Storagemag onlinemay2012 final

DAS liveS!

buDgetS Still chAllenge StorAge ShopS

also:friendlier face for cloud storage

Beware the storage apocalypse

Big adjustments to handle Big data

the effects of flash in the cloud

are disk shortages real?

cloud ArchivingThe best storage application for the cloud just might

be archiving; it’s a great way to keep long-term data on somebody else’s disks or tapes.

Managing the information that drives the enterprise

StorageVol. 11 No. 3 May 2012

From our SponSorS

Storage

3 Storage May 2012

Friendlier face for cloud storage

Beware

the storage apocalypse

Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still

challenge storage shops

Big adjustments

to handle big data

The effects of flash in the cloud

Are disk

shortages real?

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editorial | rich castagna

Cloud storage not so spooky anymore

Lower prices, no vendor lock-in, endless storage capacity—cloud storage is getting downright friendly these days.

One way you can tell a technology is maturing is when the com-petition among its purveyors starts to heat up. cloud storage still has an uphill climb to prove that it’s enterprise-worthy, but the recent, and almost simultaneous, announcements from amazon, google and microsoft about lowering their prices suggest it’s get-ting a lot closer to broader acceptance.

those three behemoths are the “real” storage behind scores of cloud storage services, along with other providers such as at&t synaptic, nirvanix and rackspace. they don’t just command our attention because of who they are; we notice because they’re big enough in the cloud storage market to have the power to ef-fectively control the direction the technology will take in the next few years.

By lowering their prices within days of one another, the Big three are clearly squaring off to position themselves well within the sights of enterprise data storage managers. it may also be a sign the cloud storage market has reached a certain level of ma-turity, with potential users focusing more on price than the tradi-tional gotchas of cloud storage (security and bandwidth).

that’s not to suggest that security and bandwidth concerns

Storage

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have disappeared; rather, enterprise buyers are likely getting a little more comfortable with how providers are dealing with those issues and are moving closer to adding cloud to their storage arsenals. so, naturally, their attention now turns to price.

what three dominant players do pricewise is bound to affect the entire market. and if that means making cloud storage more accessible, that’s good news for enterprises.

price wars aren’t the only sign that cloud storage might be mov-ing up the food chain. it’s also looking more and more like “regular” storage, meaning most of us have gotten past how exotic the con-cept of sending data into the cloud is and are now focusing on things that relate to storage wherever and whatever it is.

for example, nasuni, a vendor of network-attached storage (nas) appliances that serve as gateways to the cloud, has been touting a capability it rolled out in early 2011. it’s a cloud-to-cloud migration facility that didn’t get an awful lot of at-tention then, but it stands to catch a few more eyes now. what nasuni is offering is a way to pull your data out of one cloud stor-age service and park it at another—without recovering it back to your data center or even shipping it through some intermedi-ary. on one hand, it “simply” allows the kinds of data migrations that happen in data storage shops all the time when new gear is trucked in to replace aging systems. But put in a cloud context, it’s significant in that it may erase another bugaboo about cloud storage: vendor lock-in.

yet another sign that cloud storage might finally be escap-ing its adolescence is cloud storage shoppers starting to evalu-

There are still only a handful of major players, which is always a con-cern in a market, even if they all drop their prices at the same time.

Storage

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ate providers as services rather than “things.” the utility concept is beginning to take hold, and cloud storage users are more in-terested in service-level agreements (slas) than in what kind of equipment their data ends up on. “how,” “when” and “why” are all becoming a lot more important than “where.” if you think of cloud storage as a big disk in the sky, you might have to alter that im-age. as cloud storage gains popularity, there’s no way providers will be able to maintain all their customers’ data on spinning disk. tape vendors are salivating at this prospect, and probably laughing up their sleeves at the irony of 21st century storage turning out to be based on a medium that’s been repeatedly declared dead. case in point: fujifilm just launched permavault, its new cloud archive service targeting its health care and media and entertain-ment customers, and behind the curtain is a lot of tape fronted by crossroads systems’ strongBox gateway device, which leverages the linear tape file system (ltfs).

these are all promising signs, although none is reason enough to completely forfeit a healthy skepticism about cloud storage just yet. there are still only a handful of major players, which is always a concern in a market, even if they all drop their prices at the same time. and you still have to use caution when you send your data off-site, pretty much as you do when you hand your tapes over to the folks in brown shorts driving big brown trucks.

But even that may be a good sign. the more cloud storage looks like “traditional” storage, the more likely it will get adopted and (hopefully) even more vendors will start pushing out products that will help integrate on-premises storage with cloud services. inte-grating cloud storage with existing systems—as backup, as an ar-chive, as nearline storage—still seems to be the key to convincing more storage managers to consider cloud storage services. n

Rich Castagna is editorial director of the Storage Media Group.

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One reADing of the stelae discovered in the ancient ruins in and around the yucatan peninsula holds that the world is kaput as of december 21, 2012. so you can understand why i wanted to get this column published now.

while the consensus of the scientific community regarding the mayan apocalypse is that somebody did their math wrong by omitting the exponent that properly places the end of everything at a somewhat later date (41 octillion or 4.124105 x 1028 years af-ter this december), you just never know. exponents, or “powers of 10” as my first math teacher called them, are shorthand expres-sions after all. as such, they’re simplifications intended to limit the number of integers required to express large numeric values so we can do math with our fingers or fit big numbers onto the screens of our smartphone calculator applications.

while useful, the incorrect use of exponents can lead to error and misapprehension. instead of our sun going supernova in 50 million years, a misplaced exponent could put this extinction-level event a mere five years away.

consider the exponents idc and others have begun to use to describe data storage capacity growth. an analyst’s chart pre-sented at a trade show last year showed storage capacity growth

storage revolutIOn | jon toigo

Were those crazy Mayans thinking about storage?

Give or take a few million years, the Mayans say we’re doomed; but our data storage systems

may be living on borrowed time right now.

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worldwide topping 21 exabytes in 2011. that’s 21 x 1018 bytes. inter-estingly, the analyst said the data created in 2010 totaled some-thing like 10 exabytes or 10 x 1018, so all that storage capacity was a good thing. (for the record, i regard “data explosion” estimates like idc’s, funded as they are by array makers, to be just as cred-ible as the apocalyptic in-terpretations of the mayan stone tablets. fear, uncer-tainty and doubt are use-ful tools for selling stuff, whether it’s overpriced stor-age arrays or mayan apoca-lypse t-shirts.)

referring to the stor-age growth chart, this ana-lyst went on to argue that transactional data had been declining as a share of to-tal data being stored, while file data was growing. But that was old news; they had been saying that file storage had exceeded block storage since the mid-aughties. more interesting to me was their assertion that the capacity allocated to replicating data had grown to approximately half of the total capacity deployed, sug-gesting that most companies were using their most expensive disk to make copies of the stuff they already stored on their most expensive disk. if true, this statistic makes me sick to my stom-ach for three reasons.

first, given a 7% to 14% failure rate in disk per year, based on the experience of google and others, that means somewhere be-tween 1.4 exabytes and 2.9 exabytes of data will be compromised by simple disk failures in 2012. it’s a scary thought, and one array makers use to encourage us to purchase spare drives and unused capacity to replace failing platters.

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Given a 7% to 14% failure rate in disk per year… that means somewhere between 1.4 exabytes and 2.9 exabytes of data will be compromised by simple disk failures in 2012.

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second, given current estimates of data growth in companies de-ploying server virtualization—from 300% over the next three years according to idc, to more than 600% over the same period per gart-ner—the total capacity demand for storing production data will end up between 300 exabytes and 650 exabytes by 2015. if you double that number to include disk-based replication schemes, you’re look-ing at a total data storage capacity requirement that exceeds a zettabyte (1.3 zettabytes or 1.3 x 1021 by gartner’s estimate). factor in the additional capacity we’ll need to purchase to keep up with drive failure rates, and you’ll need to add another 91 ex-abytes to 182 exabytes of replacement disks.

third, if you consider the energy requirements for that much disk, both to power and cool them, you’re looking at a sig-nificantly greater energy demand and cost than we confront today. hard disk power consumption rang-es from approximately 3 watts to 10 watts. calculate how many disk drives are required to deliver 1.3 zettabytes of capacity, plus another 100 exabytes of powered spare drives, and we’re looking at some serious power consumption. moreover, the heat dissipation requirements for a storage plant in excess of a zettabyte of capacity will be well above the current estimate of about 2 kilowatts per square foot of data center floor space to somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 kilowatts per square foot. mix in the energy required to power the disk and the energy required to dissipate the heat with the in-creasing cost of utility power (up 23.2% on average in the u.s. over

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We need to get strategic with our storage planning or else the apocalypse we’ll really be confront-ing in the next couple of years—perhaps as soon as December 21 for some firms—will be of our own making.

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the past two years, according to USA Today), and you’ve created a real witches brew.

all this paints a pretty apocalyptic picture of data storage and its costs going forward. unlike the mayan apocalypse, however, our movement along this path is not pre-ordained or inevitable.

compression and data deduplication (preferably done as a func-tion of the file system) will have an impact along the way. and magnetic media manufacturers are working on reducing power demands and improving energy efficiency at the component level. But altering this dismal picture significantly will require a more holistic or systemic rethinking of our data storage strategies.

we’ll need to get much more particular about what we store and where we store it. we’ll need to challenge the disk industry’s mantra about the inefficacy of tape-based storage and bring it back online sooner for hosting, archiving and protecting the 40% to 70% of data that doesn’t need to be stored on spinning disk. and we might just have to eschew any server virtualization software approach that requires an unwieldy reconfiguration and replica-tion of our storage infrastructure to obtain anything like accept-able i/o performance from applications.

in short, we need to get strategic with our storage planning or else the apocalypse we’ll really be confronting in the next couple of years—perhaps as soon as december 21 for some firms—will be of our own making and not the result of a galactic reset predicted by some crazy mayan text. n

Jon william Toigo is a 30-year IT veteran, Ceo and managing principal of Toigo Partners International, and chairman of the Data Management Institute. Correction: in my january column (“iops per what?”), i mistakenly asserted that hp/3par’s 450,000 iops record on the storage performance council’s spc Benchmark was achieved by short-stroking disk. i was informed this wasn’t the case, as the work-load was spread across 1,900 drives that weren’t short stroking. while the rig does support short stroking, the technique wasn’t used in this test. i regret the error.

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IT woulDn’T SeeM necessary to start a discussion about archiving by defining the term, but it is. in the early days of computing, ar-chiving was understood to be the process of moving data on tape to a remote facility for long-term storage. now, however, archiving has taken on numerous meanings based on context. archiving can be the “auto-archive” simplicity of microsoft outlook, moving older data to cheaper storage as well as more traditional long-term off-line storage. in the context of cloud computing, we’ll define it to mean relegating data to a third-party location for the purposes of

by phil Goodwin

One of the best applications for cloud storage is data archiving. Cloud archiving services can offer accessibility and data preservation at a fraction of the cost of building an on-site archive infrastructure.

Cloud storage

archivingfor

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lowering costs, improving data protection or both while still main-taining a reasonable degree of data access.

HOw lOng is lOng?regardless of context, implicit in the notion of archive is time—typically a long time. But “long” is a relative concept. for most financial data it means seven years, 20 years for pharmaceutical research, and more than 50 years for some medical records and nuclear records. in general, retaining data on spinning (or even spin-down) disk for 10 years or more is cost-prohibitive even in the cloud. so, for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll define “long” as between one year and seven years. for data retention exceed-ing seven years, disk systems will be the media of choice in only specialized applications. some examples of those specialized apps include geospatial data (i.e., oil and gas exploration images), medi-cal images and aircraft maintenance logs where the frequency of access is low but the probability of retrieval at some point is high; therefore, the time and difficulty of recovering 15-year-old tapes is likely to be unacceptable.

Price vs. PerfOrmancecloud-based archive opens the possibility of a “just right” balance between cost and accessibility. tape has been, and remains, far and away the lowest cost method of storing data for years. a typi-cal lto tape holding approximately 1 tB of data costs roughly $35 with monthly off-site storage in the range of 25 cents per month. there’s no way for even the cheapest cloud disk to compete with this price. on the downside, the normal retrieval time for a tape from archive is next-day delivery plus the time needed to mount and restore it. this means users will wait about a business day before being able to access the information requested.

cloud storage, on the other hand, starts at approximately 10

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http://searchsmbstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Getting-started-with-cloud-archiving-Tips-for-smaller-businesses

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Archiving-data-to-cloud-storage-How-to-choose-the-right-cloud-storage-provider

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14 Storage May 2012


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cents/gB per month and up (depending on volumes). this adds up when contemplating hundreds of tBs, but it’s still often less than the cost to procure, deploy and manage arrays in a central data center. whereas tape retrieval is measured in business days, data hosted on cloud storage can be accessed in seconds. for some apps, this may be the ideal tradeoff between price and performance.

clOud advantages, disadvantagesBefore going all-in on cloud archiving, however, it needs to weigh the virtues of cloud with in-house archiving. technologically, cloud providers can’t offer anything that can’t be implemented in-house. so a company may, for example, choose to implement a tiered storage infrastructure with tier 3 high-capacity sata disk to achieve a lower av-erage cost per gB stored. generally, organizations will lean toward an in-house solution if they can’t risk the loss of connectivity to a remote location, have regu-latory requirements that require strict data security oversight or have data retrieval requirements where remote laten-cy would be unacceptable. this is a fairly restrictive list, but there are still many applications that are candidates for cloud archiving.

it organizations can quantify the logistical effort to migrate to cloud, but shouldn’t overlook a predictable but unforeseen chal-lenge: a mind shift from a technology-centric perspective to a service-level management perspective. it staff used to making technology choices and deployments often want to delve into the cloud vendor’s architecture and “suggest” product or technology-specific implementations. rarely are such requests warranted, as

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IT departments really shouldn’t be concerned with the underlying technology, provided contractual service levels are met.

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Cloud-storage-Five-best-practices-for-moving-to-the-cloud

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Cloud-storage-Five-best-practices-for-moving-to-the-cloud

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the vendor maintains full responsibility for managing the cloud infrastructure. it departments really shouldn’t be concerned with the underlying technology, provided contractual service levels are met. with experience, staff attention will gradually shift from low-level details to higher-level governance.

service is tHe critical factOrservice-level management, then, is critical to the initial decision for cloud archiving as well as ongoing operations. when shopping for a cloud archival vendor, consider the following service-level issues:

uptime. for most applications, three nines or four nines of avail-ability are sufficient to meet business requirements. if you need five nines, you probably have data access requirements that aren’t conducive to an archive tier. data hosted in an archive tier is, by definition, non-critical. the uptime requirement largely determines how much infrastructure the vendor must provision, so it has a big impact on the hosting cost. don’t guess; determine the actual hours

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• Cloudarchiving is a tradeoff between accessibility and cost. it may yield the lowest cost while delivering acceptable data access performance.

• Usingacloudprovider requires the it organization to shift from managing machines to managing service levels.

• Clearlydefinedservicelevels are the key to successful cloud archive hosting.

• Organizations should have an exit strategy in case things go wrong.

Key cloud archiving considerations

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when data will be accessed, access patterns and cost of downtime. these calculations can be compared to the cost of various uptime guarantees, and easily justified or rejected based on the compari-son. Vendors often offer hosting-fee rebates or other performance penalties for missing service-level agreements (slas). however, the caveats are contained in the fine print, so read them.

Accessibility. accessibility and uptime aren’t necessarily the same. the storage may be humming, but the subcomponents ren-der an application unavailable. if you need redundancy or multiple redundancy of data links, for example, you’ll have to pay for them

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while many it shops still consider their old backup tapes to be “archives,” there are specific use cases and access require-ments that distinguish archives from backup data. Backups are done to protect data that’s currently in use; if data has to be restored from a backup, it generally happens shortly after that backup was made. Backup data typically has a short shelf life.

archives are sets of data that will be retained for a long pe-riod of time for regulatory compliance, corporate governance or use as intellectual property. archives are accessed infre-quently, but are searchable so specific data can be recovered relatively quickly and easily.

the storage networking industry association makes a dis-tinction between cloud backups and cloud archiving services:“Whereas with Cloud Backup the cloud is simply a reposi-tory of backup data, with Cloud Archive and Preservation, the Cloud is where the active processes occur that ensure long term retention, preservation and viability of data.”

Archive vs. backup

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but the alternative may be unacceptable application outages. make sure service levels encompass end-to-end data availability.

performance. Quantify how many iops your applications require and ensure this number is part of the sla. iops can be measured either as an average or during peak activity. if you demand iops guarantees at peak, then you’ll have to pay for the vendor to provi-sion them. some vendors may offer metered billing, but many orga-nizations don’t like the potential uncertainty of such billing should demand suddenly spike. most organizations will absorb a certain amount of constrained operation (especially for an archive tier) in return for cost certainty. in this case, the sla is for guaranteed iops, not absolute performance experienced by the end user. if ap-plication demands exceed contracted iops capacity, it’s rightly the it organization’s problem; additional iops can always be purchased.

Data recoverability. as they do for in-house applications, it or-ganizations need to specify recovery point objective (rpo) and re-covery time objective (rto) requirements for cloud-based archives. this is related to uptime, but also covers contingencies such as data corruption or a component failure that doesn’t affect overall uptime but impacts individual applications. the vendor should have default values for rpo and rto, which may be sufficient for an ar-chive tier. again, don’t guess. know what kind of data loss and ap-plication unavailability the business units can financially tolerate. in many cases, it’s much more than is intuitive.

Disaster recovery (Dr). if the cloud archive is used as off-site replicated storage to satisfy data redundancy requirements, it may not be necessary to consider a dr strategy for this tier. But buyer beware: most hosted storage doesn’t include any dr contin-gency. if the hosted data is “live” data provisioned as hybrid cloud storage, then a dr plan may be necessary. hosting providers may regularly back up the data, but they generally don’t rotate the data off-site, and if they do, they do so infrequently (e.g., monthly). al-

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http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/Jon-Toigos-top-tips-on-IOPS-performance-in-the-data-center

http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/feature/Disaster-recovery-in-the-cloud-explained

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though a disaster at a sas-70 compliant data center is unlikely, it’s not impossible. dr capability from a hosting company is often a significant additional expense and can change the economics of hosting in a hurry. make sure data isn’t left in a vulnerable state.

backup and recovery. even if the hosting vendor backs up the data regularly and rotates it off-site frequently, it organizations may not be out of the woods. hosting companies usually have a limited number of backup software options and tape technolo-gies. this means their backup format (hardware, software or both) may be incompatible with your it systems. if an it organization is forced to do a recovery from the vendor’s tapes, there could be a substantial delay in acquiring the necessary infrastructure. ensure there’s a way out in a worst-case scenario.

compliance. archived data that requires special compliance treatment may still be a candidate for cloud hosting. you’ll need to ensure the data is retained on immutable media, if required. you’ll probably also need assurance that strict access guidelines are fol-lowed and auditable; sas-70 providers should have such processes in place.

cost certainty and granularity. one of the key benefits to cloud storage hosting for archiving rather than using in-house in-frastructure is that you pay only for the storage consumed. the metering should go up or down with use, though it may have a floor minimum.

turn taPes intO clOud arcHivesit’s clear that cloud archiving may be attractive to companies with aging data stored on relatively expensive in-house arrays. more questionable is whether or not converting from tape-based ar-chives to cloud archives makes sense. larger organizations may have tens of thousands of tapes in off-site archives. the process of retrieving all those tapes and reading them onto a cloud archive

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infrastructure is daunting. it also assumes the provider has the necessary hardware to read all the tapes, some of which may be in obsolete formats. moreover, there’s no way a cloud provider could host such a data volume at anything close to the cost of tapes sit-ting in a glorified warehouse. disk compression and data dedupli-cation can help significantly, but the difference in cost is still likely to amount to a substantial premium.

even though the hurdles for converting tape to cloud archiving are high, it may still be a consideration. tapes more than seven years old are likely to be very expensive—and possibly problemat-ic—to restore. Best practices dictate that organizations retrieve and rewrite tapes every five years to ensure the data is readable and the format is current. it’s a task to be reckoned with. for example, with a 10,000 tape archive and a five-year refresh cycle, a company would have to refresh 2,000 tapes each year. that comes to approximately eight tapes per workday, which is do-able, but requires a year-around effort for what’s fundamentally a nonproduc-tion exercise. here again, the crux of the matter lies in the prob-ability of retrieval. some organizations choose to allow tapes to become obsolete in the vault with the knowledge that a recovery would be painful, but the probability of needing to restore the data is low enough to be worth the risk. on the other hand, if you know a recovery is all but inevitable, you may opt to incur the time and

It’s clear that cloud archiving may be attractive to companies with aging data stored on relatively expensive in-house arrays. More questionable is whether or not converting from tape-based archives to cloud archives makes sense.

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expense of moving from tape to cloud now, thus saving significant time and effort later, perhaps under urgent conditions.

that’s not to suggest that tape is losing its role in archiving. it’s still the lowest cost choice for most situations. in addition, lto’s linear tape file system (ltfs) is enabling tape to take on a new role as “tier 4” storage, so it can act as another tier in the cloud (or data center) that’s provi-sioned along with tiers 0, 1, 2 and 3. in a cloud archive environment, this would effectively enable a hybrid cloud that offers relatively fast access (e.g., minutes) but at the price point of tape for rarely accessed data. the tapes will also have built-in compression, and the options of encryption and worm. using automated tiering software, data can be moved auto-matically to the archive tier.

tHe inevitable “wHat if”so far, we’ve painted a fairly positive picture of cloud archiving ser-vices. usually the effort yields the desired result, but not always. organizations should consider what would happen if they trans-ferred tens of tBs of data to a provider and then failed to realize the desired or contracted results. sure, penalties might kick in, but small monetary penalties wouldn’t fully compensate for the true cost, aggravation or damage to the it organization’s reputation for delivery. contingencies begin with a contract that may be ter-minated without penalty for failure to meet specific performance levels. it should also include a plan for alternative hosting capabili-ties, either back in-house or with another provider. cloud archiving is fairly low on the list of risky endeavors, but smart organizations will be prepared for anything. n

Phil Goodwin is a storage consultant and freelance writer.

Regardless of context, implicit in the notion of archive is time—typically a long time.

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DIReCT-aTTaCheD SToRaGe (DaS) is storage installed in a server or external cabinet that’s still connected directly to the server. das is storage that’s essentially captive to a particular server, so the serv-er doesn’t need to traverse a network to read and write data.

das has been criticized as an inefficient way to connect stor-age to a server and as an obstacle to the data protection process. storage that’s locally attached can’t be shared, which can lead to a situation where one server can be running out of disk capacity while others have plenty to spare. without shared storage, there’s

by GeorGe Crump

lIveSDirect-attached storage may seem passé, but it’s making a comeback and gaining widespread interest.

DAS

http://searchstorage.techtarget.co.uk/feature/New-forms-of-direct-attached-storage-emerge-to-meet-VM-I-O-demands

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no way to balance capacity demands.das could complicate the data protection process because each

server would have to be backed up individually and the data copied across the network. alternatively, each server would have its own locally attached tape device and backup application that would add even more complexity to the backup process.

shared storage in the form of a storage-area network (san) or network-attached storage (nas) device was supposed to address these issues and thus hasten the extinction of das. But das is still a common method of attaching storage to a server; in fact, it’s enjoyed something of a comeback in recent years. the resurgence reached new heights this year when emc announced a pci express (pcie)-based solid-state storage product designed to enable its networked storage systems to store some data locally on the server.

san and nas underdeliverone reason das continues to live on is that san and nas have largely underdelivered on their promises. sans were supposed to make it easy to create a global pool of storage that could be dynamically divvied up among servers so that only the capacity actually needed at the time was assigned to a server. for the first eight years or so of the technology’s existence, this capability was largely unavailable, and san storage had to be hard partitioned to individual servers. when a server needed more capacity, a new partition had to be allocated to that server and then concatenated into the existing storage pool on the server or, worse, managed separately. the process of adding storage to a server on a san was very similar to the prior das methodology.

23

DAS is still a common method of attaching storage to a server; in fact, it’s enjoyed something of a comeback in recent years.

Storage

24 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

data protection was also supposed to get a lot easier. the goal was to back up the san directly and not have to back up the indi-vidual servers. while a few software applications were able to ac-complish that feat, all suffered from blindly backing up data and not understanding what that data was. users quickly realized they needed something called “application awareness” to back up ac-tive applications and then perform intelligent restores. as a result, some form of backup software was required on the servers.

finally, the price of san or nas technology is still significantly higher than das. many users have decided it’s less expensive to inefficiently directly attach storage than to efficiently share it.

to be fair, modern san and nas implementa-tions have addressed the early storage allocation shortcomings with tech-nologies like thin pro-visioning. however, the time it took to deliver on the allocation promise allowed das to build on its foothold in the data center. But the other challenges remain, for the most part.

the primary driver for san/nas adoption has been the advent of server and desktop virtualization, since the ability to move vir-tual server images between physical hosts requires shared stor-age. Virtualization also makes application-aware, off-host backup viable due to the entire server being a file that can be backed up without interacting with the original physical host. But despite this new and important use case for shared storage, das continues to live on in the data center. and its value is increasing.

das bOOtone of the key reasons for das’s continued popularity in the data center is the need for a local boot drive. while most sans support

24

One reason DAS continues to live on is that SAN and NAS have largely underde-livered on their promises.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/application-aware-storage

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/SAN-vs-NAS-Which-do-you-need



Storage

25 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

some form of booting methodology, it still requires specialized host bus adapters (hBas) and specific support on the san storage sys-tem. as a result, most physical servers still boot from das storage.

thanks to solid-state drives (ssds), booting from the local server offers some specific advantages over booting from the san. first, servers can now be booted or re-booted in seconds from a local ssd. and the ssd can be used as a virtual memory paging area, which is incredibly important in virtual environments. as hosts in these environments get loaded up with virtual machines (Vms), they can quickly run out of ram and begin to use local storage as a memory paging area. if this local storage is hard disk, perfor-mance can degrade substantially. when this local storage is mem-ory based, like flash ssd, the drop in performance is negligible. ssd as a boot drive allows for more virtual machines with-out the need to purchase expensive ram.

extending tHe san witH dassolid-state storage also plays another role in the re-surgence of das adoption: as an extension to the san. leveraging even higher performing pcie-based solid-state storage, architectures are now develop-ing that allow the tiering or caching of data directly to the server needing it. pcie ssds can communicate directly with the cpu and don’t get bogged down by sas or sata protocols like typical ssds. this again makes an ideal virtual memory paging area for ram-constrained systems, but it’s the tiering or caching use case that’s becoming increasingly interesting.

with this architecture, storage systems can intelligently pre-stage the most active data within the pcie ssd. then, when a re-quest for data is made by an application or user, it will be available

25

Solid-state storage also plays another role in the resurgence of DAS adoption: as an extension to the SAN.

http://searchstoragechannel.techtarget.com/tip/PCIe-SSD-pros-and-cons-use-cases-and-VAR-recommendations

Storage

26 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

for high-speed delivery on the pcie ssd. this means the applica-tion or user doesn’t have to wait for the request to travel across the storage network, be accepted and processed by the storage controllers, wait for hard drives to rotate into position and then send the requested data or write acknowledgment all the way back up that infrastructure.

if successful, this model of storage architecture design would turn the san world up-side down. storage on the san would become the central re-pository of information that’s growing cold and the local pcie ssd das would be used for the most active data. the san would be used for long-term retention or backup, and the server would be used for active processing. this would lead to san storage system designs where capacity is the focus and performance is less im-portant. But the one downside to native pcie ssds is that you can’t boot from them, so a local sas hard drive or even an ssd in a drive form factor would still be required.

clOud cOmPute infrastructureother key drivers for the revival of das are the designs of massive storage environments like those of facebook, google and others. these systems combine compute and storage on a single server that’s highly networked for communication with the other servers. these systems often have locally attached storage and the ability to access data on other servers. they can even leverage a com-bination of pcie ssd and hard disk drive (hdd) for booting. these

26

Vendors like Nutanix offer products that are clusters of servers with internal storage to provide a turnkey cloud compute-type of infrastructure suitable for more traditional data centers.

Storage

27 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

27

online providers and internet technology companies chose this de-sign so they could get incredibly cost-efficient architectures with the ability to scale easily as new servers were added.

this model of das converged with compute was thought to be a limited use case, one that only companies with large online apps would deploy. now, however, thanks again to server virtualiza-tion, there’s often a need to build scalable compute and storage infrastructure simultaneously. Vendors like nutanix offer prod-ucts that are clusters of servers with internal storage to provide a turnkey cloud compute-type of infrastructure suitable for more traditional data centers.

server virtualization still needs shared storage to move virtual machine images and provide high availability. these converged architectures automatically copy data to the other nodes in the cluster so that the virtual machines’ images are available to any node in the cluster. this “shared das” model provides the simplicity and cost effectiveness of local stor-age while providing many of the benefits of a san.

if das lives, is san dead?das isn’t just living, it’s thriving. there are many storage experts who believe the data center is moving toward a “das mostly” en-vironment, as described above, where the san would become the long-term repository while truly active data gets stored locally on the server that needs it. the software to manage this movement of data is maturing quickly and will be used to keep active data locally. it will also be able to acknowledge the writing of new data locally and then sync that data to the capacity san in the background.

the drivers for a potential shift to this “das mostly” model are

Using SSD DAS as a booting and paging device can complete the storage perfor-mance picture.

Storage

28 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

the performance demands of the virtual environment and the per-formance capabilities of solid-state storage. one driver has a need for data locally and the other has the ability to leverage local data by avoiding the latency caused by the storage network.

still lOts Of stOrage OPtiOnsas always, there are a lot of potential options for a storage ad-ministrator when dealing with storage challenges. the first step is to invest in a performance analysis tool that can help fine-tune the current environment. this maximizes the current investment and allows for an informed decision when selecting what step to take next.

if the network or storage infrastructure can’t be upgraded due to budget or time constraints, then a valid approach would be a strategy of mixing ssd-based das with san storage. this would provide the benefit of improved performance by eliminating the storage network bottleneck for maximum ssd benefit.

if a refresh is in the budget, an investment could be made in storage network infrastructure and a shared storage system, such as an all-flash device to eliminate storage performance concerns for the foreseeable future. still, with this approach, using ssd das as a booting and paging device can complete the storage perfor-mance picture. n

GeorgeCrumpispresidentofStorageSwitzerland,anITanalystfirmfocused onstorageandvirtualization.

28


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

29 SToRaGe May 201229

SToRaGe ManaGeRS have been grappling with spiraling disk capac-ities and new demands on their data storage infrastructures, while their budgets have dwindled or languished in the doldrums. as we all strive to regain some measure of predictability, it planning is still often a tumultuous affair, and storage shops aren’t immune to the ups and downs of an economy slogging its way to recovery.

the past few Storage magazine/searchstorage.com purchasing intentions surveys have indicated that recovery is underway, but our most recent survey suggests we may still experience a bump or two on the road to recovery. the good news is that storage managers are as resourceful as ever and more than willing to entertain new tech-nologies to meet demands even if their purses are pinched a bit.

Recovery

slowsstorage shops

Storage budgets have been recovering, but progress might be slowing. Storage managers are looking for tools to get more out of the gear they have or plan to buy.

By RICh CASTAGNA

for

Storage

30 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

30

Budgets growing sloweras the economy swooned in 2009, on a year-over-year basis, storage budgets fell into negative numbers for the first time. it took a year for that to turn around with steady but modest upticks to get back to near-respect-able numbers. the latest survey, however, is less encour-aging. last year, storage budgets averaged 1.9% higher than the previous year’s; this time the difference is only 0.8%. still a positive number, but it appears storage man-agers won’t have a lot more to spend in 2012.

in dollar terms, the average 2012 storage budget is approximately $2.7 million, off about 10% from 2011. Big and midsize companies will do more belt tightening than smaller firms: the average enterprise budget is $7.5 mil-lion, down almost 10% from last spring, and midsize bud-gets slipped 8% to $2.4 million. with an average storage budget of $1.4 million, the picture’s much brighter for small companies that have struggled as larger firms recovered.

30

0%

5

10

15

#2

#3

#4

#1

-3

-2

-1

0%

1

2

3

4

5

Spring 07

Fall 07

Spring 08

Fall 08

Spring 09

Fall 09

Spring 10

Fall 10

Spring 11

Big companies

Midsize companies

Small companies

Fall 11

Spring 12

3.7

3.9

2.9

3.2

-1.9

-0.40

0.6

1.8 1.9

22

52

89

0.8

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

TB

% c

han

ge

106

277

706WILL ADD IN 2012

CURRENTLY INSTALLED

SPRING 2012

SPRING 2010

SPRING 2012

SPRING 2010

0% 10 20 30 40 50

Using SSD now

Implementing SSD this year

Evaluating SSD

No SSD plans37

296

10

10

24

49

35

Data center primary data

Disaster recovery

Data center nearline data

Archiving Remote office online data

12.1

4.2

10.8

6.4

10.8

4.4

6.8 6.6

3.3

storage Budget change year over year

Key stat

averaGe amount of data that Com-panies are manaG-inG on all forms of storaGe media.

1.7 petabytes

By the numBers

averaGe Company revenue is $1.3 billion, sliGhtly less than last year’s $1.4 billion.

broken down by Company size, year-over-year storaGe budGets have made only small Gains: 1.1% inCrease for biG Companies, 2.3% for midsize and 0.6% for small Companies.

budGet money will be alloCated as it has been for sever-al years, with disk hardware GettinG the biGGest Chunk (35%) followed by staff (14%), soft-ware (13%) and main-tenanCe fees (12%).

Storage

31 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

31

Disk storage still top prioritydisk systems are still the heart and soul of any storage operation. our survey companies reported an overall av-erage of 247 tB of data stored on their disks, with large companies leading with 706 tB; midsize firms reported 277 tB and small companies had 106 tB. those are pretty staggering numbers, which will only grow in 2012 as companies add an average of 41 tB of disk capacity.

for the first time since we started asking back in 2008, fibre channel (fc) wasn’t the most popular type of stor-age system installed. with 58% reporting that they’re running network-attached storage (nas) gear, those file storage systems lead the way, with fc (43%) and iscsi (42%) trailing. looking at plans for 2012 disk-related ex-penditures, the biggest chunk (34%) will once again go for additional hard drives for existing storage systems— a trend we saw starting back in 2007. new nas systems are the next-highest priority at 17%, with the rest fairly equally split among fc and iscsi storage-area networks (sans), hybrid systems and direct-attached storage (das).

31

0%

5

10

15

#2

#3

#4

#1

-3

-2

-1

0%

1

2

3

4

5

Spring 07

Fall 07

Spring 08

Fall 08

Spring 09

Fall 09

Spring 10

Fall 10

Spring 11

Big companies

Midsize companies

Small companies

Fall 11

Spring 12

3.7

3.9

2.9

3.2

-1.9

-0.40

0.6

1.8 1.9

22

52

89

0.8

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

TB

% c

han

ge

106

277

706WILL ADD IN 2012

CURRENTLY INSTALLED

SPRING 2012

SPRING 2010

SPRING 2012

SPRING 2010

0% 10 20 30 40 50

Using SSD now


Evaluating SSD

No SSD plans37

296

10

10

24

49

35


Disaster recovery



12.1

4.2

10.8

6.4

10.8

4.4

6.8 6.6

3.3

currently installed disK capacity plus capacity to Be added in 2012

Key stat

say priCe is the main faCtor in ChoosinG a primary disk system vendor.

24%

By the numBers

small Companies will add 22 tb of CapaCity, midsize firms will need another 52 tb (seCond-hiGhest hike we’ve ever seen) and biG Companies will add 89 tb.

for respondents planninG to buy storaGe arrays, 43% will Go with midranGe systems while 32% will opt for low-end systems.

twenty-seven per-Cent will buy das for new file storaGe in 2012; the rest will split their spends amonG nas filers (19%), nas Gateways (15%), virtualiza-tion (11%), Clustered systems (9%) and the ubiquitous “other” (19%).

Storage

32 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

32

Flash is solid storage alternativegiven how slowly storage tends to evolve, the adoption of solid-state storage is something of a phenomenon, going from luxury trinket to a key component of scores of sys-tems in just a few short years. right now, 24% of respon-dents are solid-state drive (ssd) users, with another 10% planning to add it this year. toss in 29% who say they’re evaluating the technology and that leaves approximately 37% on the ssd sidelines.

the most popular spot for ssd is still in storage arrays (67%), but 40% have deployed it in servers, 34% in end-user systems and 20% in caching appliances. the average capacity of installed solid-state storage is 9 tB—maybe not terribly impressive by hard disk standards, but a hefty amount of flash that has grown from an average of 6.8 tB two years ago. on average, companies planning to add solid-state storage in 2012 will up their installed capaci-ties by 7.1 tB.

32

0%

5

10

15

#2

#3

#4

#1

-3

-2

-1

0%

1

2

3

4

5

Spring 07

Fall 07

Spring 08

Fall 08

Spring 09

Fall 09

Spring 10

Fall 10

Spring 11

Big companies

Midsize companies

Small companies

Fall 11

Spring 12

3.7

3.9

2.9

3.2

-1.9

-0.40

0.6

1.8 1.9

22

52

89

0.8

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

TB

% c

han

ge

106

277

706WILL ADD IN 2012

CURRENTLY INSTALLED

SPRING 2012

SPRING 2010

SPRING 2012

SPRING 2010

0% 10 20 30 40 50

Using SSD now


Evaluating SSD

No SSD plans37

296

10

10

24

49

35


Disaster recovery



12.1

4.2

10.8

6.4

10.8

4.4

6.8 6.6

3.3

currently using, planning to deploy or evaluating solid-state storage

Key stat

of non-users say solid-state storaGe is still too expensive.

65%

By the numBers

two years aGo, only 10% of respondents said their Companies were usinG solid-state storaGe vs. 24% today.

the averaGe of 9 tb of installed ssd CapaCity represents an inCrease of 18% sinCe last fall and 32% vs. one year aGo.

thirty-one perCent say they have 10 tb or more of ssd installed.

Storage

33 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

33

Cloud storage slowly gaining fansnot too long ago, it took a leap of faith for a company to use a cloud storage service, especially for housing prima-ry or nearline data. But service providers have made great strides in the last couple of years, and they’ve begun to win over some converts. today, about 30% of companies use some form of non-backup cloud storage (more on cloud backup later); the current survey indicates that the top three applications are data center primary data (12.1%), disaster recovery (10.8%) and data center nearline data (10.8%). to put those numbers in perspective, two years ago only 14% were using non-backup cloud storage and the top app was dr at 6%.

companies using those cloud storage services have an average of 19 tB of data stored in the cloud. that’s nearly 20% higher than the number reported last fall when we asked the question for the first time. current users also seem pretty pleased with the services as 83% plan to add services in 2012, with dr (38%) and storage for primary data (37%) topping their shopping lists.

33

0%

5

10

15

#2

#3

#4

#1

-3

-2

-1

0%

1

2

3

4

5

Spring 07

Fall 07

Spring 08

Fall 08

Spring 09

Fall 09

Spring 10

Fall 10

Spring 11

Big companies

Midsize companies

Small companies

Fall 11

Spring 12

3.7

3.9

2.9

3.2

-1.9

-0.40

0.6

1.8 1.9

22

52

89

0.8

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

TB

% c

han

ge

106

277

706WILL ADD IN 2012

CURRENTLY INSTALLED

SPRING 2012

SPRING 2010

SPRING 2012

SPRING 2010

0% 10 20 30 40 50

Using SSD now


Evaluating SSD

No SSD plans37

296

10

10

24

49

35


Disaster recovery



12.1

4.2

10.8

6.4

10.8

4.4

6.8 6.6

3.3

does your company use cloud storage services for these primary or nearline storage applications?

Key stat

have already deployed—or plan to deploy—private storaGe Cloud produCts.

26%

By the numBers

some Cloud use is substantial: 44% say they have more than 10 tb in the Cloud.

only 6% are Cur-rently usinG hybrid storaGe deviCes, whiCh inteGrate on-premises storaGe with a Cloud storaGe serviCe.

nine perCent of re-portinG Companies use a Cloud file sharinG/synChinG serviCe; 7% plan to add one this year.

Storage

34 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

34

Managing storage for virtual serversserver virtualization might’ve made life easier for systems jockeys, but storage teams haven’t been so lucky. as server virtualization continues to rise, storage manag-ers are learning how to adapt to and cope with the new environment. fc (34%) is still the storage of choice for vir-tual machines (Vms), but the number is much lower than those of the last four years, when it hovered around 50%. iscsi (21%) and nas (14%) have picked up some of the slack as companies found those protocols provided adequate performance for most Vms.

Backup has been a particular headache for storage managers coping with Vms. twenty-nine percent still use traditional backup methods, with a backup client installed in each Vm. that number has dropped from 43% a couple of years ago as backup admins employ alternatives such as using specialized Vm options in their backup software (11%), backing up the physical server (11%) and Vm-specific products (7%). twenty percent are holding out and still us-ing Vmware consolidated Backup (VcB) despite its being effectively shelved by Vmware.

34

#5#6

#7#8

0%

20

40

60

80

100WE DON’T BACK UP THESE DEVICES

END USERS DO THEIR OWN BACKUP

HAVE/WILL IMPLEMENT

ACTIVELY EVALUATING/WILL EVALUATE

CLOUD BACKUPSERVICES

SPECIALIZED BACKUP SOFTWARE

MAIN BACKUP APP

IMPLEMENTED PLAN TO BUY EVALUATING NO PLANS

0% 5 10 15 20 25 30

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

184

7

11

11

20 22 23

22 21

56 61

8 8

7 77

5 410

15 18

25 22

29

Desktop PCs

Laptop PCs

Tablets Smartphones

Traditional backup apps

VMware Consolidated Backup

Our backup app's VM options

Back up entire physical server

VM-specific backup app

Continuous data protection (CDP)

No VMs yet

30 29

0% 20 40 60 80 100

Thin provisioning

Data archiving

Storage tiering

Primary storage data deduplication

Primary storage data compression 25

32

32

32

31

313136

4345

37

30 30

3024

28

3327

2627

28 14 33 25

38 9 23 30

24 11 32 33

2114 3233

31 12 34 23

10 Gig Ethernet products

Data deduplication for backup

Data encryption for security

Data reduction for primary storage

SAN/NAS gateways

DR monitoring /testing software

Solid-state storage

Change management software

Multiprotocol storage arrays

File virtualization tools

how do you BacK up your virtualized servers?

Key stat

say their Com-panies are usinG more storaGe with vms than they did before.

63%

By the numBers

eiGhteen perCent say that with vms they find they’re baCkinG up too muCh data.

for 14%, vm baCkup is still too CompliCated.

eleven perCent say they’ve had to deploy more disk to aCCommodate their vms.

more than a third (36%) say “no problem” when it Comes to vm baCkup.

Storage

35 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

Shops trying new backup approachesfor most shops, backup is still job no. 1 and headache no. 1 for a lot of them. apparently, cutting tape is one method companies are using to streamline backup operations. thirty-four percent say they’ll reduce their use of tape in 2012, about the same as we’ve seen the last two years. But only 15% say they’ll increase tape usage, which is the lowest number we’ve ever seen. still, tape hasn’t left the arena just yet, as 64% say they spin off some or all backup data to tape.

on the flip side, a healthy 44% will increase their spend-ing for disk-to-disk (d2d) products, with another 40% plan-ning to spend at 2011 levels. currently, using disk as a file system target for backups is the most popular d2d method (44%), and 27% are using data deduplication in their backup schemes. cloud backup is also starting to play a bigger role, with 31% backing up at least some data to the cloud. those still loathe to use cloud backup cite reluctance to send data into a public cloud (30%) and an effective current backup setup as the top reasons for eschewing cloud backup.

3535

#5#6

#7#8

0%

20

40

60

80



HAVE/WILL IMPLEMENT




MAIN BACKUP APP


0% 5 10 15 20 25 30

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

184

7

11

11

20 22 23

22 21

56 61

8 8

7 77

5 410

15 18

25 22

29

Desktop PCs

Laptop PCs

Tablets Smartphones







No VMs yet

30 29

0% 20 40 60 80 100

Thin provisioning

Data archiving

Storage tiering



32

32

32

31

313136

4345

37

30 30

3024

28

3327

2627

28 14 33 25

38 9 23 30

24 11 32 33

2114 3233

31 12 34 23





SAN/NAS gateways


Solid-state storage




how do you BacK up the data stored on these end-user devices?

Key stat

ByOD AleRT! only

baCk up tablets,

baCk up smartphones.

21%18%

By the numBers

Cdp may be on the rise, with 32% sayinG they’ll inCrease Cdp spendinG in 2012.

forty-six perCent—the hiGhest we’ve ever seen—plan to inCrease baCkup dedupe spendinG.

with an averaGe of 90 slots, tape li-braries are GettinG smaller, but 35% plan to purChase at least one library in 2012.

Cloud baCkup users have an averaGe of 12 tb of baCkup data in the Cloud; 93% plan to inCrease or maintain spendinG levels this year.

Storage

36 Storage May 2012


Beware


Cloud archiving

DAS lives

Budgets still


Big adjustments

to handle big data


Are disk

shortages real?

36

Growing interest in efficient storage toolstough times call for new ways to deal with old problems, and using storage more efficiently has become de rigueur for most it organizations. used by 38% of our respondents, thin provisioning is one of the easiest efficiency technolo-gies to implement; another 9% plan to add it this year and 23% will evaluate. data reduction for primary systems is also getting a lot of attention since its success in the back-up world; 24% say they’re using compression to cut stor-age down to size, while 28% say they’re using one of a handful of primary storage dedupe products.

storage virtualization is another effective method for ensuring more efficient use of installed capacity. Virtual-izing storage can still be a major undertaking, but 33% of companies have virtualized at least some of their storage —about five points higher than three years ago. Block and file storage are getting equal attention: seventy percent say some block has been virtualized and 71% say the same for file storage. the numbers drop off significantly for com-panies that have really taken the plunge: twenty percent have virtualized all their block and 18% all file storage.

36

#5#6

#7#8

0%

20

40

60

80



HAVE/WILL IMPLEMENT




MAIN BACKUP APP


0% 5 10 15 20 25 30

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

184

7

11

11

20 22 23

22 21

56 61

8 8

7 77

5 410

15 18

25 22

29

Desktop PCs

Laptop PCs

Tablets Smartphones







No VMs yet

30 29

0% 20 40 60 80 100

Thin provisioning

Data archiving

Storage tiering



32

32

32

31

313136

4345

37

30 30

3024

28

3327

2627

28 14 33 25

38 9 23 30

24 11 32 33

2114 3233

31 12 34 23





SAN/NAS gateways


Solid-state storage




nearly one-third using efficiency tools

Key stat

say they will either buy or evaluate a stor-aGe virtualiza-tion produCt.

40%

By the numBers

storaGe tierinG, used by 31% of respon-dents, puts data on the most suitable storaGe; 12% plan to add it this year.

the most popular way to virtualize storaGe is via the storaGe array (41%), followed by usinG a virtualization applianCe (38%).

twenty-seven perCent plan to evaluate storaGe virtualization this year.

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Storage tech agendastorage managers are always on the lookout for technologies or products that may help them manage their companies’ information resources better. for 2012, 71% of them will be looking to implement or evaluate 10 gbps ethernet gear to pep up their storage networks. Backup dedupe—at or near the top of the list for years now—has been or will be implemented by 43%, while 27% plan to give it the once over. data reduction for primary storage is no. 4 on the list, but it’s lost some interest vs. last year, perhaps a reflection that storage vendors just haven’t done a heck of a lot in this area yet.

some techs continue to languish at the bottom of the list—sort of a “not-to-do” list that includes implementing chargeback systems, data classification, e-discovery tools and the still-new ltfs tape indexing technology. n

Rich Castagna is editorial director of TechTarget’s Storage Media Group.

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#5#6

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11

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5 410

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29

Desktop PCs

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No VMs yet

30 29

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32

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techs at the top of to-do lists

aBout the storage purchasing intentions survey

the Storage magazine/searchstorage.com purchasing intentions survey is fielded twice a year; this is the 10th year the survey has been conducted. Storage magazine subscribers and searchstorage.com members are invited to participate in the survey, which gathers information related to storage managers’ purchasing plans for a variety of storage product categories. this edition had 687 qualified respondents across a broad spectrum of industries, with the average company size measured as having revenue of $1.3 billion.

mailto:rcastagna%40storagemagazine.com?subject=

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hot spots | terri mcclure

Dealing with big data: The storage implications

Whether it’s defining “big data,” understanding Hadoop or assessing the impact

of large data stores, storage pros need a clear understanding of the big data trend.

it SeemS impoSSible to get away from the term “big data” nowa-days. the challenge is that the industry lacks a standard definition for what big data is. enterprise strategy group (esg) defines big data as “data sets that exceed the boundaries and sizes of normal processing capabilities, forcing you to take a non-traditional ap-proach.” we apply the term “big data” to any data set that breaks the boundaries and conventional capabilities of it designed to support day-to-day operations.

these boundaries can be encountered on multiple fronts:

• the transaction volume can be so high that traditional data storage systems hit bottlenecks and can’t complete opera-tions in a timely manner. they simply don’t have enough pro-cessing horsepower to handle the volume of i/o requests. sometimes they don’t have enough spindles in the environ-ment to handle all the i/o requests. this often leads users to put less data on each disk drive and “short stroke” them. that means partially using them to increase the ratio of spindles per gB of data and to provide more disk drives to handle i/o. it also might lead users to deploy lots of storage systems

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39

side by side and not use them to their full capacity potential because of the performance bottlenecks. or both. this is an expensive proposition because it leads to buying lots of disk drives that will be mostly empty.

• the size of the data (individual records, files or objects) can make it so that traditional systems don’t have sufficient throughput to deliver data in a timely manner. they simply don’t have enough bandwidth to handle the transactions. we see organizations using short stroking to increase system bandwidth and add spindles in this case as well, which, again, leads to poor utilization and increased expense.

• the overall volume of content is so high that it exceeds the capacity threshold of traditional storage systems. they simply don’t have enough capacity to deal with the volume of data. this leads to storage sprawl—tens or hundreds of storage si-los, with tens or hundreds of points of management, typically with poor utilization and consuming an excessive amount of floor space, power and cooling.

it gets very intimidating when these things pile on top of each other—there’s nothing that says users won’t experience a huge number of i/o requests for a ton of data consisting of extremely large files. indeed, the term big data was first used when talking about the needs of specific vertical industries, such as media and entertainment organizations, and oil and gas companies.

suPPOrting stOrage arcHitectureswe’re seeing an evolution in storage architectures to help deal with the increasing volume of data associated with big data. each has slightly different, but overlapping, characteristics.

on the i/o-intensive, high-transaction volume end, esg sees a broad adoption of architectures that can scale up by adding spin-

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dles. that’s the traditional approach and systems like emc VmaX, hitachi data systems Vsp and iBm ds8000 do well here.

on the large data size front, bleeding-edge industries that have been dealing with big data for years were early adopters of scale-out storage systems designed with enough bandwidth to handle large file sizes. we’re talking about systems from datadirect net-works, hewlett-packard ibrix, isilon (now emc isilon) and panasas, to name a few. tradition-ally, scale-up implied there were eventual lim-its; scale-out has far less stringent limits and much more flexibility to add ca-pacity or processing power. as big data sizes become more of a mainstream problem, some of these systems are finding more mainstream adoption. these more mainstream environments can be a mix of i/o- and throughput-intensive performance demands, so both scale-up and scale-out are often needed to keep up.

finally, on the content volume front, we’re seeing more adop-tion of scale-out, object-based storage archive systems to make it easier to scale to billions of data objects within a single, easily managed system. the advantage of these systems is that they en-able robust metadata for easier content management and track-ing, and are designed to make use of dense, low-cost disk drives (dell dX 6000 series is a good example here).

wHat abOut HadOOP?no column on big data would be complete without a discussion of hadoop. the ability to accelerate an analytics cycle (cutting it from weeks to hours or minutes) without exorbitant costs is driving enterprises to look at hadoop, an open source technology

We’re seeing an evolution in storage architectures to help deal with the increasing volume of data associated with big data.

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that’s often run on commodity servers with inexpensive direct-attached storage (das).

hadoop is used to process very large amounts of data and consists of two parts: mapreduce and the hadoop distributed file system (hdfs). put (very) simply, mapreduce handles the job of managing compute tasks, while hdfs automatically man-ages where data is stored on the compute cluster. when a compute job is initiated, map-reduce takes the job and splits it into subtasks that can be run in parallel. it basically queries hdfs to see where the data required to complete each subtask lives, and then sends the subtasks out to run on the compute node where the data is stored. in essence, it’s send-ing the compute tasks to the data. the results of each subtask are sent back to the mapreduce master, which collates and delivers the final results.

now compare that with a traditional system, which would need a big expensive server with a lot of horsepower attached to a big expensive storage array to complete the task. it would read all the required data, run the analysis and write the results in a fairly serial manner, which at these volumes of data, takes a lot longer than the hadoop-based mapreduce job would.

the differences can be summed up in a simple analogy. let’s say 20 people are in a grocery store and they’re all processed through the same cash register line. if each person buys $200 worth of groceries and takes two minutes to have their purchases scanned and totaled, $4,000 is collected in 40 minutes by the star cashier hired to keep up. here’s the hadoop version of the scenario:

41

hadoop is used to process very large amounts of data and consists of two parts: MapReduce and the hadoop Distributed File System (hDFS).

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ten register lines are staffed by low-cost, part-time high school students who take 50% more time to finish each separate trans-action (three minutes). it now takes six minutes to ring up the same 20 people but you still get $4,000 when they hand in their cash drawers. from a business standpoint, what’s the impact of reducing a job from 40 minutes to six minutes? how many more jobs can be run in that 34 minutes you just gained? how much more insight can you get and how much quicker can you react to market trends? this is equivalent to business-side colleagues not having to wait long for the results of analytical queries.

hadoop isn’t perfect. clustered file systems are complex, and while much of this com-plexity is hidden from the hdfs admin, it can take time to get a ha-doop cluster up and running efficiently. ad-ditionally, within hdfs, the data map (called the namenode) that keeps track of where all the data lives (metadata) is a single point of failure in the current release of apache hadoop—some-thing that’s on the top of the list to be addressed in the next ma-jor release. data protection is up to the admin to control; a data replication setting determines how many times a data file is copied in the cluster. the default setting is 3, which can lead to a capacity overhead of 3x the required usable capacity. and that’s to protect in the local cluster; backup and remote disaster recov-ery (dr) need to be considered outside of the current versions of hadoop. there’s not a large body of trained hadoop professionals

42

There’s not a large body of trained hadoop professionals on the market; while firms like Cloudera, eMC and MapR are doing a good job on the education front, it’ll take time to build a trained workforce.

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on the market; while firms like cloudera, emc and mapr are doing a good job on the education front, it’ll take time to build a trained workforce. this last point shouldn’t be taken lightly. recent stud-ies show that projects planning to leverage contractors/consul-tants should budget as much as $250,000 per developer per year.

big data, bigger trutHthis laundry list of shortcomings, combined with the potential commercial analytics market opportunity, is driving big storage companies like emc, iBm and netapp to look at the big data op-portunity. each company has introduced (or will, you can count on it) storage systems designed for hadoop envi-ronments that help users cover the manageabil-ity, scalability and data protection angles that hdfs lacks. most offer a replacement to the hdfs storage layer with open interfaces (such as nfs and cfs), while others provide their own version of a mapreduce framework that performs better than the open source distribution. some offer features that fill in the open source hdfs gaps, like the ability to share data between other apps via standard nfs and cfs interfaces or, much better, data protection and dr capabilities.

netapp is actually taking a radically different approach from most vendors. they’re embracing the open hadoop standard and the use of data nodes with das. instead of using their own file system with a wrapper for hadoop, they’re turbo-charging the das with sas-connected jBod based on the low end of the engenio platform. and for the namenodes they’re using an nfs-attached fas box to provide a quick recovery from a namenode failure. it’s

Big data is a reality, and not all big data was cre-ated equal: various types of big data need different storage approaches.

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a “best of both worlds” hybrid approach to the problem.whether or not the market will pay a premium for the better

availability and broader potential application leverage still remains to be seen, as we’re in the early days yet.

Big data is a reality, and not all big data was created equal: various types of big data need different storage approaches. even if you have a big data problem and are hitting those barriers that indicate you need to do something differently, the best way for users to talk to vendors about their requirements is to cut right through the fluff and not talk about big data at all. instead, you should talk about the business problem and the use cases that will ultimately narrow the spectrum to a specific set of workload characteristics. the right storage approach will quickly become evident. n

Terri McClure is a senior storage analyst at enterprise Strategy Group, Milford, Mass.

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for Service proviDerS operating in or moving to the cloud, data storage is a strategic component of their overall offering. whether it’s a small regional managed service provider (msp) or a global cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (iaas) provider, a great storage platform can provide that competitive edge to rapidly grow your business. on the flip side, a weak storage system can be the achilles’ heel that costs a provider service-level agreement (sla) penalties or, worse, new business opportunities.

traditional storage systems have been engineered for busi-nesses that have the luxury of specialized skills and significant storage budgets. in contrast, service provider operations designed for scale with margin-optimizing efficiency require considerably more storage with considerably less complexity. most attempts by traditional vendors to address these needs have forced service providers to make painful tradeoffs in critical areas such as avail-ability, performance and cost.

with this in mind, service providers looking for a better ap-proach have increasingly invested in flash storage technology.

read/write | jeff byrne

Flash tech powers cloud storage and gives enterprises a boost

Flash technology can be attractive for cloud service providers—and enterprises—looking

for a highly available, scalable and efficient data storage solution.

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flash has promised—and largely delivered—better iops and in-creased throughput for critical, i/o-intensive applications, though often at a much higher cost per gB than traditional hard disk drives (hdds). But performance is just one attribute cloud service providers are looking for in a storage solution. also high on their list are requirements such as:

• high availability and reliability. cloud service providers can’t afford storage infrastructure downtime, lest they risk break-ing sla-driven availability commitments and irreparably dam-aging their reputations.

• cost-effective scalability. flash storage must scale easily and nondisruptively to accommodate rapidly growing capac-ity requirements, and at a cost that enables service providers to maintain affordable and competitive prices.

• built-in operational efficiencies. in a similar vein, cloud service providers are looking for storage systems that are frugal in terms of space, power and cooling requirements, since every dollar of cost means one less dollar flowing to the bottom line.

unfortunately, most flash storage systems today don’t meet these requirements. we believe this gap between solution re-quirements and actual capabilities, along with some confusion about how and where flash can best be deployed, has inhibited the adoption of flash storage among cloud service providers. let’s take a closer look at these requirements and, in the process, briefly examine how a couple of innovative flash storage vendors are addressing them. though flash can be deployed in various ways to meet service provider challenges, we’ll focus on all-flash array solutions.

it’s important to note that many enterprises have similar needs. so while emerging solid-state products satisfy service provider

46

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requirements, they also meet those of enterprises looking for high-performance, reliable and scalable storage.

requirement: availability and reliabilityfor service providers looking for a storage platform, high availabil-ity is clearly one of the top requirements. most cloud iaas provid-ers’ slas are based on minimum availability guarantees, meaning storage must operate without disruption in the event of outages or planned maintenance activities.

unfortunately, many early flash storage of-ferings have been built around single controller systems, and have lacked the availability features needed to meet these requirements. nimbus data systems, a provider of all-flash arrays, is ad-dressing availability with a dual-active, redundant controller architecture designed to eliminate single points of failure. a companion set of capabilities, such as hot-swappable flash modules and nondisrup-tive capacity expansion, are in place to prevent outages due to planned maintenance activities. just as important from a reliabil-ity and durability perspective, nimbus uses enterprise-grade en-terprise multi-level cell (emlc) nand silicon for an extended life 10 times better than mlc flash chips.

solidfire, an all-solid-state drive (ssd) vendor that recently emerged from stealth mode, also has a system architected for high availability. the company’s clustered, scale-out storage sys-

47

Cloud service providers are looking for storage systems that are frugal in terms of space, power and cooling requirements, since every dollar of cost means one less dollar flowing to the bottom line.

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tem employs storage virtualization to spread volumes across the entire drive pool and its helix technology to replicate data. if a node or drive suffers a hardware failure or needs to be taken offline, the affected data is instantly re-replicated across the clus-ter, allowing processing to continue without disruption.

requirement: scalabilitywhile flash storage performance generally lived up to service pro-viders’ expectations, scalability of flash systems didn’t.

with an eye on scalability requirements, nimbus has designed its flash storage technology with service providers in mind. at 10 tB per rack unit, nimbus offers one of the highest density primary storage systems on the market today. service providers can seamlessly add nim-bus enclosures to an exist-ing array, so capacity can be added without forklift upgrades.

solidfire clusters are also built for scalability, aggregating mul-tiple storage nodes over an iscsi-based, 10 gbps ethernet grid. the cluster scales linearly with each additional node, aggregating performance and capacity resources across all nodes. the com-pany’s primary storage solution scales to 100 nodes, representing more than 1 pB of capacity.

requirement: OPeratiOnal efficienciesin the highly competitive cloud service provider space, efficiency advantages can make or break profitability. service providers are constantly looking for ways to pack more storage wallop into a smaller footprint, and to wring every last watt of power and Btu

Flash memory has the potential to take cloud storage availability, scalability and efficiency to a whole new level.

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of cooling efficiency out of their arrays. unfortunately, most flash storage offerings to date have fallen short of meeting those effi-ciency goals.

nimbus’ approach delivers high-density flash storage with three times the density of 15k hdds. a single nimbus e-class system can crank out the same level of performance using just 7% of the footprint of hdd storage. e-class systems consume just 5w of power per terabyte, an 80% savings over conventional 15k disks.

for its part, solidfire employs real-time inline deduplication and compression across all data to streamline capacity needs. all new capacity is thin provisioned. leveraging the strengths of the scale-out clustered architecture, these capabilities enable solidfire to achieve 85%-plus capacity utilization without perfor-mance degradation.

wHat tHis means fOr service PrOviders (and enterPrises)flash memory has the potential to take cloud storage availability, scalability and efficiency to a whole new level. innovative play-ers such as nimbus data systems and solidfire are bringing flash storage products to market that help realize the potential of solid-state storage. n

Jeff Byrne is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group.

mailto:[email protected]

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Shortages—real or not—have hiked disk pricesas 2011 drew to a close and 2012 dawned, most storage news focused on the devas-tating floods in thailand and their crippling effect on hard disk production. with more than half of all disk manufacturing concentrated in that area, it wasn’t long before storage vendors announced price increases and shortages. of the users who said they ordered disks or disk systems (29 tB average order) since november 2011, 56% said prices were hiked, with the average increase at 12%. disk orderers also had to wait longer to receive products, with 40% reporting delays—and half of them saying the delays were “fairly long” or “very long.” more than a third (35%) couldn’t get the disks they wanted, with 62% noting that high-capacity (greater than 1 tB) sata disks were the toughest to procure. there’s very little skepticism among our respondents: 11% think the shortages are a vendor ploy to pump up prices, 36% believe the short-age are real and 47% feel the shortages might be exaggerated. —Rich Castagna

“ the laws of supply and demand dictate price, but i feel that manufacturers and retailers have taken this opportunity to exploit the consumer just as gasoline companies do.” —Survey respondent

snapshot

50

What do you think about the hard disk shortages caused by the recent flooding in Thailand?

Which types of hard disk drives did you want but couldn’t get? *

All things considered, what compromises did you have to make to receive the number of hard disk drives you needed?*

47% the different drives we had to get cost more18% the different drives we had to get had lower performance15% none11% the different drives we had to

get had higher performance than what we originally ordered

6% the different drives we had to get were cheaper than what we wanted

23% other

10%

11%

6%

47%36%

33

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There are shortages,but they’ve been exaggeratedThe shortages are real The shortages have been fabricated by disk and storage system vendorsOther

Fibre Channel disksOther

Solid-state drivesSAS disks

SATA disks, up to 1 TB capacitySATA disks, greater than 1 TB capacity

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

10%

11%

6%

47%36%

33

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There are shortages,but they’ve been exaggeratedThe shortages are real The shortages have been fabricated by disk and storage system vendorsOther

Fibre Channel disksOther

Solid-state drivesSAS disks

SATA disks, up to 1 TB capacitySATA disks, greater than 1 TB capacity

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

56%Said vendors increased the prices of the disks or disk systems

*Multiple selections permitted

*Multiple selections permitted

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5151

Storage magazine

Vice President of editorialmark schlack

editorial Directorrich Castagna

Senior Managing editorkim hefner

executive editor ellen o’brien

Contributing editorsJames damoulakis, steve duplessie, Jacob Gsoedl

SearchStorage.com


Senior News Director dave raffo

Senior News Writersonia r. lelii

Senior Writer Carol sliwa

Senior Managing editor kim hefner

Assistant Site editorian Crowley

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SearchDataBackup.com SearchDisasterRecovery.com SearchSMBStorage.com SearchSolidStateStorage.com

Senior Site editorandrew burton

Managing editored hannan

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Senior Site editorsue troy

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Assistant Site editorfrancesca sales

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TechTarget Conferences

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editorial events ManagerJacquelyn hinds

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©2012 techtarget inc. no part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. for permissions or reprint information, please contact mike kelly, vp and Group publisher ([email protected]).techtarget reprints are available through the yGs Group.

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