I addressed the answers to these (and other) questions in a recent ESG Brief, Server Virtualization: Beyond IT-owned Workloads. There has also been plenty of industryspeak on reference architectures, converged infrastructures, and coalitions, but what is the real value?

Let’s use the recent Cisco & Citrix solution as an example. I recently spoke with a VP of Emerging Solutions and her excitement for such a solution centered on:

1. A turn-key solution that helps avoid risk and complexity and streamlines the procurement process.
2. A single support model that expedites the troubleshooting process and takes the burden off her team.

She also fully understood the value of desktop virtualization and recognized the urgency to extend its value to a much larger user population.

Cisco has been challenged with positioning the UCS inside the enterprise that has a well entrenched server footprint from IBM, HP, or Dell. The Cisco & Citrix solution is exactly what’s needed to demonstrate an architecture and management role in a greenfield opportunity. Desktop virtualization is an ideal use case: it requires new IT infrastructure, it is typically run on a completely different set of gear inside the data center, and ESG research clearly shows that desktop virtualization is a top IT priority.

The challenge ahead lies with creating a message that resonates with senior IT and business leaders; they are the top advocates of desktop virtualization.

Additionally, it looks like Cisco and Citrix have built the CVD (Cisco Validated Design) with NetApp. Now each of the industry leaders has to educate the channel, its partners, and customers on the value of the combination of all three solutions; how it helps drive costs down; how it improves operational efficiency; how it enhances security; and how it clearly differentiates itself from the competition.

This is the first example I have seen of an integrated infrastructure that has the potential to resonate with IT professionals, demonstrate the value of Cisco UCS where it is not necessarily going head to head with the incumbent, and create a great opportunity for Citrix to extend its thought leadership position in a market that is about to be set ablaze.

Read more of Mark’s blog entries at Liquefying IT.

RSA Security made one of these by introducing virtualization intelligence in its Archer compliance suite.

What’s the big deal? IT operations needs standard server configurations to meet compliance mandates and auditors need visibility into both physical and virtual servers. Neither group wants to jump through hoops to get what they need. This is a pretty big deal. When ESG asked security professionals what security-specific developments need to take place in order to enable more widespread server virtualization usage, 27% responded that their organizations needed, “compliance management tools that recognize virtual server events.” This was the third most popular of all possible responses.

RSA is on to something here. When I move workloads to the cloud you can be damn sure that my auditors want to know what’s going on. I’d like to see more vendors follow RSA’s lead and I’d really like to see security and cloud computing vendors start to discuss data standards for compliance, event management, and log file formats as well as secure transport protocols. Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The RSA announcement won’t get much pick up, as it lacks the buzz of some cloudy/virtualization vision thing. Nevertheless, it is exactly what customers are looking for.

You can read Jon’s other blog entries at Insecure About Security.

ESG sees a giant opportunity for companies to help match users with technology, choose the ideal desktop virtualization delivery model (BTW it won’t always be VDI), choose the technology vendor(s), and then monitor the results (which include the end-user experience). Companies such as Liquidware Labs have already established a relationship with Dell Services to help address this exact scenario. These companies also see the value of being engaged early in the game and continuing to provide value as users transition and desktop virtualization becomes embraced by end-users and IT operations.

Tactical VDI deployments should not be considered successful desktop virtualization implementations. It takes a clear understanding of the current end-user community, their jobs and responsibilities, application usage, endpoint choices, and the right technology to successfully build desktop virtualization into your company’s desktop strategy.

Read more of Mark’s blog entries at Liquefying IT.

Introduction

Virtualization is transformational to the way that IT services are delivered—it will fundamentally change how businesses use, access, and pay for IT services.  Why? Once virtualization is implemented in a specific area of IT, it becomes viral.  Virtualizing a specific IT asset leads to virtualization of other IT assets … and so on.  It leads to more efficient delivery of IT services, which, in turn, creates opportunities to extend virtualization and transform the environment for business impact.

Situation Analysis

The number of challenges faced by IT organizations runs the gamut from the high cost of delivering services, to not being able to keep pace with data growth, to security vulnerabilities, to energy issues and more.  The economic climate adds pressure to IT budgets and resources.  However, IT organizations are still expected to deliver cost-effective and quality IT services in response to new business initiatives—with agility.

IT management is most concerned with the “IT triad:” mitigating risk to existing business activities, reducing cycle time to deliver innovation, and reducing costs to fund innovation.  It’s often difficult to achieve all three of these objectives, so some organizations may make sacrifices in one area to deliver in another.

Ideally, IT should be directed toward business initiatives that provide a competitive edge.  That could be delivering business applications, creating new business channels, improving processes for employees and business partners, and more.  Unfortunately, IT’s need to “keep the lights on” and simply run the business often take up 70% of time and resources, leaving only 30% for changing-the-business-to-be-more-competitive activities.

Oftentimes, the imbalance is a result of IT sprawl.  Silos of legacy, inflexible hardware and software stacks are inefficient and costly.  These resources are often under-utilized and create multiple points of failure.  The situation also results in operational inefficiency: managing more infrastructure, reactive “firefighting” activities, and delivering baseline service levels.

The reality of the situation creates conflict between the business and IT.  Line of business (LOB) owners desire rapid return on investment (ROI) and higher service levels.  To achieve high service levels, IT might over-provision or create dedicated stacks to guarantee performance.  However, this is in conflict with ROI requirements and LOB owners’ (and IT’s) needs to reduce costs and achieve business agility.

The result?  Over-stressed IT teams are struggling to meet IT triad goals while simultaneously maintaining high quality of service for their business constituents.  Likewise, business constituents could have low satisfaction if quality of service needs are being sacrificed by IT in order to address other concerns.

That’s where virtualization comes in.  Virtualizing resources breaks down the silos.  This, in turn, can reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and agility, and help mitigate risk.  A virtualized infrastructure can also contribute to IT’s ability to maintain high service levels. Finally, virtualization can facilitate a flip-flop on the 70/30 maintain/innovate ratio.

Virtualization

What is Virtualization?

In simplest terms, virtualization is an abstraction of reality—the process of abstracting the logical from the physical—to turn physical assets into a pool of independent logical assets.  As previously mentioned, this can be transformational for IT since it alters the way services are delivered, which enables transformation of the business.

Virtualization Maturity Model

So how is this transformation achieved via virtualization?  It’s an iterative approach that happens over time.  Small steps lead to benefits that enable next steps, and so forth.  As organizations progress through specific phases, greater cost optimization and process efficiency accompany the progression.

To illustrate the concept, ESG’s virtualization maturity model details the characteristics of the environment at distinct phases in the virtualization journey (see Table 1).

The first phase, basic, is to initiate resource consolidation and centralization through virtualization.  The resulting logical resource pool can help in eliminating single points of failure and reducing vulnerabilities, as well as improving utilization of resources. A shared infrastructure may facilitate automation, streamline management, and simplify IT’s ability to monitor and analyze trends.  This phase can drive the next one: standardization.

The aptly named standardization phase involves creating standard configurations, processes, and policies.  Policy development and adherence can deliver automation and more predictable budgeting as well as greater predictability for service levels.  The result for IT may be process improvement, enhanced management, and greater business resilience, quality of service, and responsiveness.

As IT organizations progress to the enterprise phase, virtualization and its benefits become more pervasive.  Service delivery is service catalog-driven and IT may have initiated a utility computing model.  Business policies are understood and aligned with IT.  Automation and self-service are more often in place.  Business constituents benefit from predictable service levels and costs—which is likely to result in higher satisfaction.  The IT triad objectives of greater agility resulting from process improvements, minimized risk, and cost reduction are within reach.

The culmination of a highly virtualized environment is the dynamic phase, where operations are highly automated and based on a utility model.  Resources are dynamically provisioned and used, and service delivery is tied to business-linked service level agreements (SLAs).  IT benefits from an enterprise-wide-view of resources, which streamlines planning and management.  All combined, dynamic-level virtualization enables the business agility companies desire to gain competitive advantage.

Extending Virtualization Principles

The most predominant form of virtualization today is server virtualization.  Some 76% of organizations with 2,500 or more servers are currently using virtualization in a production environment, compared to just 27% of organizations with less than 25 servers (see Figure 1).[1]

Server virtualization is expanding in two dimensions: consolidation of more physical servers onto virtualized platforms and expansion of the number of applications running on virtual machines.  As server virtualization expansion follows the aforementioned maturity curve, the dividends of the virtualization journey pay off.

Storage virtualization is often combined with server virtualization. Storage virtualization (functionality that takes multiple storage systems and treats those devices as a single, centrally-managed pool of storage) provides an additional opportunity to reduce IT costs and optimize efficiency—especially as server virtualization proliferates. ESG research indicates that among current server virtualization users, 86% report they have storage virtualization initiatives as a top spending priority over the next 12 to 18 months (see Figure 2).[2] The combination often amplifies the benefits of both forms of virtualization: lowering costs, improving resource utilization, increasing availability, simplifying upgrades, and enabling scalability.

As organizations become more comfortable with one form of virtualization, they don’t have to make great intellectual or philosophical leaps in order to grasp the concept of virtualizing other data center domains.  Oftentimes, IT organizations undertaking complete data center refresh initiatives have virtualization as top of mind and would look to extract all possible efficiencies in one fell swoop by deploying virtualization in multiple technology areas.

Creating Efficiency and Business Agility

As organizations mature in their use of virtualization, time and cost efficiency enable further innovation.  For example, virtualization could extend to leveraging the elastic and potentially infinite resources in cloud computing models.  In this case, compute, storage, communications, and applications are abstracted into services and delivered over the Internet, enabling cloud-based, on-demand computing.

Cloud computing can be IT-owned and -operated or leased on a subscription basis (usage-based) from a third-party.  In a cloud computing approach, IT’s capital expenses are converted into operational expenses.  Because IT organizations can more easily partition and provision resources in a multi-tenant environment, this aids in providing customer-specific SLAs.

As more organizations virtualize the infrastructure layer in corporate- or third-party-data centers, IT service delivery becomes a reality.  A shared resource model facilitates a shared services model.  Instead of the application silo approach, applications are de-coupled from the infrastructure and are delivered via a utility model.  An application services approach can offer increased availability considering that infrastructure provisioning is dynamic and application workloads with greater criticality could be prioritized over less critical ones.

Implications for Data Protection

Virtualization of servers and storage is a catalyst for changes in data protection, too. These abstractions allow server and storage resources to be used more efficiently to capture and store data copies for operational and disaster recovery.  This can result in changing both the way that data protection services are delivered and the cost structure.

Encapsulation and portability of the operating system, applications, data, and configuration setting in virtual machines enables mobility within and across data centers.  Transitioning from on-premises, siloed infrastructure to an environment that includes IT-owned-and-operated or third-party shared components creates new possibilities for protection strategies.  Data protection solutions can capture and transfer active virtual machine disk files as a whole, enabling rapid local or remote recovery.  Furthermore, a virtualized, shared infrastructure eliminates IT’s dependence on one-to-one, physical-to-physical mirroring strategies and creates an opportunity to scale availability and recovery architectures cost effectively.  This outcome is clearly resonating with end-users.  As shown in Figure 3, ESG research respondents ranked “facilitated disaster recovery” as the number one benefit of deploying server virtualization.[3]

Applying virtualization to data protection resources can result in benefits similar to those seen in server and storage virtualization environments: consolidation, automation, enterprise-view of resource management, higher utilization, etc.  Importantly, it can also address IT triad objectives by minimizing risk, delivering more predictable service levels and costs, and maintaining agility. ESG research respondents ranked decreasing time and budget requirements and improving SLAs in the top five outcomes of implementing server virtualization.

The Bigger Truth

Virtualization is vital for IT optimization and there is a compelling business case for adoption. It enables scalability, ease-of-management, improved utilization, increased availability, and system resiliency.  This, in turn, contributes to efficiencies in IT responsiveness and costs.  It brings qualitative changes to the way IT is run and services are delivered.

Virtualization is the cornerstone of the service delivery movement. As IT resources “go virtual,” IT organizations advance on their transformational journeys from an environment where resources are over-provisioned and underutilized, deployment is slow, costs are high, and processes are inefficient to one where resources are pooled and virtualized for right-sized consumption, deployment is on-demand, costs are optimized, and processes are agile.  Reaching the “dynamic” end-state in the virtualization journey takes a considerable investment in time, capital investment, and skill enhancement for IT resources; however, the results could be well worth the price.

[2] Source: ESG Research Report, 2010 IT Spending Priorities, February 2010.

[3] Source: ESG Research Report, 2010 Data Protection Trends, April 2010.

Background

The management of file-based, or “unstructured,” content (i.e., multimedia files, Web pages, office productivity documents, etc.) has become one of the most pressing and persistent challenges facing today’s IT organizations; IT managers must store, deliver, and manage large volumes of unstructured data while meeting increasingly demanding service levels. ESG research indicates that the majority of end-users currently using or considering scale-out NAS solutions are most concerned with improving management efficiency, scalability, performance, and availability.[1]

Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution or UDS File Services

Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution (UDS in North America) File Services offerings, shown in Figure 2, offer a broadly scalable NAS solution that can address the unique challenges of scaling out NAS services for businesses of all sizes.

Fujitsu brings a number of economic benefits associated with scale-out NAS platforms to the table with its Symantec FileStore based solution. Scale-out NAS architectures have a number of cost advantages over scale-up solutions, ranging from start up costs to managing technology refreshes—and many steps in between. Scale-out NAS carries a lower overall cost compared to scale-up systems for a number of reasons:

• Ability to scale capacity without scaling headcount. With Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution, it is just as easy to manage a clustered storage system with sixteen nodes as it is to manage one with two nodes. Scale-out file storage systems enable this through clustering and a global namespace, which provides a single point of management for massive amounts of file data.
• Low entry cost. The entry cost for scale-out systems varies depending on the minimum configurations supported. Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution starts as small as two nodes and scales up from there. With clustered scale-out systems, you can add resources and scale as needed, online.
• Just-in-time scalability. Because of the modular nature of scale-out systems, there is no need to buy (and power or cool) frames, power supplies, and mostly empty cabinets in advance of storage capacity needs.
• Higher utilization rates. Because all of the NAS heads in FileStore clusters can address the entire pool of usable capacity, no capacity is locked away behind underutilized NAS heads—a common problem in scale-up systems. It is not unusual to see utilization rates of 30% or less in scale-up systems and 60% or more in scale-out systems.
• Reduced change management planning cycles. The modularity and scalability of scale-out NAS allow for extremely fast provisioning. Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution is plug-and-play; add a storage or processor node and the system self-discovers and expands the file system or incorporates it into load balancing algorithms on the fly. There is typically no disruption of service, nor is there a requirement to plan data layouts, create LUNs, or perform data migration.
• Non-disruptive technology refresh. The process of managing technology refreshes with Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution is faster and easier than with monolithic NAS because the cluster maps logical mount points to physical mount points in a virtualized manner, allowing back-end technology changes to be made with little or no disruption to client access.

Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution offers advanced features still fairly new to scale-out NAS, with built-in support for storage tiering and solid state disk. Dynamic Storage Tiering allows for policy-based movement of files across storage tiers. Based on activity or desired performance levels, data can automatically be demoted to lower performing, bulk-storage tiers, including MAID, or promoted to primary tiers if it suddenly becomes very active. Consider the benefits this capability brings to environments with tiers that include solid state disk (SSD). For example, a Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution customer can initially choose to store data in a secondary tier (SATA or Nearline SAS) and then promote it to a primary tier based on IO access. Dynamic Storage Tiering can then push the data back to the secondary tier based on IO inactivity, eliminating the need to peg data in valuable SSD real estate and then manually monitor and move it. All of this storage tiering and data movement occurs completely in the background, transparently to the end-user. The locations of the files, and even their node numbers, do not change.

This report examines Fujitsu’s Scalable File Server Solution with a goal of evaluating ease of administration, performance, and scalability as well as advanced enterprise-class features such as file system mirroring, replication, and Dynamic Storage Tiering.

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution at Fujitsu’s Sunnyvale Campus. Testing was designed to evaluate manageability, performance, scalability, and availability. The test bed, shown in Figure 3, was comprised of the Scalable File Server Solution’s entry-level NAS storage system with two cluster nodes. Windows and Linux workstations were utilized as CIFS and NFS clients.

Ease of Deployment and Flexible Management

ESG Lab first examined the management interface of Fujitsu’s Scalable File Server solution, evaluating the ease of use and functionality of creating storage pools, file systems, and shares for CIFS, NFS, and FTP clients. Fujitsu utilizes the browser-based Symantec FileStore management tool to provide a full featured interface for all file service and storage functions. The Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution ships with a storage array and server cluster preconfigured, so administrators can create shares and start providing file services immediately.

ESG Lab Testing

The first step in the setup of the Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution platform was to configure TCP/IP networking using a CLI connection directly attached to the system console. ESG Lab configured the network IP address for each physical interface along with the virtual IP addresses associated with the physical IP. A console IP address was also assigned at this point. Figure 4 shows the TCP/IP configuration wizard in the CLI.

Once the IP addresses were assigned, all management was performed using the browser-based management tool. A Web browser was pointed to the same IP address that was used for the console CLI. A local administrator username and password were entered. The administrator can be a local user account or one contained in an Active Directory domain or LDAP source.

The home page of the management interface, seen in Figure 5, shows the status of the Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution. All NAS and file system functions are managed from this page.

From the File System screen, ESG Lab selected the option to create a new file system. The selection started a two-step wizard, shown in Figure 6 that allowed ESG Lab to configure the size, layout, and storage pool location for the file system. ESG Lab created a 15 GB file system named “ESG1” with a striped layout in pool DG0001.

Next, ESG Lab clicked the shares tab in the System Status window and selected the option to add a CIFS share. As seen in Figure 7, one dialog box was displayed where the file system to share was selected, and the name and properties of the share were set.

ESG Lab tested access by mapping the network share to a network drive from a Windows client; ESG1 was mapped to the Y: drive. Figure 8 shows files and folders successfully copied to the share.

This test was repeated using the same file system, ESG1, to create an NFS share. As before, the shares tab in the system status screen was used to access the add share wizard.  Once the NFS share was exported, the share was mounted by a Linux client and files were copied into the NFS share successfully. The entire process, creating a file system and sharing it out to both NFS and Windows clients, took less than five minutes.

Next, ESG Lab used a snapshot to simulate the recovery of an accidentally deleted file. Single, manual snapshots can be created or a schedule can be set to take recurring snapshots of a file system on a periodic basis. ESG Lab created a snapshot schedule as seen in Figure 9.

Once created, the snapshot was made visible to Windows clients using the same add share wizard that was used to create CIFS shares, seen earlier in Figure 7.

Connectivity to the snapshot was tested using a Windows client. First, a file was deleted from the ESG1 share and then ESG Lab copied the file from the snapshot and back to the ESG1 share.

Performance and Scalability

One of the key benefits of Fujitsu’s Scalable File Server Solution is its ability to provide a high-level of aggregate capacity and performance that scales in near-linear fashion as nodes and storage are added to the cluster. With a maximum file system size of 256 TB and total addressable storage space of 2 PB, Fujitsu’s Scalable File Server Solution can scale to meet the needs of applications that require high performance, high capacity, or a combination of both. As additional cluster nodes are added, performance increases with the additional processing power, memory, and bandwidth of each node. As additional disks and disk arrays are added, the capacity—and performance—of the solution increases as well.

Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution also provides advanced features that enhance the scalability of the system. Not only can file systems be expanded non-disruptively, they can also be shrunk to reclaim space for other purposes.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested both expanding and shrinking a live file system mounted by an active client. These functions were accessed from the File Systems tab in the System Status window. ESG Lab first expanded the 15 GB ESG1 file system by 10 GB, to 25 GB total, as shown in Figure 11. After expanding the file system, files were copied into that file system to validate connectivity. The client was still connected to the share and was able to copy files with no issues.

ESG Lab then used the same wizard to shrink the file system down to 20 GB. Connectivity was tested by again copying files into the now smaller file system. The size was verified by looking at the properties of the associated share from the Windows client and confirmed: the new file system was 20 GB, adjusted with no disruption to connectivity or remounting of the share.

ESG Lab next tested the ability to grow the cluster non-disruptively.  Starting with a three node cluster, a scripted copy operation was started from a client to generate a continuous load as a fourth node was added. First, the physical IP address for a pre-wired and staged new node was added to the cluster configuration and a group of virtual IP addresses were assigned to the new node as shown previously in Figure 4.  Once the IP addresses were assigned, the node was rebooted and F12 was pressed to initiate a network boot. FileStore software was then automatically installed on the new node. Once the installation was complete, the new node appeared on the Cluster page of the FileStore management GUI as an available node, as shown in Figure 13.

At this point, adding the node to the cluster was accomplished by selecting the IP address and clicking “Add Node.”  Within a few seconds, the node was added to the cluster. While IO paused momentarily, as seen in Figure 14, it resumed with no loss of connectivity and no remount required.

SPECsfs2008 Results

ESG Lab audited published results of the SPECsfs2008 industry standard benchmark suite maintained by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). SPECsfs2008 testing measures file server throughput and response time, providing a standardized method for comparing file server performance across disparate vendor platforms. SPECsfs2008 results summarize the server’s capabilities in the context of both the number of file operations that can be handled per second, in addition to the overall latency of the file operations. While Fujitsu has not published results for a Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution configuration as of this writing, there is a result for the 12-node Symantec FileStore Cluster ESG evaluated for this report.

SPECsfs2008 results are audited by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation and peer reviewed to ensure consistency. Full configuration data for each SPEC benchmark result are publicly available for download and review.[2] While this can be useful for comparison between vendors, it is important to note that not all vendors participate and publish results.

As seen in Figure 15, the 12-node cluster provided an excellent result of 176,728 SPECsfs2008 requests per second with an average response time of 4.1 milliseconds. Response time is an extremely important component of SPEC results as this is the delay that an application will experience (and pass on to users) when a storage system is stressed to its limits. A system servicing 176,728 SPECsfs2008 IO requests per second with a response time of 4.1 ms is exceptional.  In fact, FileStore has posted one of the highest SPECsfs2008 NFS result as of this writing.

Availability and System Protection

Central to the functionality of Fujitsu’s Scalable File Server Solution is high availability. The system is designed to ensure that the file system remains functional at all times—even in the unlikely event of a software or hardware failure. Clustering technologies are used to eliminate unscheduled downtime and protect data from:

• Server failures (e.g., failed processor or power supply).
• Storage failures (e.g., failed drive or controller).
• Network failures (e.g., failed network cable or NIC).

In addition, the ability to mirror the file system provides additional redundancy to reduce the need to recover the file system if a storage array is taken offline. Similarly, file system replication provides the capacity to copy entire file systems to an off-site location over a wide area network to protect against site outages. Figure 16 shows an overview of data availability options available with Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution. In addition, anti-virus software is built into the cluster and can be activated with a license key with no installation required. Policies for anti-virus scanning can be set up individually per share. These policies can be set to scan shares on a schedule or set to auto protect mode which scans on file reads.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab validated the failover capabilities of a Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution by injecting faults into a two-node cluster. The first scenario ESG Lab tested was a network failure. ESG Lab used a client connected to the IP address on port eth1 on Node2 to continuously copy files from one file system to another. A network failure was simulated by removing the Ethernet cable from port eth1 on Node2 while the file copy was in progress. The virtual IP addresses assigned to port eth1 were moved to other available physical addresses in the cluster and the copy traffic moved to port eth2 transparently, with no administrator intervention, after only a brief pause. Figure 17 shows IO activity using Windows Task Manager on the client.

The second test simulated a storage failure by running a firmware upgrade on one controller in the ETERNUS DX80 array. ESG Lab used the same client running the same script to continuously copy files while the controller firmware was upgraded. As before, a brief pause in IO was observed while the ETERNUS DX80 failed all disk volumes over in the array. No loss of connectivity to the file system was experienced by the client during failover of the controller.

Finally, ESG Lab simulated a cluster node failure. The test was executed on a four-node cluster configuration. A client accessing two shares on Node4 was used to continuously copy files from one file system to another. ESG Lab then deleted Node4 from the cluster, at which time the virtual IP addresses originally assigned to Node4 were moved to physical IP addresses on the remaining three nodes. While the client experienced another brief pause in IO, the copy operation continued with no action required by the client or the administrator.

Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution also allows administrators to add mirrors of a file system; this is in addition to the disk level protection in the ETERNUS array. File System mirrors can be used to enhance availability or facilitate migration of a file system to new back end storage non-disruptively. ESG Lab added a mirror of the ESG1 file system using a one step wizard. The wizard allowed the selection of disks for the mirror from all available storage. After clicking “OK,” the cluster began mirroring the file system to the new disks. Figure 19 shows the File System Details page after mirroring completed, confirming that there were now two mirrored copies of the file system.

Finally, ESG Lab tested the functionality of replication, including the ability to copy only changed blocks rather than whole files. A replication job was set up to replicate the file system cifs0, owned by a two-node cluster, to a file system on a four-node cluster. A total of 25 200 MB files were copied to cifs0 and a replication event was triggered. When the replication event was complete, the target file system, cif0t, was examined and the files were all transferred successfully, for a total of 5 GB of data moved. Next, ESG Lab renamed all 25 files in cifs0 and triggered a second replication event.

System logs showed minimal replication traffic to cif0t and the files at the target site, seen in Figure 20, reflected the new names less than a minute after triggering the replication, confirming that replication only transferred the changed metadata.

ESG Lab also tested the anti-virus feature built into Fujitsu File Services using two files with well known virus signatures. The files were copied into a share called virustest. ESG Lab then started a scan of the virustest share and the two infected files were discovered and moved to a quarantine area, shown in Figure 21.

The second anti-virus test ESG Lab performed reviewed autoprotect mode, where files are scanned on demand when read by clients. ESG Lab copied the same two infected files into the virustest share. When an attempt was made to read the files with a client, the files were automatically scanned and quarantined and access to the files was denied.

Dynamic Storage Tiering

Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution can use multiple tiers of storage to meet a variety of application performance needs. SSD, Fibre Channel, or SAS drives are supported for performance-sensitive applications and workflows including high performance computing and rich media editing and delivery. Affordably dense Nearline SAS or SATA drives are supported for capacity-intensive applications including deep archives, backup to disk, and large scale consolidation of general purpose legacy file systems.

Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution provides Dynamic Storage Tiering to provide automatic, hands-off movement of files between tiers based on access patterns. Policies can be set to determine how frequently the system checks for file access and what parameters are used to trigger movement between tiers.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested the functionality of Dynamic Storage Tiering on a Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution cluster that contained a primary tier of high speed SAS disks and a secondary tier of low speed Nearline SAS  drives.  A 100 GB file system, hscifs0, was set up with both tiers and access policies were set. The primary tier was seeded with files totaling 11 GB and the secondary tier was seeded with files totaling 54 GB. Figure 23 shows the utilization of each tier in the File System Details page of the management GUI.

ESG lab then modified 4 GB of data files residing in the secondary tier. After the scheduled scan, the changed data was moved from the secondary tier to the primary tier according to the configured policy. The two tiers were again examined in the File System Details page and primary utilization had increased to 15 GB while secondary utilization decreased to 50 GB, confirming that the 4 GB of data files that were modified had been automatically moved to the higher tier.

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

• Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution was configured and serving files to Windows and Linux clients less than five minutes after sitting down at the console.
• The Web-based administration console can be accessed from any browser. No separate installation of an administration program is required.
• Snapshots were easy to configure and use to recover files.
• Growing the cluster by adding a new node was a straightforward, non-disruptive process as was growing and shrinking file systems.
• Audited FileStore performance was impressive, posting impressively high throughput with a very low overall response time.
• Advanced data protection and recovery capabilities typically associated with enterprise-class NAS appliances were tested. Local snapshots were used to recover files after common errors and the system stayed online through multiple simulated hardware errors, such as network outages and storage controller and power failures.
• Dynamic Storage Tiering provided automatic, hands-off movement of files between tiers based on access patterns.

Issues to Consider

• While Snapshots were easy to manage and use, administrators must manually share snapshots to allow users to recover files.  A feature to automatically share snapshots with pre-defined naming conventions and integrate with Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) would be a useful enhancement.
• When prompting the administrator to select disks for mirroring a file system, the FileStore GUI did not exclude disks already in use by the source file system.  While the system would not create the mirror on disks already in use by the source, their appearance in the selection screen could be confusing to administrators.
• The version of SAMBA currently in FileStore can only share out a file system from one IP address, which can limit the total performance available to any single SMB share. This issue is corrected in the latest version of SAMBA, which is being integrated into FileStore as of this writing.

The Bigger Truth

The massive growth of file data flooding data centers today—and the wave that will be generated as more and more cloud storage and rich media applications come online—can easily overwhelm traditional scale-up NAS solutions. A scale-out NAS solution from Fujitsu offers scale beyond that which can be attained with traditional NAS solutions: users can start small with a two node system and affordable back-end storage and grow to a massively parallel system with Enterprise class ETERNUS arrays. The performance ceiling is raised by adding more processors and capacity is increased by adding more storage, enabling “just-in-time” scalability. And management is simple because the Fujitsu Scalable File Server Solution scale-out NAS solution is managed as a single entity—no matter how large it gets.

Legacy scale-up NAS solutions face a number of challenges. First, scale-up systems typically have capacity limits in the range of tens of terabytes, with individual file system limits between 2 and 16 TB. As capacity is scaled and limits are hit, more discrete systems are needed—and those systems need to be managed. Second, scale-up systems have fixed performance ratios; there is a fixed number of NAS heads that can be included in a single file system, typically one or two. Third, scale-up NAS has a relatively expensive price/performance ratio compared to scale-out.

A scale-out NAS solution from Fujitsu combines the field-proven performance and scalability of Symantec FileStore software, Fujitsu PRIMERGY industry standard servers, and Fujitsu ETERNUS DX disk storage system to cost-effectively address both scale-up and scale-out NAS challenges. What’s more, it’s surprisingly simple to deploy. ESG Lab was accessing files less than five minutes after getting started. It was also easy to manage via an intuitive graphical user interface.

Additionally, it supports enterprise-class NAS features that are often missing in scale-out NAS solutions; ESG Lab tested snapshots, file system mirroring, remote replication, and automated online migration between different tiers of storage. Last, but not least, it is fault tolerant and fast.

Three things in life are guaranteed: death, taxes, and information growth. Information growth will continue even in a down economy. This deluge of file-based information must be dealt with. Scale-out storage is the wave of the future—it is a path for IT managers to meet their number one storage challenge: keeping pace with overall data growth.

Because of these considerations, more and more enterprises are taking a serious look at scale-out NAS solutions like Fujitsu’s Scalable File Server Solution—clustered scale-out solutions are going mainstream. But commercial enterprises are not just interested in the increased bandwidth scale-out solutions bring to the table: users are expanding use cases for scale-out NAS thanks to the higher scalability and manageability of these systems. In short, scale-out makes economic sense.

Using an appliance-based approach that is fault tolerant and centrally managed, Fujitsu has harnessed the field proven power of ETERNUS and PRIMERGY hardware to Symantec’s FileStore software to create an enterprise-class scale-out NAS solution that is extremely scalable, extremely fast for a wide variety of applications, and extremely easy to deploy and manage.

Appendix

[2] http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

Overview

There is certainly a lot of hype around cloud computing as the technology industry positions itself for the “next big thing.” Unfortunately, this rhetoric masks an important inflection point: cloud computing is real and will impact IT in unprecedented ways.

ESG envisions the cloud’s evolution as a three-stage process (see Figure 1).  On the enterprise front, cloud computing will follow ongoing technology initiatives like data center consolidation and server virtualization as large organizations turn their IT infrastructures into their own private clouds. At the same time, public cloud options of all types (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) will also mature, driven by new standards, development tools, and services offerings.  Enterprises will typically consume these services as an alternative to internal IT resources.  Finally, as standards emerge, large companies will bridge internal private clouds and external public cloud services into a federated hybrid cloud architecture. When this happens, traditional IT walls will disappear as the cloud brings ubiquity to computing (i.e., application processing, storage capacity, etc.) just as the Internet and IP protocols delivered universal connectivity for networks.

CIOs Should Start Preparing for the Cloud

At present, the entire IT industry is pouring massive amounts of R&D dollars into cloud computing. This will likely accelerate the technology maturation process, making cloud computing an increasingly attractive enterprise option.  Smart CIOs will quickly come to this realization and begin to adopt cloud computing by:

• Betting on virtualization technologies. Virtualization will be a foundational technology for cloud computing.  Why?  It disaggregates IT workloads from the underlying hardware. When combined with tools that enable workload mobility and flexibility, workloads can be moved from server to server, data center to data center, or private to public cloud services depending upon hardware contention, network traffic, IT resource limitations, or cost considerations.
• Modernizing the network. In the past, network traffic tended to flow in a “north and south” pattern from data centers to core, distribution, and then access networks.  With the explosion of Web applications and server virtualization, more traffic flows “east and west” between the servers themselves.  Make sure that data center networks are designed to handle this traffic, especially as the population of Web applications and virtual servers continues to explode.  Don’t forget to include data center to data center network capabilities in these plans as well.
• Embracing flexibility. With cloud computing, there is no “one-size-fits-all” model.  Rather, cloud computing is an entirely new mindset where CIOs have unprecedented flexibility. For the first time, IT managers have the true luxury of placing IT workloads (i.e., compute, application, storage) in the most advantageous and effective places.  As a result, future IT decisions should be based upon TCO, service quality, and time-to-market as much as existing IT infrastructure and organizational considerations.

What About Performance?

In spite of the promise of cloud computing, many IT professionals first conceive of two major hurdles: security and availability.  Yes, addressing these important issues is essential for cloud’s progress, but ESG believes that there is another key obstacle: high performance.  In fact, high performance connectivity to cloud services is crucial for:

• Connecting private and public clouds. High performance and responsive connectivity is a “must have” in cloud computing use cases for distributing applications, running processor-intensive scientific computing systems, mirroring transactions, and leveraging vast pools of cloud storage. Even high bandwidth “best effort” Internet connectivity could still be victimized by an unrelated traffic spike, possibly interrupting cloud computing systems and business operations.
• Providing user services. Private or public cloud ROI won’t matter if users experience reduced productivity due to unacceptable response time to access files, applications, or their virtual desktops.
• Future flexibility. Let’s face it—without high performance in the cloud, computing alternatives will remain suspect.  A few early performance problems could persuade risk-averse CIOs to abort their otherwise sound cloud initiatives and instead keep critical applications and services in-house, failing to realize the potential benefits.  High performance data migration also allows CIOs to adapt their approaches to new offerings in the future.

WAN Optimization will Bridge the Performance Gap

The performance issues above are prospective “show stoppers” for cloud computing, but there is a potential solution.  WAN optimization is usually equated with accelerating network traffic between enterprise data centers and branch offices, but ESG believes that it will also play a crucial role in cloud computing enablement.  Why?  Leading WAN optimization platforms already handle lots of diverse workloads to connect data centers to other data centers and a range of IT applications and services to end-users.

ESG sees cloud computing use cases as a new superset of WAN optimization functionality. That said, all WAN optimization solutions are not created equally.

To meet the challenges of cloud computing, WAN optimization offerings must provide high performance and:

• Support for multiple services. To connect cloud data centers, WAN optimization must accelerate network traffic, business system protocols and linkages, and remote mirroring application like EMC’s SRDF for disaster recovery. At the other end of the spectrum, users benefit from WAN optimization for high performance connections to business unit applications, cloud services, and file services. Finally, WAN optimization solutions can help enable greater use of cloud-based storage services for backup, archival, and near-line capacity by accelerating specific block based storage protocols (like iSCSI or REST.)  Each layer of IT resources, applications, servers, and storage can then be placed where it has the best mix of quality and cost, independent of other components’ locations.
• Multiple form factor choices. As workloads and users become more mobile, WAN optimization must find its way into lots of locations in the cloud and across the enterprise.  This will require additional form factors to traditional WAN optimization hardware appliances.  ESG sees the need for virtual WAN optimization appliances that can be easily deployed or moved with workloads around both public and private cloud environments. In addition, WAN optimization agents will accelerate cloud service performance for mobile worker endpoints across the globe.  Again, storage-specific cloud accelerators will also provide huge value.
• Visibility and manageability. Since the main goal is high performance, IT managers will want to monitor and adjust the network to ensure that business-critical traffic meets or exceeds SLAs, and plan for future moves of IT resources as desired.  This will require WAN optimization systems to act as a network service, providing consolidated visibility of real-time application traffic. With this information in hand, network engineers need the ability to fine-tune network traffic based upon changes in the application mix, cloud service adoption, or workload location.

With these characteristics, WAN optimization could go beyond high performance delivery alone.  ESG believes that these attributes could help large organizations take better advantage of cloud computing flexibility.  Why?  The combination of high performance, multiple form factors, and granular visibility will allow more choices for CIOs.  Enterprises can easily experiment and rapidly adapt their infrastructure by moving workloads around and assessing which location delivers the “biggest bang for the buck.” In this way, cloud-centric WAN optimization can also help improve the business’s top and bottom lines.

The Bigger Truth

Cloud computing is on the horizon. It will be arriving far sooner than many people think. It’s time that the cloud computing discussion moves beyond rhetoric and focuses on key issues. Beyond security and availability, ESG believes that high performance networking needs more attention.

WAN optimization is an obvious enabling technology as it is designed to accelerate network traffic between source and destination.  With cloud, however, the sources and destinations will multiply and change rapidly. This requires a new type of WAN optimization built with the cloud in mind. Cloud-centric WAN optimization will ultimately support lots of services, come in an assortment of form factors, and provide central visibility and management regardless of cloud service location.  Applications, servers, and storage can each be dynamically deployed and activated wherever most appropriate for the organization’s changing needs.

ESG believes that cloud-centric WAN optimization is an enabling technology that will play a major role in the success or failure of enterprise cloud computing initiatives. The sooner CIOs realize this, the more they can take advantage of available and emerging cloud computing options.

Background

Server virtualization adoption is on the rise among organizations of all sizes and all industries around the world.  As a matter of fact, a recent ESG survey indicates that increasing the use of server virtualization is currently IT managers’ most important priority.[1] Given the impressive economic benefits of server virtualization, the glut of affordable and under-utilized processing power, and growing power and cooling issues in the data center, ESG predicts that the brisk adoption of server virtualization will continue for the foreseeable future.

As more and more applications are deployed within a consolidated virtual server infrastructure, IT managers are struggling to meet the challenges associated with storing and protecting a single pool of application data.   Exploding data growth, in part due to virtual server sprawl, is driving IT managers to carefully consider how they meet the storage needs of virtualized applications.  This is clearly shown in Figure 1, which indicates that improving data backup and recovery, managing data growth, and data center consolidation are top IT priorities.

This balance of this report explores how networked storage solutions from NetApp are ideally suited for the consolidation of popular Microsoft business applications deployed in a virtual server environment.

Unified Windows Storage Consolidation

NetApp storage solutions offer a Unified Storage Architecture that is ideally suited for server virtualization and Windows consolidation. As shown in Figure 2, a mix of business applications from Microsoft (Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Active Directory) can be consolidated using a cluster of virtual servers (e.g., VMware vSphere) that are network attached to a NetApp  storage system  (e.g., NetApp FAS2040).

The NetApp Data ONTAP operating system that is built into each and every NetApp storage system supports a unified mix of host protocols (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, FC, FCoE) and disks (FC, SAS, SATA) as it creates a unified platform which increases storage efficiency, simplifies data management, improves data protection, and reduces costs.

Unified storage efficiency is provided with powerful NetApp technologies including thin provisioning, FlexClone, primary storage deduplication, and space-efficient snapshot backups. Unified management simplicity is provided with an end-to-end family of management tools, including an application-aware family of SnapManager products (e.g., NetApp SnapManager for Microsoft Exchange), NetApp VSC (VMware plug-in), and a potent, yet intuitive, storage manager (NetApp System Manager).

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on testing of a unified Windows storage consolidation solution over the course of two days at a NetApp facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Getting Started

An overview of the test bed is a good place to get started: a pair of servers running VMware vSphere server virtualization software was attached to a NetApp FAS2040 storage system over a 1Gb Ethernet network.[2] The NFS protocol was used to access virtual machine images and the iSCSI protocol was used to access Microsoft application data and additional virtual machines images stored on VMware VMFS. The VMware vSphere Client shown in Figure 3 was used to browse the pre-configured test bed. Note how a mix of Microsoft (e.g., Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server) and Linux (e.g., Apache) applications was consolidated within a vSphere cluster sharing a consolidated pool of NetApp storage capacity.  Also note that a NetApp tab has been added so that common storage management tasks could be directly performed from within the VMware vSphere Client.

Manageability

The NetApp Unified Storage Architecture extends beyond the boundaries of the storage hardware with a unified collection of management software utilities—at the Microsoft application level, the VMware level, and the storage system level. Management at the application level is provided by software packages (e.g., SnapManager for Microsoft Exchange). Management at the VMware level is provided with plug-ins for the VMware vSphere Client management console (a.k.a., the NetApp VSC Plug-in for vSphere).  Management at the storage system level for routine tasks, including initial configuration and reporting, is provided by NetApp System Manager. Taken together, the unified management tools from NetApp use intuitive wizards and context-aware interfaces to simplify the management of virtualized Microsoft applications deployed within a consolidated infrastructure.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab used VSC version 2.0 to demonstrate the power and simplicity of a unified management approach in a consolidated Microsoft environment. The VSC Plug-in was installed on a server running the VMware vSphere Client. As shown in Figure 4, VSC can be used to perform routine storage management tasks using an intuitive right mouse click from within the vSphere Client. In this example, a right mouse click was used to resize an iSCSI attached VMFS datastore hosting .vmdk files for a virtualized Microsoft Exchange application. Four mouse clicks and two minutes after getting started, the datastore capacity was increased from 500 GB to 600 GB.

A similar intuitive right mouse click from vCenter was used to create a new datastore for a consolidated mix of Microsoft applications.  Note how the wizard-driven interface shown in Figure 5 can be used to create a thin provisioned datastore that delivers just-in-time storage capacity. In this example, a 10 GB datastore has been configured to auto-grow in 1 GB increments to a maximum size of 200 GB. Six mouse clicks and two minutes after getting started, the new datastore was ready to serve the needs of a consolidated mix of Microsoft applications.

Nest, ESG Lab used the wizard shown in Figure 6 to automate the storage provisioning and cloning of ten virtual machines.

Seven mouse clicks and less than five minutes later, the VSC rapid cloning wizard had automated the creation of ten virtual machines sharing the same guest operating system (Windows Server 2008 R2). In this example, VMware virtual machine images (.vmdk files) were stored on the NetApp FAS2040 storage array using the iSCSI and NFS protocols accessed over an industry-standard 1 GbE network.

ESG Lab was particularly impressed with the best practices automation capabilities built into the VSC version 2.0.   As shown in Figure 7, the NetApp tab accessed from the vSphere Client was used to determine whether VMware ESX hosts were configured according to NetApp ESX host specific best practices. As shown at the top, the configuration settings that didn’t meet best practice guidelines were shown as red alerts. An intuitive right click was used to learn what needed to be fixed and to automatically correct the problem.  In this example, three recommended settings were changed with a single mouse click: an incorrectly configured host bus adapter, a multi-path driver, and NFS heartbeat settings.  As shown at the bottom, automatically setting values according to NetApp best practices eliminated the red alerts.

Recoverability

NetApp snapshots provide instant, space-efficient backup and recovery in consolidated Microsoft environments.  Point-in-time disk-based snapshot images can be used to quickly restore deleted or corrupt files. Snapshot images can also be used to dramatically shrink backup windows. The capacity consumed for each incremental snapshot is reduced to the capacity required to store the 4K chunks that have changed since the last snapshot was taken, making snapshots cost effective as system administrators keep multiple disk-based versions for quick and reliable restores.

The real power of snapshots is realized when they are used in conjunction with NetApp’s growing family of application-aware SnapManager software tools running on a server. With SnapManager, wizard-driven application consistent backup and granular recovery can be performed at the application level instead of at the volume level. For example, SnapManager for Exchange can be used to restore an individual user’s e-mail and SnapManager for SQL Server can restore an individual table within a database.  SnapManager tools are also available for restores at the operating system level (e.g., Microsoft Windows) and the virtual server level (e.g., VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V).  Sub-plug-ins for VSC can also be used to manage the protection of applications, virtual machines, and operating systems from the vSphere Client.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab used NetApp SnapManager for Exchange and SQL Server to perform space-efficient disk-based backups and restores for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server running in a consolidated VMware infrastructure. The schema for the SQL Server database used during ESG Lab testing is shown in Figure 8.  In this example, a 215 MB database full of baseball statistics was tested.

A wizard accessed from the NetApp SnapManager for SQL Server interface was used to perform a space-efficient disk-based backup.  Database corruption was simulated by deleting two of the tables (dbo.Batting and dbo.BattingPost). The wizard shown in Figure 9 was used to recover the database.  Less than three minutes after getting started with the intuitive NetApp SnapManager for SQL Server wizard, the restore had completed.   Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio was used to verify that the database had been restored correctly.

ESG Lab performed a similar set of tests with Microsoft Exchange. A 2 GB Exchange database with 40 pre-populated mailboxes was used during this stage of testing. The Exchange database was deleted to simulate a catastrophic operator error.  Less than two minutes after getting started with the restore wizard, Microsoft Exchange was up and running.

Efficiency

The NetApp Unified Storage Architecture uses a variety of technologies to increase storage efficiency in a consolidated Microsoft environment.  FlexVol with thin provisioning, FlexClones, and NetApp Deduplication are particularly powerful.

FlexVol with thin provisioning increases storage efficiency by providing just-in-time capacity for applications accessing storage using block-based or file-based protocol (e.g., iSCSI, FC, FCoE, CIFS, NFS). Instead of allocating the maximum amount of storage that an application might use over time, NetApp Thin Provisioning allocates capacity on demand from a shared pool of storage.

FlexClone reduces the capacity required to store clones of operating system and application images in a consolidated Microsoft environment. A cloned copy created with FlexClone through the Rapid Cloning Utility magnifies capacity savings as it stores differences instead of whole copies. NetApp Deduplication provides similar benefits as it reduces storage capacity by eliminating redundant chunks of data within a storage volume (block or file) via a background operation. Virtual server images are a great candidate for NetApp Deduplication because they tend to have a lot of data in common (e.g., operating system images and space reserved on disk for virtual server memory dumps).

The combined efficiency of NetApp FlexVol, Thin Provisioning, FlexClone, and Deduplication is illustrated in Figure 10. FlexVol with Thin Provisioning reduces storage capacity as it eliminates the differences between the capacity allocated to an application and what is actually consumed.  FlexClone and Deduplication eliminate duplicates to magnify the capacity savings.

The combined effect of NetApp capacity efficient technologies is backed by a 50% Virtualization Guarantee. As part of the program, NetApp is offering a guarantee that its customers will use 50% less storage compared to traditional storage in a VMware virtual environment, subject to terms and conditions.[3]

ESG Lab Testing

NetApp System Manager was leveraged to monitor the storage efficiency of a consolidated Windows environment during ESG Lab testing. Block-based volumes accessed via the iSCSI protocol (e.g., the iSCSI datastore hosting VMs) were configured to provide capacity on demand with FlexVol.  A NetApp Deduplication job was run on demand to eliminate duplicate data, including .vmdk files accessed via the iSCSI protocol. The Rapid Cloning Utility was used to realize additional capacity savings with NetApp FlexClone technology.  As shown in Figure 11, capacity requirements were reduced by 89% during ESG Lab testing.

A similar set of tests which measured the efficiency of NetApp Deduplication in a consolidated VMware environment was performed in a previous ESG Lab Validation.[4] During those tests, the capacity required to store 15 VMware virtual machine images was reduced by a factor of 97%.[5]

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

• The Unified Storage Architecture was used to consolidate a mix of file sharing and popular applications (Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Active Directory, Apache Web Server) in a virtual server environment powered by VMware vSphere.
• Unified management tools from NetApp were used to perform routine storage management tasks at the application level (e.g., NetApp SnapManager for Exchange), the virtual server level (NetApp VSC Plug-in for vSphere), and the storage system level (NetApp System Manager).
• The VSC 2.0 Plug-in was used to perform wizard-driven storage management tasks from the VMware management console.
• A Rapid Cloning wizard, accessed from the VSC-enabled VMware management interface, was used to perform a wizard-driven, space-efficient clone of ten VMware images in less than five minutes.
• FlexVol, FlexClone, and NetApp Deduplication reduced storage capacity requirements in a consolidated Microsoft environment by 89%.
• SnapManager for Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange were used to perform a wizard-driven, capacity-efficient restore of a database with simulated corruption.

Issues to Consider

• While ESG Lab tested a unified Windows consolidation solution with server virtualization technology from VMware, it should be noted that NetApp also supports tools and best practices for server virtualization technology from Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Citrix (XenServer).
• ESG Lab has confirmed that the combination of FlexVol, FlexClone, and Deduplication can be used to increase storage efficiency in a consolidated Windows environment by 89% or more, but storage administrators familiar with legacy storage systems need to change the way they’ve been managing storage capacity to take advantage of these capabilities.  Instead of waiting for an application or an operating system to signal that it is out of storage capacity, a FlexVol just-in-time storage pool must be monitored to make sure it never runs out of storage. The good news is that NetApp’s unified management approach can be used to simplify and automate these tasks using familiar management interfaces.
• While NetApp’s unified approach supports a broad variety of host interfaces, drive types, and management software packages, care should be taken when calculating the cost of a NetApp unified solution since many of the interfaces and software packages are separately licensed. This matters the most when comparing the price of a NetApp unified solution to a disk array from an emerging vendor that bundles a less exhaustive list of interface and software options into the acquisition price.

The Bigger Truth

IT managers are struggling to answer a number of questions as they look to meet the growing storage capacity needs of Microsoft applications.  As more and more Microsoft applications are classified as business critical, how will vital information assets be protected now and in the future? How will the organization keep pace with capacity growth of 50% or more annually while staying within budget?  How can more capacity be managed with existing service levels and existing staff?  Will storage investments complement—or complicate—a virtual server consolidation initiative? Can IT create a winning strategy that works for both the team and the business?

Windows file servers and islands of storage for Microsoft applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint are a waste of time and money.  Reliance on a mix of legacy servers and separate storage solutions to meet the needs of a mix of Microsoft applications increases capital equipment and ongoing operational costs. Costs are increased due to a variety of reasons, including inefficient server utilization, over-provisioned disk capacity, increased complexity for storage administrators, and the ever-rising cost of space and power.

For more than a decade, NetApp has been delivering unified storage systems with a single operating system that runs on all of its disk arrays.  Starting with a unified storage system that supports a unified mix of storage protocols and drive types, NetApp has evolved to create a Unified Storage Architecture which increases storage efficiency, simplifies data management, improves data protection, and reduces costs.   The storage efficiency gains in a consolidated Microsoft environment are particularly noteworthy. During ESG Lab testing, storage capacity requirements were reduced by 89%.

When we first tested a unified NetApp storage system with iSCSI support in 2003, ESG Lab was extremely impressed with the native Windows look and feel of the NetApp SnapDrive for Windows plug-in. Since then, NetApp has focused on the development of best practices and application-aware management interfaces for Microsoft applications.  During this most recent round of testing in 2010, ESG Lab was extremely impressed by the VSC version 2.0 Plug-in and the SnapManager interfaces for Microsoft Exchange and SQL server. As of the writing of this report, ESG Lab had tested more than a dozen storage systems in virtual server environments.   Based on our experience to date, ESG Lab believes that NetApp has the most powerful, intuitive, and consistent set of management tools for consolidated Windows environments.

If your organization is struggling to keep up with data growth, keep costs in check, and increase the availability of Microsoft business applications in a VMware environment, ESG Lab recommends that you start with an evaluation of the savings that can be realized with the NetApp Guarantee: NetApp guarantees that customers will use 50% less capacity compared to traditional storage in a VMware virtual environment. [6] With an integrated family of management capabilities, a common code base that supports all of the popular block and file-based storage interfaces, capacity efficiency that’s ideally suited for virtual server environments, and application-aware snapshots that are fast and efficient, ESG Lab has confirmed that the Unified Storage Architecture from NetApp is a sound foundation for Windows storage consolidation.

Appendix

[2] For more configuration details, please refer to the Appendix.

[3] For more information, visit www.netapp.com/guarantee

[4] Source: ESG Lab Validation Report, NetApp Deduplication for FAS, April 2008.

[5] The level of capacity reduction that can be expected in production environments will vary depending on the number of virtual machines sharing the same storage system and the degree of data commonality between virtual machines. In this example, there were relatively few virtual machines (15) with a high degree of data in common (each machine was running the same operating system and application).

[6] For more information, visit www.netapp.com/guarantee where you can access program details including FAQs, technical resources, best practices, and the new NetApp Storage Efficiency Calculator to evaluate your current environment and learn how NetApp storage efficiency technologies can lead to higher storage utilization.

Server Virtualization

In the future, business decisions will drive application choices and policies. The application will provide its requirements to a highly virtualized platform and the platform will take over and perform many of the manual tasks handled by IT administrators today. Compute capacity will be distributed across large hardware resource pools connected by network connections of different speeds and protocols, all tied to storage and data that spans different storage systems on different continents. Protection, security, and performance a will be policy-driven based on the data. In order to optimize cost and utilization, data is moved from place to place based on lifecycle, requirements, and usefulness of data itself—enabling completely liquid IT.

This all may seem too good to be true, but look at what server virtualization has already done in a relatively short time. It has introduced efficiencies and optimization that had been cumbersome and costly in the past. For example, ESG consistently sees business continuity and disaster recovery as a primary driver to server virtualization implementations. IT has already begun to recognize that sever virtualization extends well beyond server consolidation and improved resource utilization.

With the great success server virtualization has experienced, a massive opportunity still lies ahead:

1. Tier-1 applications. It has been relatively simple for IT for virtualize the first 20% to 30% of applications, but the next 5% remains a challenge. Now is the time for IT operations to work with the “server huggers” to build confidence in the virtualized platform. Technology vendors will have to arm application and line of business owners with best practices, blueprints, and frameworks that are application-specific and demonstrate the value of a virtualized platform.  Expect to see solution purchasing trends that are also application-specific, are massively scalable, and are designed and delivered on a virtualized platform.
2. Management and automation. Data center orchestration and management will play a monumental role in virtualization investments as companies drive toward 100% virtualized environments and begin to build applications specifically targeted for the platform. Microsoft, for example, is making a giant push with System Center messaging and aligning with key technology partners, indicating a clear focus on System Center as the management solution for physical and virtual environments.  Now that virtualized environments have successfully matured, IBM, CA, HP, and BMC are all upping their game as well.
3. Multi-hypervisor deployments. Just as IT has managed and maintained a heterogeneous operating system environment, evidence also suggests that multiple hypervisors will be deployed. IT is heterogeneous by nature, so this makes complete sense. All hypervisors essentially do the same job, but licensing fees for proprietary products are driving enterprises to adopt a second free product. The increasing maturity of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V are grabbing enterprise attention, but VMware is not necessarily being displaced where it exists.
4. Platform affinity. For the last few years, the virtualization market has been ripe with a steady stream of features that complement the core virtualization platform. At this point, the technology has actually surpassed deployments in many cases. Expect to see virtualization vendors continue to share their visionary strategic roadmaps with the end-user community in an effort to shift more applications over to the virtualized platform and establish a strong hold inside the data center. Keep a keen eye on how each vendor will approach the situation: VMware with its core vSphere platform, Microsoft with System Center, Oracle from an application perspective, Citrix with a data center to desktop strategy, and Cisco in the areas of unified platforms and data center networking.

Higher level IT priorities are also helping accelerate the migration to a virtualized platform via:

• Centralization of core IT assets, IT personnel, and applications.
• Consolidation of services, operations, resources, and infrastructure.
• Shared services of resources, professional services, and infrastructure.
• Budget and cost control driven by cost reduction, avoidance, and activity-based pricing.
• Security highlighted with improved safeguards, enterprise policies, data protection, and mitigation of insider threats.

The Bigger Truth

The success of virtualization can be measured by the fact that business decision-makers have worked it into their conversations and become proponents of the technology. In many cases, it is a top IT priority due to its ability to save time, reduce capital expenditures, and greatly improve overall data center efficiency. However, challenges lie ahead as IT works to take the initial success of virtualization and transition it to more business production workloads. The interesting fact is that the transition will have little to do with technology and will instead be heavily weighted toward IT and business process.

Application owners and ISVs largely hold the keys to the next wave of server virtualization success. Application choices, migrations, upgrades, and hardware refresh cycles will act as catalysts for change and potential opportunities to move workloads to the virtual platform. New application deployments will also drive deployment choice. ISVs that see the value in virtualization will transparently build in server virtualization for improved availability, simplified maintenance, and additional value to their customers.

Investing in server virtualization should be a no-brainer for a certain class of predictable workloads—IT often has in-depth knowledge regarding these applications and their performance characteristics. Constant analysis is essential to maintaining momentum as organizations target the next wave of applications suitable for virtualizing. Additionally, management tools that provide visibility, performance metrics, and modeling will help tune investments in virtualization and drive increased confidence for future applications.

The Cloud

Cloud computing—everyone wants it, but no one knows what it is. Primarily driven by its ability to provide improved operational efficiencies, IT agility, and risk mitigation, cloud computing as a platform choice that can be applied across multiple IT initiatives will be top of mind for IT executives. The interesting dynamic that will evolve over time is the perceived risk it poses to current IT operations. ESG speaks with IT operations professionals who clearly see the benefits of cloud computing, but are fearful of the potential security risk it poses and even its impact on headcount reduction, shifting application responsibility, and automating current IT responsibilities. Expect to see IT “cloud teams” that are tasked to define and identify initial opportunities, and map cloud computing to IT initiatives. Some CIOs are already being compensated for migrations to cloud.

As businesses plan to transition virtualization investments to a cloud computing platform, they will be focused on:

• Consumption and delivery. Cloud computing is a self-service consumption model where workloads are deployed and transparently executed either internally or over the Internet and delivered to businesses that only pay for what they consume. IT must work to develop a deployment strategy or application owners and developers will turn directly to the public cloud and risk security breaches, violation of compliance mandates, and data loss.
• A cloud readiness checklist that includes virtualizing X86 based workloads, automating routine IT tasks, and delivering IT as a service on a highly optimized platform. Companies will also need to include deployment of a consumer interface, a chargeback model, and favorable economic consumption models for application and line of business owners. The virtualization platform will need to be highly secure with guaranteed service levels for all deployed workloads.
• An integrated platform that includes servers, networking, and storage.  The consumption model is changing as intercompany alliances are founded to build shared services layers. Cisco, EMC, and VMware have made significant movement in the market with VBlocks, same for HP with its Converged Infrastructure and IBM Cloudburst, and this trend should continue. Cloud maturity’s will rely on a stable, reliable, and scalable platform that is well integrated and ready to quickly adapt to business requirements. The modularity of the platforms will also be important for independent scaling of compute, network, and storage capacity.
• Third party capacity that can be leveraged on demand for additional compute or storage requirements. By no means is IT about to move entire data centers to Amazon or Google, but they will begin to leverage service providers as an extension of their cloud computing infrastructures. Savvis, Terremark, and Bluelock are all going to market with IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offerings. Expect to see the service provider market heat up with additional IaaS opportunities focused on data protection, test and development, elastic capacity, and hosted desktop virtualization. The biggest barrier to adoption? Security and auditability in multi-tenant environments.
• Applications. The majority of focus to date has been on keeping existing applications up and running on an improved platform. This is where server virtualization has made giant strides. The next area of focus is new application design and development. Application owners and development teams are very interested in designing new applications to take advantage of HTML 5 as well as Java and .NET platforms that deliver design and deployment choices far superior to those that exist today. VMware has jumped in the game with the acquisition of SpringSource, Microsoft continues to evolve AZURE, and Amazon and Google are rounding out their services.

Cloud computing is an excellent way to capture the attention of IT professionals, but technology vendors, resellers, and service providers have to be armed with clear strategic roadmaps outlining where they are today and how to ultimately deliver IT as a service. A new skill set and a new language will need to be established for vendors and service providers to learn, become efficient at communicating, and quickly demonstrate the value cloud computing.

The Bigger Truth

The buildup around cloud today is primarily being driven by large technology vendors sharing their strategic directions regarding the future of IT. As vendors and the media build hype around the cloud, there will certainly be benefits to IT, but we may not even end up calling it “cloud.” It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that IT will begin consuming a more modular infrastructure that is likely to be delivered pre-integrated and the consumption of IT will be greatly simplified and economically favorable to the business. Server virtualization will lead IT consolidation efforts, but it won’t stretch much beyond helping with existing x86 workloads. IT will still have to maintain mainframe, UNIX, and other proprietary platforms.

IT operations and application owners will view cloud differently. IT operations will look at cloud as the potential to provide previously unavailable capacity; application owners and developers will look at the cloud as a development and potential deployment platform. Both paths lead to success if managed much in the same way we have always managed IT: by applying the required security policies, maintaining application availability, and driving application productivity. Cost, risk, and time to delivery will always be factors and IT will need to manage these variables to make informed decisions that drive value to the business. No one is suggesting going in on Monday morning and moving an entire data center to the cloud, but the opportunity to move pieces, certain workloads, and even desktop is very real and available.

Overview

Before 10Gb Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), standard enterprise architectures recommended multiple independent (often resilient) networks. These networks were wired, via rack-mounted patch panels and light guides, to a central patch panel zone in the data center. Wiring reconfiguration had to be performed manually, cables had identification tags, and missing or misplaced connections caused outages. Network flows were designed as edge-to-core, so all traffic passed through a set of core network switches with fan out ratios carefully calculated to avoid congestion and frame loss.

Today, network architects construct a single resilient network using top of rack, wire once configurations. Virtual networks replace physical networks and pairs of MAC or WWN addresses identify connections rather than cable tags.  Even basic cabling is greatly simplified—ESG estimates a potential savings of $2,600 per server on cabling alone.  Network administrators use a management console to reconfigure connectivity rather than patch cords and a network diagram. Top of rack switches replace patch panels and light guides. Rack configuration becomes idiot-proof. As we move to scale-out storage and server configurations, the predominant network flows are edge-to-edge rather than edge-to-core and, as a result, core switches can be smaller and less expensive.

Server Centric – Network Physical Designs

Last century, network designs consisted of one or more data networks, a storage network, a management network, and a Keyboard, Video, Mouse (KVM) network.

Each server network port is connected to its switch via a set of patch panels or fiber light guides inside the rack and a central patching zone. Each server network port needs to be physically connected to the correct switch to suit its purpose. This involves adding at least two patch leads, the first in the rack from the server to the rack patch panel (1) and the other at the patching zone (2) to connect to the desired switch.

A typical server may have six or more network ports to be connected. Changing from one network to another involves a physical visit to the data center and the replacement of patch leads. This is expensive, inflexible, complex, and prone to error. Troubleshooting is manual and tedious.

Rack Centric – Top of Rack Network Physical Designs

In top of rack designs, a switch fabric is installed at the end of each row. As racks are configured, a pair of switches is installed at the top of each new rack and wired back to the end of rack fabric (using either 10Gb or 40Gb structured interconnect uplinks). As servers or blade frames are installed in the rack, they are wired directly into the top of rack switches via patch leads (1).

A typical server will have two network ports to interconnect. Changes are made electronically via a central console or by using autonomics, scripts, and templates. No one visits the data center, risk and cost are low, and change cycle time is reduced to immediate. Troubleshooting is simple and accurate. Heavily virtualized environments use functionality in the hypervisor or its surrounding support systems to fully automate the changes and integrate them with load balancing and automatic fault isolation and remediation functions.

What is Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (CEE)?

Convergence is a networking approach that leverages a number of key improvements in Ethernet technology that together are called Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CCE), also known as Data Center Bridging (DCB). These improvements include:

• Priority-based flow control: designed to ensure zero loss for particular Classes of Service traffic in congested networks—an essential prerequisite for supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
• High performance: 10Gb or 40Gb—essential for carrying large numbers of virtualized network flows.
• Congestion notification: moves flow control intelligence out to the network edge and enables transmission rate limiting, thereby enhancing the performance of protocols like TCP.

The net impact is that CEE can carry all traffic on a single network, including loss- and latency-sensitive Fibre Channel storage flows. Figure 3 shows a mixture of Ethernet and FCoE frames on a single CEE network.

Network designers can choose to mix IP-based LAN traffic with either FCoE or iSCSI on the same wire, knowing that the advanced features of CEE will create a low latency, lossless platform that ensures high-availability and predictable performance and reliability. Converged designs also allow flexibility for applications to migrate from FCoE to iSCSI block storage or to file or object structured storage, all by changing software configurations rather than by moving cables or changing from Fibre Channel HBAs to CEE network adapters.

Operational Efficiency

Server Configuration

Top of rack designs are wire once and forget. Configuration and routing of LAN and SAN traffic are done centrally—either manually via a console or more likely as part of an integrated virtualization product such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Citrix Xen.  In fact, the more “virtual awareness” in the network, the more server configuration tasks can be automated.  For example, BLADE Network’s VMready can detect a VM move from one server to another; when this happens, virtualization management and the network can coordinate to preserve attributes like VLAN or 802.1p tags.  With this virtualization intelligence, large organization can leverage the flexibility and mobility features of server virtualization without breaking the network architecture or opening up security holes.

Data Center Scale-out

The top of rack converged design is conceived to enable rack loads of servers and storage to be scaled out in a modern enterprise data center. As each new rack is populated, a small set of uplink connections are made to an end of row switch, usually with a fan out ratio of five to one (five top of rack ports for each uplink port). In a BLADE infrastructure, this can radically improve data center network economics.  How?  Rack-based networks perform the role of access and aggregation switches, alleviating the need for more expensive external core/aggregation switches within the data center.  This also reduces cabling costs as multiple network tiers are connected within a rack rather than through patch panels under the data center floor.

Switches are acquired just in time as the rack needs to be populated, improving capital efficiency and reducing power wasted by orphan ports.

Conventional three-tier switch designs require full network population at data center inception, dramatically impacting capital efficiency and increasing waste power and heat. Newer high performance (40GbE and 100GbE) parts cannot be integrated into the conventional design as all equipment must be designed and implemented too early.

Cost Analysis

Costs are notoriously difficult to compare as they move frequently. So, to some extent, many of the line items in Table 1 (adapters and switches) can change over time and vary depending on region and market conditions. However, the cabling cost differential is huge and compares similar parts—the top of rack design just needs many fewer of them.   Additionally, larger organizations can achieve significant cost savings by using additional top of rack switches with fewer ports per switch instead of investing in excess capacity/port count on expensive core switches.

The Bigger Truth

Anyone considering building a new data center without seriously assessing top of rack designs will simultaneously spend more than necessary on build-out and reduce operational flexibility. Installing, configuring, and managing data center scale patch panels are highly complex tasks that require significant effort and attention to detail. Top of rack network designs deliver reduced risk of human error or electrical failure, higher velocity of change, and reduced cost.

When choosing top of rack switches, it is also important to assess software capabilities and not just hardware “speeds and feeds.”  The best switches will feature easy-to-use software for configuration management, troubleshooting, and central command-and-control across multiple physical switches.  Furthermore, software functionality should extend beyond basic Ethernet, toward a unified fabric.  This means tight integration with server virtualization management and storage over Ethernet.

Finally, top of rack switches should fit into the overall data center architecture.  Since the accelerating adoption of server virtualization will continue to pull blade servers in its wake, a rack-based network architecture makes a lot of sense.  Given this, BLADE Network Technologies will likely become part of the fabric—one way or another.  Smart IT executives will recognize this trend and evaluate how they can integrate BLADE’s offerings into their strategic data center plans.