celerra NAS gateway. They were able to craft a unified message merely by uniting the management of each in a single GUI. Now, I am not saying that this is all together bad, but this has proven to have scalability and performance issues in the past and although components are faster, the underlying bottlenecks have not changed. This is why Isilon will play a more strategic role for EMC in the future. Isilon is a scale-out NAS platform. Adding nodes increases performance linearly and reduces overall overhead of the system. Due to the architecture, Isilon is more geared for large file NAS deployments (in particular, the way in which Isilon handles Level 1 and Level 2 caching within the system) and is not really a unified platform.

Hitachi BlueArc NAS with an AMS 2000 series behind it shares much of the same inefficiencies as the VNX and it not a true unified platform. It has however found its niche in its ability to address Billions of small files efficiently.

Until recently, I had not had much deep technical experience with new age file systems such as ZFS (Zettabyte File System) and CASL (Cache Accelerated File System). Like NetApps WAFL, ZFS, found as the basis for Oracle’s Unified Platform, Nexsan’s E5000 and IceWEB, is a WIFS (Write In Free Space) file systems. This makes them extremely efficient as blocks are not over-written, but written to free space, updating the file system index with the new location. CASL which runs at the heart of Nimble Storage is a file system always writes in stripes across the whole disk group. One could argue that this makes compression more efficient and increases performance for random workloads.

The contention for the past several years has been centered around the limitations of the file system to effectively manage the transactional nature of the index. The addition of SSD into ZFS and CASL file system architectures reduces this bottleneck even during high IO transactional workloads. Each of these “next generation” unified platforms can accommodate Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, WebDAV, HTTP as well as a host of other protocols. Furthermore, the flexibility of leveraging commodity oriented hardware makes these architectures cost effective.

Too often people mix fact, fiction and opinion into a technology blog that is meant to inform. This DST blog has been started to remove the spin and give an honest assessment of the direction of the storage industry.

We are at an exciting time, especially in storage. The slow but steady adoption by the storage industry of external SAN storage virtualization has taken root, as evidenced by EMCs push with VPLEX, adds new possibilities and also complexities into the environment. Hitachi, IBM and Falconstor all offer a virtualization layer product, yet each is very different in capabilities and design. Virtualization is increasing being adopt in the NAS world as well to simplify migration and put a policy engine in front of the data. We also see the lines blurred – convergence between storage tool sets to augment backup, disaster recovery and business continuity and traditional backup products being more integrated at the storage layer. Customers are rethinking the entire backup paradigm that has existed for years.

This is fast becoming the decade of scale-out, scale up, scale over………… and the introduction of old technology in a new way is sweeping the scale-___ world. With the productizing of object-based storage, the Petabytes are becoming what used to be Megabytes. Scaling up to Exabytes is the new rage. With this technology comes a new method of access, removing the bloated file system and having applications track objects through an API or WebDAV access.

This blog hopes to shed some light into the world of storage and how customers can move tactically while making good strategic decisions for their enterprise.