Washington Archives: A hardware failure leads to a fresh start on the storage front with DataCore

Washington Archives Management (WAM) is a 50-person archiving service that stores, archives and manages paper records.

A hardware failure leads to a fresh start on the storage front
“Two ESX servers had WAM’s environment virtualized onto them, but the ESX servers had no shared storage,” notes Steve Parlee, Senior Systems Consultant, Moose Logic. “The two servers were running local, internal storage – and one had a direct-attached drive shelf. This was not a very convenient set-up because we could not, for example, VMotion the guests between servers in case of a failure.”

Moving the virtualized guests to the other server (in case of a hardware failure) was difficult because there was no shared storage – no SAN was in place, which is necessary to “motion” the virtual guests. As fate would have it, the firm did experience one ESX server failure and therefore was forced to run on only one ESX server. Without redundancy in the network, if any other component had failed, Washington Archives Management would have been “out of business” until it was fixed.

WAM considered two options. The firm could either go back to where it had been with the two VMware ESX servers and simply try to become more stable, or it could do some forward-thinking and put in place a SAN that would make the consequences of hardware failure a thing of the past. “We could have just replaced the ESX server and stayed on the path we were – risking future hardware failures that would yet again impact business operations,” says Parlee. “The choice Washington Archives Management made was to go with a shared storage approach and to use DataCore as the foundation of that whole strategy.”

Utilizing XenServer and shared, network storage from DataCore– a “no-brainer”
Moose Logic advised WAM to deploy DataCore because it allows the firm to replicate in real time their storage between two nodes. In addition, Moose Logic replaced the ESX servers with Citrix XenServers. With the XenServers, Moose Logic was able to utilize something called multi-pathing. “With muti-pathing, we have been able to take down half of WAM’s network for maintenance – without impacting day-to-day operations,” comments Parlee.

“Because of the shared storage and the fact that the storage is virtual, WAM now has the ability to ‘XenMotion’ the guests back and forth between two different pieces of hardware,” continues Parlee. “The other notable capability is high availability. If any of the Citrix XenServers were to crash, it will automatically restart on the other server. And what makes this possible is the back-end, shared storage.”

What accounts for the storage being “virtual” lies in the fact that DataCore enables a system administrator to take a “volume” (i.e. a piece of disk space for storage) from each of the two SANmelody nodes and mirror them. When these volumes are mirrored together, this creates a single “virtual volume” which is what is then presented to the application server (e.g. XenServer, Windows Server, etc.). By doing this, the application servers only see the one instance of the “virtual volume,” but in reality that virtual volume is tied to the mirrored volumes. It is this key feature – inherent to SANmelody – that enables the system to failover.

A virtualized IT environment – radically simple, high availability storage virtualization solution
The redundant SANmelody SAN servers that are currently in operation on the back-end are mirrored to each other using synchronous replication. “It is all about the redundancy – the fault-tolerance for failover,” explains Parlee. “We can lose up to three components – two servers and a switch – and everything keeps running. You see, either one of the SANmelody servers can present storage. Only one is presenting it at any time, but if one goes down, without impacting the environment whatsoever, the system seamlessly switches over to SANmelody number two and just keeps right on running.”

Summarizes Radford, “The bigger picture here is that technology like this has previously been prohibitively expensive for a small to mid-size business customer. Sure, large companies have been deploying virtual servers and virtual SANs, but they have had to pay a huge price for doing so. DataCore’s SANmelody enables the small business to get this kind of virtualization environment built and to do so without paying for Fibre Channel or paying over $100,000 for the SAN alone, which is what has made having a SAN unattainable for a large number of customers – before DataCore paved the way.”

Citrix XenServer for Free; What does server virtualization for free mean for storage virtualization?

Opinion, more server virtualization projects will feed storage virtualization deployments. Is this a trend? Is server virtualization becoming a commodity?

The battle at the virtual server market is heating up and these are the questions being asked. So what just happened? Citrix is now making XenServer free since it has had a hard time making inroads against the giant VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V initiatives and pricing (see articles below). A benefit of the industry cost battle is that it helps fuel more virtualization projects…which obviously stresses the need for shared storage SANs but the high cost of the SAN (often the largest cost item - typically costing well over $75k) then becomes the major hurdle to virtualization deployments.

This virtualisation and consolidation of servers results in 2 major pain points - it concentrates I/O performance (slows it down) and since all the applications are running on fewer servers it magnifies the impact of interruptions on business continuity -the 'All the eggs in one basket' impact: InformationWeek - Virtualization Driving SMB/SME Storage . This battle at the virtual server level bodes well for DataCore high-availability SAN software solutions… since DataCore overcomes these critical pain points. Citrix XensServer is now Free (XenCenter, XenMotion, Resource Pools, etc. ). Check out this overview: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/02/citrix-xenserver-is-now-free-xencenter.html

DataCore & VMWare Storage VMotion - Solving Troublesome Migration Problems

An interesting day in the life story...submitted today from one of the DataCore Technical Account Managers in the UK...

March always presents an interesting time in local government; the end of the financial year sees the opportunity for the IT managers to get the projects that they've always wanted to do out of the way. This was no different for a large hospital system client that I visited this morning. They have purchased DataCore and were at the stage of the project that most IT Managers dread... Attempting to calculate the downtime and risk of the implementation of a brand new SAN environment.

Lists of application servers had been drawn up, tiers had been assigned, timescales were mooted and several small conversations were taking place amongst the people involved as to what needed to go first and what could be coped without when. The migration was to move from CX300 hardware to a DataCore SANsymphony environment housed upon large storage servers. Initially a 2 node configuration, with a primary production SAN and a DR SAN housed 8 miles away at the sister hospital, the purpose of the project was to provide an initial DR strategy and Storage expansion for a virtualised environment, culminating in the implementation of a Microsoft Sharepoint environment to improve the efficiency and end user experience within the PCT.

So after about 15 minutes of discussion I asked what version of ESX they were on... 3.0.1 came the reply. This quickly turned into a discussion regarding the upgrade path of VMWare from 3.0.1 to 3.5 and when the ease of this became apparent the solution became a no-brainer. Use Storage VMotion! By provisioning the DataCore Virtual Volumes to the ESX hosts as datastores, we can then Storage VMotion from one datastore to the other! There will be NO downtime at all! Having gone through the idea in a little more detail it became obvious that it was watertight and what was a potentially awkward, convoluted meeting with tight schedules became an easy discussion about just how flexible the solution was.

The icing was the cake was the point at which we decided that we could "chuck a 4GB HBA into the storage server" for the time that the 3rd node is to be implemented... "It'll just mean we can bang it in without any downtime again..." was the final comment on the matter.

10 Thin Provisioning Storage Options for SMBs

Another SMB, RealTime Services Group Inc., which provides service and support to small staffing firms, has been using thin provisioning for two years. Jeff Sabotin, director of IT, selected DataCore Software Corp.'s SANmelody software for his 12 servers at an initial cost of $25,000. Prior to the installation, some of RealTime's servers had plenty of storage available and some sorely needed more.

"Expanding and adding partitions took a lot of time, so thin provisioning was a big deal for us," Sabotin said. "We're a small shop, and we don't have a ton of money."

10 Thin Provisioning Storage Options for SMBs

Thin provisioning makes a lot of sense for SMBs. By delivering
rewards such as improved storage utilization, lower costs and
simplified management, thin provisioning appears to be the right tool
for these tough times.

To help you evaluate the viability of thin provisioning, our
editorial team has assembled this market overview, with specific
deployment examples and descriptions of 10 products that are shipping
now:
http://go.techtarget.com/r/6149719/1283994

Storage Managment; Replication; New Features for Datacore SANmelody and SANsymphony

High performance and availability from VMware shared storage

http://www.prosecurityzone.com/Customisation/News/IT_Security/Backup_Data_Recovery_and_Disaster_Recovery/High_performance_and_availability_from_VMware_shared_storage.asp SANmelody and SANsymphony from DataCore provide virtualized storage solutions for maximizing availability in VMware virtual infrastructures

ENTnews: The Storage Management Gap
http://entmag.com/reports/article.asp?EditorialsID=142
In the world of storage solutions, management remains a huge gap in the administration of storage subsystems. It's a challenge to manage storage at any level, because data center hardware growth is typically heterogeneous.

Although many strategies exist to help manage the terabytes, the proprietary solutions available today only rarely interoperate. "To date," says Jon Toigo, an expert on storage management, "the industry has shown only limited interest in making products work together in any sort of coherent management scheme. Until some of the incompatibilities in array controllers and fabric switches are fixed, the success of a storage virtualization strategy in delivering these values may be limited. As with most technologies, try it before you buy it."

Solutions for these incompatible systems range from simple backup, to archives and replication, to single-instancing. But one of the tools that has seen growth is storage virtualization. In fact, more and more products such as SANmelody from DataCore Software Corp. and Network Storage Server from FalconStor Software have been positioned by vendors as virtualization solutions.

SearchStorageChannel.com: Remote data replication: Hardware vs. host vs. backup replication - George Crump
Solution provider takeaway: For customers that are shoring up their disaster recovery strategy with remote data replication, storage solution providers can guide them toward the right replication approach -- hardware- vs. host vs. backup-based replication -- by examining a number of key factors.

...An alternative approach is to use a storage virtualization appliance like those available from DataCore and Falconstor to handle the remote data replication services. A storage virtualization appliance allows the customer to replicate from anything to anything. This is an ideal solution to recommend to customers if you don't happen to provide the storage that they already have in place. They can keep their current solution, and you can provide the virtualization appliance as well as the target storage on the remote site.

Using a storage virtualization appliance also drives down the storage costs in the remote DR site. You can provide a lower-performing system with fewer higher-capacity drives, for example. But be careful not to go to cheap. In the event of an actual disaster, your customer may have to run their production environment on this storage. Find out what the customer's tolerance is for running the production environment in degraded mode, and make hardware choices based on their level of comfort.

Finally, a storage virtualization appliance gives you the option to participate in the build-out of storage in the production site. If the customer wants to extend the use of the storage virtualization appliance beyond just remote data replication, the appliance often can provide the same functionality as the storage system itself. Features like logical unit number (LUN) allocation, snapshots and thin provisioning can all be handled by the appliance, freeing the customer to use hardware of their choosing.

The Value of Storage Virtualization Software

..."But at the end of the day, server virtualization is popular because it helps IT organizations get more out of their existing hardware investments. Right now, the only thing that does that in the realm of storage virtualization is a software-only approach to creating virtual pools out of existing storage investments."

http://blogs.eweek.com/masked_intentions/content/storage/the_value_of_storage_virtualization_software.html

The folks at DataCore, which makes software that allows IT organization to turn existing storage arrays from multiple vendors into a shared pool of disk storage, have two theories about why storage virtualization is evolving much more slowly than server virtualization.

The first theory is that most storage hardware vendors require customers to buy new storage arrays that support storage virtualization. In these difficult economic times, it's hard to make an argument that basically says an IT organization should spend a lot of additional capital now in order to save money later.

The second theory is that when IT organizations introduce storage virtualization, they are worried about performance penalties. Too often there are database and e-mail applications that don't perform so well when virtualization is introduced. To specifically deal with storage virtualization performance issues, DataCore is now adding 1TB of cache to a new 64-bit implementation of its SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 software .

DataCore's 'solid state SANs' with mega-caches to make storage virtualisation performance soar

http://www.it-director.com/enterprise/content.php?cid=11109

Enterprises with virtual environments should be intrigued by DataCore Software's developments for its venerable software-with upcoming SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 storage virtualisation releases due for general availability around month end. These include a massive boost to SAN-wide performance and improvements to high availability...

Both SANmelody and SANsymphony will now support for 64-bit "mega-caches" providing up to one terabyte (TB) of cache memory per node; so performance will scale linearly with each node added to the fabric. It means that the entire SAN operation for many virtual machines can be kept in SAN-wide caches avoiding the vast majority of disk I-O.

"This is a solid state SAN," James Price, vice president channel and product marketing told me, adding that this would dwarf anything in the market. "There will be a 600-1200% performance increase."

He explained that while the number one bottleneck for virtualisation was memory (CPU cycles and pure capacity), next came storage performance-limited by I-O to virtualised disk. So the need was to scale and deliver I-O at native speeds or more. This boost should be worth watching!

Previously DataCore has offered up to 20 GB of cache, which Price said had been competitive, but, driven by increasing virtualisation, 16-32 GB cache would be a common requirement with a lot of customers. That's a long way from the TB maximum so provides oodles of expansion for those who find they need more...

In fact, it looks like DataCore is thinking especially of large enterprises and cloud storage environments. It refers to immense storage pools which will be in constant flux-and the product enhancements have been fully integrated into DataCore's high availability solutions for Citrix disk farms. DataCore is claiming maintenance, upgrades, expansion, and failures to parts of the storage infrastructure can occur without application disruption.

There's also optional 'before- and after- the fact' thin provisioning of virtual disks for SANmelody and SANsymphony to avoid tying up physical capacity. Since virtual machines typically use only a small fraction of the total volume assigned to them, the software will automatically reclaim thinly provisioned space previously occupied in the background after applications or file systems zero it out. So the SAN gives back capacity temporarily needed to optimise resource usage.

DataCore's "Transporter" migration facility is another new option designed to cut out long backups and restores caused by complicated format conversions. It migrates disk images and workloads between different operating systems, hypervisors and storage subsystems.

Finally (for now because there is more), a re-architecting of SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 has been needed to fully exploit the power and scalability of 64-bit Windows Server 2008-both virtual and physical platforms-to provide universal storage controllers. Everything in these solutions will now support x64 technology.

So it all sounds good but the proof will be in the eating; only a few weeks to wait.

Storage Virtualization Software

Storage Virtualization Software

http://www.itreselleronline.com/download.mvc/Storage-Virtualization-Software-0001?atc~c=771+s=774+r=001+l=a&VNETCOOKIE=NO

Virtually everything hinges on storage. Server and desktop consolidation, in particular, place extraordinary demands on it. Too often, disks slow down, interrupt or endanger these centralized IT operations not because they are poorly built, but because they are physically constrained. Although VMware virtualization helps you to overcome similar limitations in processors, when it comes to advanced functions such as workload migration, load balancing, fail-over and disaster recovery, it is completely dependent on highly available (HA) shared storage. You'll be shocked at the high hardware costs and major overhaul generally proposed to put such a storage infrastructure in place.

DataCore's storage virtualization solutions deliver a more practical HA solution to VMware shared storage requirements. They abstract your storage into idealized, virtual disks akin to virtual machines. The software pools and mirrors disk blocks across available devices, despite differences in make and model. In the process, it speeds up I/O response and throughput using extensive SAN-wide caching. This lets you take optimum advantage of VMware's full suite of capabilities without hesitation. A plug-in for VMware's Virtual Infrastructure Client allows you to non-disruptively provision, share, clone, replicate and expand virtual disks among physical servers and VMs. DataCore(tm) yields the highest availability, fastest performance and fullest utilization from your storage assets, making it an essential element of your VMware configurations.

Solution Highlights

* Makes business continuity and disaster recovery practical for virtual servers, virtual desktops and general IT consolidation
* Eliminates storage-related disruptions due to inevitable maintenance, reconfiguration, upgrades, expansion and failures
* Speeds up application performance by removing disk I/O bottlenecks
* Maximizes use of available disk capacity
* Centralizes and automates storage administration despite variations in equipment

Server plus Storage Virtualization

Server plus Storage Virtualization [From Jon Toigo's Blog]

I am not a huge fan of the former, but I like the latter. And when I stack up two together, I want my servers virtualized with Virtual Iron (for reasons of cost and stability and functionality) and I want my fabric virtualized with DataCore SAN Sympony - because it freakin' works.

That's why I was delighted to see a press release today that talked about combo low pricing for both kits. And it is why I am reprinting some of the foo here. Worth a look... http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=2247

DataCore - New releases for server virtualization support

...SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 will ship next month with 64-bit software architectures and new features for virtual server users.
SANsymphony virtualizes enterprise storage-area networks (SANs), while SANmelody is aimed at Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI SANs up to 32 TB. Both provide management features such as virtual disk pooling, synchronized mirroring for high availability, load balancing and thin provisioning.
The native 64-bit controller software lets SANmelody and SANsymphony support a large cache on the physical server. Previous releases were limited to a 20 GB cache, but the new versions can theoretically support up to 1 TB.

A terabyte of cache "is at the far edge of reality for most normal sites today," said Jack Fegreus, CEO at Southborough, Mass.-based openBench Labs, a consultant and product testing firm. But a large site with big servers and a lot of virtual machines (VMs) might have 256 GB of cache. In a few years time, given Moore's Law, 1 TB of cache may well be average, Fegreus said.
Fegreus said the increased cache will allow for denser consolidation of servers into virtual machines, and could improve the performance of VM backups by minimizing I/O to disk.

Another new feature for virtual server support is the DataCore Transporter Option for SANmelody and SANsymphony, which performs conversion between physical and virtual servers. This utility allows a server to be converted from a physical Windows box to a Microsoft Corp. Hyper-V image, then to a VMware ESX image, and then back to a logical unit number (LUN) mapped to a physical server.

...DataCore customer Themis Tokkaris, systems engineer at Tucson, Ariz.-based international pest control company Truly Nolen of America Inc., said he was looking for something that would convert his virtual machine images back to physical servers. "It's also an open idea," he said. "If I'm not happy with ESX in the future, I'm not stuck with it."

Also with the releases: Organizations running VMware ESX have the option of using a new free plug-in for VMware Inc.'s Virtual Infrastructure Client, which offers "cleaner visibility and easier-to-understand mappings and paths," according to James Price, DataCore's vice president of product and channel marketing.

Plus: The DataCore releases also add a way to reclaim free capacity on volumes using thin provisioning.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1349040,00.html

Virtual Infrastructure Tutorial; Oracle rumor on buying Virtual Iron

Oracle apparently is gearing up for a virtualization play

http://localtechwire.com/business/local_tech_wire/opinion/blogpost/4643500/

Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Company who closely follows Red Hat, says Oracle is apparently getting ready to acquire Virtual Iron, a virtual server and tools maker.

Virtual Infrastructure Tutorial
http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/virtualization/virtual-infrastructure.html

Virtual Infrastructure

Virtualization Market Impact

Virtualization often comes in the form of portable software which operates on basic Intel/AMD servers ...

DataCore software is a high end provider of virtualization storage software. This software is unique because it has radically changed the ways in which storage is managed, and it does this through usage of a software program which is highly innovative, which brings together services and functions, and combines them with both the agility and the savings of the hardware independence.