Background

While IT priorities and challenges are often considered with data centers and other centralized corporate resources in mind, it is important to remember that organizations often have distributed locations that have significant and complex computing requirements. In fact, typical IT challenges are often exacerbated in these remote/branch offices due to distance and lack of onsite IT staff. ESG research found that companies face significant challenges when it comes to delivering applications over the WAN from a central location to employees at branch office locations. According to a recent ESG survey,^[1] nearly half of respondents identified improving application performance for end-users as a key initiative (see Figure 1). Improvements to application accessibility and better collaboration capabilities were also high on the list.

Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite Overview

Riverbed Technology’s Steelhead product family is designed to provide increased application performance and data transfer speeds over the WAN. Steelhead products address four main solution areas.

• Application Acceleration—Steelhead optimizes both TCP and UDP traffic, addresses application-specific latency, delivers LAN-like performance and availability over the WAN, and enables improved collaboration, file sharing, and productivity for distributed enterprises.
• Bandwidth Optimization—enables network managers to achieve better utilization of existing WAN bandwidth by eliminating redundant WAN traffic.
• IT Infrastructure Consolidation—enables consolidation of IT infrastructure from remote offices to a centrally located facility, maintaining performance, availability, and security, as well as reducing capital expenditure and management costs.
• Backup & Replication Acceleration—enables quick and secure backup and replication from branch locations.

The Riverbed Steelhead family of products is designed to optimize WAN traffic between distributed remote and branch office locations and a central data center. Steelhead appliances run the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), which is the software platform that enables data-, protocol-, and application-level WAN optimization and allows a central office to consolidate the majority of its remote office server infrastructure, taking the first step toward true infrastructure consolidation. Riverbed Steelhead EX combines WAN optimization capabilities with VMware on the appliance, enabling a branch to virtualize local servers and minimize the bandwidth required by users and applications.

Granite was developed by Riverbed to deliver edge virtual server infrastructure that extends an enterprise storage area network (SAN) out to remote offices. It enables organizations to centralize and consolidate branch office storage at a primary data center. Steelhead EX + Granite combines Riverbed Steelhead and Granite software capabilities with the goal of serving write-intensive and custom applications in the branch with a global storage infrastructure projected from the data center, eliminating storage at remote branch offices previously considered too difficult to consolidate.

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite WAN optimization and storage consolidation appliance at a Riverbed facility in San Francisco, California. Testing was designed to demonstrate how Steelhead EX + Granite improves application performance and availability, as well as delivers infrastructure consolidation and data security for branch locations in a distributed enterprise.

Getting Started with WAN Optimization

Steelhead appliances at remote locations, along with Steelhead Mobile software on remote user laptops, work together with one or more Steelhead appliances in the corporate data center to optimize traffic flowing over the WAN. Riverbed addresses three areas that affect WAN efficiency: application chattiness, data redundancy, and transport protocol inefficiency.

To speed application performance, application-specific optimizations complete transactions locally in the branch on behalf of servers in the data center, eliminating the need to wait for application responses over a WAN connection. To reduce the amount of data sent over a WAN, Steelhead appliances and software intercept and inspect WAN data to determine whether the data or a portion of it has been seen before. When a user attempts to access data already encountered by the local Steelhead datastore, the data is served locally, eliminating the delay of pulling data over the WAN. With this capability, Steelhead appliances allow users and applications to read and manipulate data, while only requesting or sending unique blocks across the WAN. To overcome transport protocol limitations, Steelhead appliances more intelligently scale and pack TCP payloads, significantly reducing round trips and more efficiently transmitting data across the WAN.

Figure 4 shows the test bed used by ESG Lab, which consisted of a simulated data center and remote office. A Network Nightmare WAN simulation device was used to limit bandwidth and inject latency, simulating a transcontinental T1 link. The data center was configured with one NetApp FAS 2050 connected to both Steelhead and Granite core appliances. The remote office had a Steelhead EX + Granite appliance running Steelhead WAN optimization software, Granite block-storage acceleration, and the Riverbed VSP. The connection between the two environments was limited to 1.5 Mbps (T1 equivalent) and had 100 milliseconds of round-trip latency injected to simulate a remote office connecting to a data center up to 3,000 miles away.

ESG Lab Testing

For the first round of tests, Steelhead WAN optimization was used to optimize typical knowledge worker operating tasks. Data reduction and optimization-related metrics were captured using the Steelhead management console as well as wall-clock timing of certain operations. As shown in Figure 5, simple file transfers, Microsoft Exchange messages with attachments, and Microsoft SharePoint transaction performance were measured with and without Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization enabled. The corresponding results show performance improvements of anywhere from 5X to 50X, depending on the type of transaction.

The data in Table 1 includes the sizes of the objects used in performance testing and the number of seconds to completely execute each operation. The largest time reduction was seen with the transfer of a 65.3 MB file from a remote client to the corporate file server.

Consolidation of Branch Services

Organizations are using server virtualization to simplify their IT infrastructures while reducing costs in their data centers through consolidation. For services required in branch offices, consolidation (minimizing infrastructure in the branches) is also a key goal. However, organizations are faced with a challenge in that certain applications require local compute and storage resources to meet performance requirements for end-users. Steelhead EX features the Riverbed Virtual Services Platform (VSP) that incorporates VMware virtualization technology to consolidate branch servers and applications onto the Steelhead EX appliance.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab began testing the ease of consolidating branch office services and applications using Riverbed Steelhead + Granite technology by simulating the user experience of moving from a traditional branch office with dedicated servers, applications, and local storage to a virtualized Riverbed WAN-optimized and consolidated model, as illustrated in Figure 6.

ESG Lab first virtualized a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 system in the remote location by installing the VM onto the Riverbed VSP. This is accomplished via the Steelhead management interface. The Steelhead EX + Granite appliance can host up to five end-user virtual machines. ESG Lab connected to the Steelhead EX + Granite appliance through the Riverbed Steelhead Management Console to install the virtual server as shown in Figure 7.

Once the virtual machine was loaded and running, ESG Lab simulated a Microsoft SQL server workload using the Iometer load generation utility. SQL Server is an application that, due to the response-time sensitivity of transactional databases, is often hosted on physical servers with local storage in a branch office. In this test, a 4 KB block size was used with a 67% read, 100% random access pattern.

Figure 8 shows the Iometer results displayed during the test. The most important metric to note here is “Average I/O Response Time (ms).” While the back-end connection to the storage array was over a simulated T1 connection with 100 ms of round-trip latency, Iometer reports only 31 milliseconds of latency to disk because data is being written to the local Steelhead blockstore.

It’s important to note here that without Steelhead EX + Granite, ESG Lab was unable to obtain a usable result due to the restricted bandwidth and high latency of the WAN link. In fact, the connection to the LUN in the data center timed out, and the mount failed.

Consolidating Branch Office Storage

Riverbed Granite extends iSCSI block storage from the data center to the remote site in a way that is transparent to users and applications, and that takes advantage of Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization technology. Granite enables organizations to maintain local servers at branch offices while actually storing and protecting their data within their data centers. Riverbed VSP provides the ability to host those servers directly on the Steelhead EX appliance.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested Granite by mounting iSCSI LUNs from the data center on physical branch server nodes as well as within the virtual machines hosted in the Steelhead EX + Granite appliance. To verify the challenge of accessing “unoptimized” iSCSI storage over the WAN, ESG Lab first attempted to mount an iSCSI LUN directly from a traditional branch server to a data center SAN without Granite, and observed that the connection timed out and the mount failed.

Next, ESG Lab tested whether Riverbed Granite could allow the use of iSCSI over the WAN by configuring Granite appliances in both a data center and a remote office location. Figure 9 shows the basic functional design of storage extended with Granite. In effect, there are two iSCSI connections (working from right to left):

• Within the data center (right), between the actual iSCSI SAN target to the Granite core iSCSI initiator.
• Within the remote site (left), between the production server iSCSI initiator to the Steelhead EX + Granite iSCSI target.

Using the same branch server, ESG Lab was able to successfully mount with no errors or timeouts the same iSCSI LUN that had previously failed to mount in the “unoptimized” test.

The combination of Granite with Steelhead WAN optimization makes it possible for a data center LUN to be successfully mounted by a remote office production server—either a physical server located in the branch or one that is virtually hosted within the Riverbed VSP hypervisor.

Next, ESG Lab examined performance and usability. For this test, ESG Lab (working right to left in Figure 9):

1. Configured multiple LUNs within the data center SAN, which is completely unaware of the Steelhead EX + Granite extended storage scenario.
2. Configured the Granite core iSCSI initiator to mount the LUNs that are to be extended.
3. Assigned a specific Steelhead EX + Granite edge device from the Granite core at the data center to extend each LUN. By doing so, the Steelhead EX + Granite device became an iSCSI target and offered the LUN to devices within the remote site.
4. Connected the LUN to the production Windows server using its iSCSI initiator, with the server being completely unaware that the LUN is not within the remote site but actually extended from the data center.

From there, the LUN behaved like any other iSCSI-attached device and could be mounted and utilized. A common concern about remote storage is that the latency associated with initial use or access requests will have an impact on the end-user experience. To observe the behavior, ESG Lab configured an extended LUN within Steelhead EX + Granite that contained a known data set and requested various randomly selected files.

Figure 10 shows the Steelhead EX + Granite Blockstore Metrics report, which measures the amount of “hits” (requested blocks that were already available at the branch) and “misses” (blocks that needed to be sent from the data center) in megabytes. This, in effect, measures the effectiveness of the Granite technology to pre-fetch and/or quickly transmit the necessary blocks, such that the branch server experiences the storage as though it is local.

ESG Lab used AutoCAD software to open a 33.5 MB file (cifs.dwg). The first time the file was accessed across the WAN, the file-open process took 27.7 seconds. The file was closed and the workstation was rebooted to clear client cache. When the workstation was restarted, the same file was opened using AutoCAD, and the file opened in 5 seconds, the same as baseline testing over the LAN.

While Figure 10 shows the Granite technology’s effectiveness in pulling data from the data center to the branch, Figure 11 shows the behavior of data written at the branch being committed to the data center.

• The dark blue line tracks the amount of data being written to the Granite blockstore.
• The light blue areas show data received but not yet written back to the data center storage array, implying minimal latency in transmitting those blocks to the data center.
• The grey areas show data that has been committed to the data center.

Overall, ESG Lab found the Riverbed Granite extended storage solution to be surprisingly easy to configure and utilize. Neither the production server at the remote site nor the data center SAN felt any impact from the extended distance. The iSCSI implementation was intuitive and performed well over a simulated 3,000-mile WAN connection. The combination of Granite with Steelhead technology dramatically accelerated data transfers over low-bandwidth, high-latency connections.

Remote Office Scenarios and Implications

After the servers were virtualized and the SAN storage was extended from the central data center, ESG Lab was ready to explore the performance and resilience of a Riverbed-enhanced remote office when a WAN link goes down and is restored.

ESG Lab Testing

First, ESG Lab set a baseline by opening several large files that resided on an extended iSCSI SAN volume shared on the remote office LAN by a virtual server hosted in the Steelhead EX + Granite appliance without Granite acceleration. ESG Lab opened a 39.4 MB AutoCAD file named “http.dwg” using a client on the remote office LAN. Without Steelhead and Granite optimization, the file opened in 721 seconds, or just over 12 minutes. The AutoCAD application was completely unresponsive while the file was pulled across the WAN.

Next, the same file-open test was performed with Steelhead WAN optimization and Granite active. The first time the file was accessed, the operation completed in 39.1 seconds. After closing the file and opening it a second time, the file opened in 5.0 seconds. As expected, the second open was much faster, being serviced by the blockstore cache on the Steelhead EX + Granite appliance. Saving the file to a new name took 3.1 seconds.

As seen in Figure 12, at 18:07, ESG Lab disconnected the simulated WAN between the remote office and data center, and attempted to open the same file. The file opened successfully, in 5.6 seconds. Next, the file was saved to a new name, which completed in 3.1 seconds. This is comparable to the performance observed when the WAN was connected.

ESG Lab repeated these procedures multiple times, opening files and saving them to new names. Performance was consistent. Figure 12 shows the data writes/commits report from the Steelhead EX appliance.

As shown in Figure 12, as data was written to the network share, the uncommitted bytes that had been accepted by the Steelhead appliance but not yet transmitted to the data center increased. Note that the entire time that the volume was disconnected, the client and server at the remote site remained connected, and the volume remained online.

After approximately 30 minutes, more than 40 MB had been written to the shared volume. ESG Lab then reconnected the WAN and monitored the data writes/commits report. As can be seen in Figure 13, the Steelhead appliance committed the 43.6 MB of data to the NetApp FAS in the data center in about 45 seconds.

The resynchronization was automatic and completely transparent. Users and applications saw no change in connectivity or access when the WAN link was down, nor when it came back up. Figure 14 shows a network traffic summary report for the time period that the resynchronization was executing.

The port number indicates the type of traffic: Port 7951 is traffic flowing between the Steelhead EX + Granite edge device and Steelhead and Granite core devices in the data center. The actual data transmitted across the WAN link was highly optimized, and, of the 43.9 MB of iSCSI data transmitted by the virtual server, only 3 MB was actually transmitted across the WAN, a reduction of 93%.

Data Protection Scenarios and Implications

When extending storage from the data center to the remote office, data protection becomes multifaceted, incorporating not only backup and recovery of production data, but also protection of remote office data from loss or theft.

Securing Data in the Appliance

Riverbed appliances utilize integrated storage to hold cached data in remote locations, designed to enhance the remote user’s experience by providing local access to frequently used data. The Riverbed Steelhead + Granite appliance offers AES encryption (up to and including AES-256) to securely encrypt the data on disk. The AES key for the Granite blockstore is kept in a secure vault area, which is also encrypted using AES-256.

The default key to each appliance vault is unique, derived from a unique identifier of each appliance. The vault key can be changed by organizations to comply with their own security standards. When an appliance boots, the vault key must be provided, or the contents of the blockstore are not accessible. A visual representation of Riverbed encryption is shown in Figure 15.

Backup and Recovery

When considering backup and recovery, multiple data protection scenarios are either enabled or enhanced, including:

• File/application-based protection of the remote data, from the data center
• Block-based protection of the LUNs used by the branch platforms, from the data center

In principle, because server-centric storage utilized at the branch is in fact extended from the data center via Granite (and user-centric data from the branch is stored locally on Granite-extended volumes), Riverbed suggests that data protection can be done entirely from the data center instance of the data.

ESG Lab audited the operating methods that Riverbed uses for storing its data to understand the viability for customers to use their current data-protection methods within a Steelhead EX + Granite deployed configuration.

Traditional File/Application Backups from Guest-VM Branch Servers

For production servers running at the branch, presumably as virtual machines within the Steelhead EX + Granite (VMware Virtual Server) host environment, traditional file- and/or application-centric backups are still achievable.

ESG Lab looked at how a typical backup agent can be installed within a virtualized production OS to send backup data to the requesting backup server located at the data center, as shown in Figure 16. In this configuration, as files are queued to be sent from the production VM to the backup server, Steelhead WAN optimization is designed to recognize the data that already exists at the data center from previous synchronizations. In this case, while both the remote backup agent and the data center backup server believe that the data is being sent across the WAN, only truly unique data segments and reference “pointers” to previously encountered data actually traverse the network.

Based on how ESG Lab tested file transfers with Steelhead EX + Granite, file-centric data movement during backups should be nearly eliminated. Similarly, application-centric backups that generate storage IO as part of the backup process (such as SQL Server log files) will benefit. In those cases, as the data files are prepared for backup, their corresponding blocks within Granite will be committed to the data center and therefore may not need to traverse the WAN during the actual backup.

SAN-based Backup of the Branch from the Data Center

Perhaps the most intuitive and yet subtle method ESG Lab observed was the ability to back up the extended LUN from within the data center. Because the SAN is unaware of the Steelhead/Granite solution, LUNs can be backed up directly using storage-based snapshots and clones—traditional “serverless” backup solutions.

As seen in Figure 17, ESG Lab observed that by backing up the original LUNs from the SAN, all of the production data could be protected in the data center, including virtualized server-centric data and client-specific data that are Granite-extended.

As shown in Figure 17, ESG Lab found serverless backups of remote office volumes to be potentially ideal choices for those customers who already utilize them within their data centers. The IO burden is removed not only from the production resources, but also from the Steelhead and Granite appliances, freeing them up for production IO exclusively. Like any serverless backup, an understanding of the applications in use and the need for consistency and post-backup processing are keys to success.

Riverbed SAN Hardware Snapshot Integration

Along with extending and potentially enhancing customers’ existing backup methodologies, Riverbed has also developed a Riverbed Hardware Snapshot Provider (RHSP) mechanism to directly integrate its storage-extending capabilities with both the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and SAN arrays from EMC, Dell EqualLogic, and NetApp.

Although RHSP was not tested by ESG Lab, a discussion with Riverbed highlighted RHSP capabilities that directly address the need for application consistency with backup. RHSP installs as a plug-in on Windows clients in the branch office. It is used within the VSS process to place a point-in-time marker into the Granite blockstore. This enables a backup agent to quiesce an application to indicate an application-consistent restore point. In turn, this indicator triggers a snapshot on the data center SAN storage array that can then be used for any required restores or subsequent secondary backups to disk or tape in the data center.

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

• ESG Lab used Steelhead appliances to optimize WAN performance and reduced data by up to 50 times, enabling more productive collaboration between remote and central offices.
• When running an OLTP database workload in a Riverbed appliance-hosted virtual machine, ESG Lab observed latency to storage over the WAN decreased by more than 67%, enabling a remote server to mount an iSCSI volume hosted in a distant data center, and making it possible to consolidate business-critical branch services over the WAN.
• ESG Lab found Granite-extended block-storage performance over a simulated transcontinental WAN link to be remarkably viable, rivaling local-attached storage in both throughput and latency.
• ESG Lab validated that Riverbed improved performance by a factor of 18 to 26 times when opening and editing large CAD files across a high-latency, low-bandwidth T1 link, providing WAN access to centralized project files at LAN-like speeds.
• ESG found that customers’ existing backup methodologies were all potentially viable options for remote offices—in ways not achievable without the combination of WAN optimization and storage extension. Without changing their backup mechanisms, customers may find their solutions enhanced because of how Steelhead optimizes the data streams that Granite has already synchronized between sites.

Issues to Consider

• It should be noted that one key to the performance of the extended storage is the built-in blockstore within the Steelhead EX + Granite appliance itself. When designing the storage to be used at the branch, customers should be aware that the Granite solution does not change normal design considerations around capacity or IO performance. Those aspects should still be considered when determining the size of the Granite edge device to place at a particular branch location.
• While many data-protection scenarios are enhanced through this configuration, for SAN-based backup of the branch from the data center, a minimal amount of effort is still required to ensure the boot volumes of the virtualized VMs on VSP within each branch appliance are protected and recoverable. ESG Lab hopes that Riverbed will address this in future releases, so that even in the VSP scenario, an entire VM can be protected at the data center.
• While many backup processes may potentially gain benefit from a Riverbed Steelhead solution with Granite technology, they do so without any awareness of Riverbed’s changes to infrastructure or topology.

The Bigger Truth

Riverbed provides comprehensive WAN optimization solutions, helping organizations share applications and data across global wide-area networks. Riverbed WAN optimization solutions have been proven in the field to give businesses order-of-magnitude increases in the performance and value of their existing IT infrastructure and mission-critical applications, including file sharing, e-mail, backup, document management systems, IT tools, and ERP and CRM solutions.

Riverbed has applied its field-proven WAN optimization technology to provide similar performance gains for SAN-based block data extended to remote offices. Achieving a data reduction of more than 26 to 1 in ESG Lab testing, Steelhead Granite technology not only reduces the amount of bandwidth needed to connect to data center SAN storage, but also provides access to remote users at local speeds, maximizing the productivity of those remote workers. Steelhead EX + Granite also enables organizations to utilize existing investments in data protection hardware and software and secures that data in the data center.

In a truly fluid enterprise, all data and storage resources will be centralized in the data center. When that occurs, organizations will gain the ability to provide desired performance in the branch and the ability to quickly provision systems and storage wherever or whenever they wish. In addition, data protection becomes much easier and more secure for remote offices—it is executed centrally along with all valuable corporate data in the data center.

ESG Lab confirmed, through hands-on testing, that Riverbed’s Steelhead EX + Granite solution is able to reduce remote office network traffic while extending data center SANs with little impact on remote office servers and clients. The solution integrated well with Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint business applications as well as basic file system services and iSCSI block storage, long considered all but impossible to extend over long-distance, low-bandwidth WAN links. Organizations interested in improving the remote user experience while bringing data-center-class performance and protection to their remote offices should seriously consider Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite.

Appendix

[2] Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.

[3] Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends, July 2011.

[4] ESG Research Report, Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends, July 2011.

[5] Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends, July 2011.

[6] ESG Research Report, Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends, July 2011.

The Stages of Server Virtualization

Many organizations are currently reaping benefits of server virtualization that include lower IT capital and operating costs and greater IT efficiency. Organizations with server virtualization experience are moving beyond these benefits to improve application provisioning, maintenance, availability, and backup/recovery processes. Server virtualization’s benefits appear to be closely correlated to users’ experience and confidence in the technology.

Over time, organizations tend to move through three distinct stages as they deploy server virtualization technology, beginning by virtualizing IT-owned infrastructure applications and utilities like file and print services. The key objectives during this first wave of virtualization are consolidation, manageability, and cost reduction. As organizations gain confidence in virtualization technology, more intensive applications like Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint are consolidated during the second wave of adoption. In this stage, the agility and availability of IT services are often enhanced as IT managers take advantage of virtualization to migrate applications from physical servers to the increased fault tolerance provided within the virtualization layer. As organizations continue on their virtualization journey, ensuring the performance and scalability of tier-1 applications like SAP is a key objective. ESG asked IT professionals what strategies they have implemented to address virtual server performance concerns. As seen in Figure 1, server architecture plays a huge role, with increased memory density and additional CPU capacity being key considerations.

Server Virtualization is a Top IT Priority

Server virtualization is becoming ubiquitous as a strategic initiative for IT organizations around the world. Of the 1,602 respondents to a recent ESG research survey, nearly three-quarters (74%) said their organization currently uses server virtualization.[1] In addition, as part of its annual IT spending intentions research, ESG surveyed senior IT professionals concerning their organizations’ most important IT priorities, and increasing the use of server virtualization was the number one response. Server virtualization is clearly their most important priority for the coming year and beyond, making it the third year in a row that it has ranked at the top of the priority list.^[2] Businesses recognize the value that server virtualization delivers and will continue to make investments in the technology in order to drive further efficiencies in their IT environments.

ESG’s data has confirmed that a massive wave of server virtualization expansion is well underway. For example, while 73% of organizations have virtualized 40% or less of their total population of servers today, 58% expect to virtualize more than 40% of all of their servers 24 months from now. The data also indicates that more of these new virtual servers will be run in production environments—on average, the percentage of VMs run in production will increase from 39% today to 58% within two years.[3]

Given the fact that 59% of organizations surveyed by ESG have not yet virtualized tier-1 applications and that the greatest benefits to be gained with virtualization come with the virtualization of these data-intensive applications and workloads, ESG expects to see an increasing number of organizations tackling tier-1 virtualization.

Overcoming Tier-1 Virtualization Concerns

While server virtualization adoption continues to gain momentum, IT organizations still have numerous hurdles to overcome in order to move closer to a 100% virtualized data center. ESG’s data indicates that many organizations struggle with concerns over performance, technology complexity, integration, security, organizational confusion, and a basic lack of knowledge and skills that they believe will be vitally important when virtualizing tier-1 application environments.

When it comes to virtualizing multi-user tier-1 applications essential to the business, in addition to the general concerns already cited, organizations have additional worries:

• Will the virtualization layer add significant performance overhead?
• Can the virtualized infrastructure scale to continue to meet their needs?
• Can performance SLAs for virtualized tier-1 applications be met with confidence?

Despite the challenges, experienced organizations with more mature virtualization deployments are rapidly moving beyond the initial benefits of consolidation, finding that more extensive use of virtualization can help improve application backup/recovery, bolster application availability, and automate IT processes. They have come to realize that the real metrics that matter in a virtual environment are those focused on availability and performance, and measure the success of their virtualization efforts not only by their ability to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but also by their ability to meet application performance requirements.

Of these more mature organizations surveyed by ESG, 52% cited application uptime and 48% indicated performance among the metrics used to gauge the success of their virtualization deployments, as can be seen in Figure 2.

Many of these early adopter organizations have now virtualized their entire infrastructures, including tier-1 applications like SAP. In other words, application performance is a top criterion for virtualization success that is being addressed by the early adopters that have fully embraced server virtualization.

The HP ProLiant DL 980, Powered by Intel Xeon Processors with VMware vSphere 5

New technologies and offerings from HP, Intel, and VMware seek to address these performance and scalability concerns. The HP ProLiant DL980 G7 is designed to reduce bottlenecks and improve throughput and performance as well as deliver enhanced reliability in an x86 environment.

Scaling up to 80 total cores with Intel Xeon E7 4800 and 7500 Series processors, up to 4 TB of  memory, 16 IO slots, and HP Integrated Lights-Out 3 (iLO 3) remote server management software, the DL980 G7 server is a platform designed for organizations looking for balanced scalability and self-healing resiliency for today’s enterprise compute environments.

VMware vSphere 5 is designed to take advantage of these massive scale-up servers and new processor technology, with support for up to 2048 vCPUs and 2 TB of RAM per host, and support for up to 32 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM per virtual machine. In addition, VMware has introduced support for multi-core virtual CPUs which allows VMs to use advanced memory management features in server hardware as if it were on a physical machine.

Figure 3 shows how HP, Intel, and VMware offerings can be leveraged to provide a robust, massively scalable virtualized environment for the most critical tier-1 applications running in enterprises today.

A growing number of businesses are looking beyond the initial benefits of increased consolidation and manageability that can be achieved when virtualizing tier-1 application workloads. And yet, as previously referenced, 59% of organizations have not yet virtualized tier-1 applications. Performance concerns are among the reasons most cited as preventing companies from using virtualization more pervasively. The balance of this report summarizes the results of ESG Lab testing designed to evaluate the scalability and performance of a tier-1 SAP ERP application workload running on an Intel Xeon-powered HP ProLiant DL980 server fully virtualized with VMware vSphere 5.

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of virtualized tier-1 application workloads in VMware’s facilities in Palo Alto, California utilizing HP’s ProLiant DL980 server with VMware’s vSphere 5 running SAP ERP 6.0.  The workload used was designed to emulate a number of different user activities in a sales and distribution environment executing several different transactions.

Getting Started

Figure 4 illustrates the test bed used by ESG Lab. SAP ERP 6.0 was installed in a VMware vSphere 5 virtual machine running on an HP ProLiant DL980 server configured with eight Intel X7560 8-core CPUs and 512 GB of DDR3 system RAM. While the DL980 can support up to 2 TB of RAM today and 4 TB with 32 GB DIMM modules in the near future, 512 GB was more than sufficient for the tests described in this report. Storage services were supplied by an HP P4500 SAN over a 1Gbps iSCSI SAN.

Testing was executed in a repeating loop against an SAP installation where all components (application and database servers) were installed and running on one virtual machine. While the workload was running, different aspects of virtual machine hardware utilization were measured as well as application response time. The testing simulated a sell-from-stock business model and included the creation of a customer order with multiple line items, delivery of the order, shipment, and invoicing.

This workload is resource-intensive and is intended to gauge the expected performance of the tested server platform and configuration in a virtualized SAP environment.

ESG Lab Testing

Figure 5 shows the HP ProLiant DL980 as seen in the vSphere 5 console, with eight 8-way Intel Xeon processors installed and hyperthreading enabled.

Testing was performed against a single virtual machine with 4, 8, 16, and 32 vCPUs. Each virtual machine had RAM allocated in proportion to the number of vCPUs assigned, from 16 GB for the 4 vCPU virtual machine to 128 GB for the 32 vCPU machine, as seen in Figure 6. It’s important to note that vSphere 5 allows administrators to configure the number of virtual sockets, enabling optimized VM memory management. It is also important to note that unlike physical machines, virtual machines can easily have CPU and RAM resources added or subtracted at any time, making the VM easier to dynamically scale to meet increasing or decreasing performance demands.

ESG Lab ran a CPU-intensive portion of the test workload and captured the screenshot shown in Figure 7.

This workload was run in a loop for several minutes. The virtual machine distributed the load quite evenly across all 32 vCPUs. It’s important to keep in mind that while most workloads don’t require the maximum VM configuration of 32 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM, vSphere 5 was able to manage large memory and vCPU allocations in a VM quite well, and it’s reasonable to expect similar results for configurations with larger RAM configurations.

Performance and Scalability

ESG lab next ran the full workload simulation on the SAP ERP 6.0 server, starting with four vCPUs and scaling up to 32 vCPUs, capturing multiple key metrics such as the number of users, IOPS, vCPU utilization, and application response time as the workload was increased.

ESG Lab Testing

The number of users simulated, IOPS driven, and response time as well as the average CPU utilization while the workload was running were monitored as a scalable number of users were emulated on a single physical server virtualized with VMware vSphere 5. The results are summarized in Figure 8 and Table 1.

Also shown in Table 1 are results captured using a 32-core physical machine ESG Lab tested in 2009[4] using the same workload.

What the Numbers Mean

• A real-world OLTP ERP workload was emulated using SAP application and database servers running in one virtual machine.
• A single virtual machine scaled from 4 to 32 vCPUs as simultaneous SAP users were increased from 600 to 3,000, proving that SAP systems running on VMware can now easily scale as an environment grows to meet the needs of the largest SAP systems.
• Average CPU utilization was remarkably consistent through the entire range of tests, illustrating vSphere 5’s ability to balance the load evenly across multiple cores and sockets as the size of the VM and the workload were increased.
• Dialog response time, representing the average application response time to users for all transaction types, ranged from .1 seconds to 1.1 seconds during the test for the virtual machines.
• ESG Lab compared these results with results obtained with a 32-core physical server tested using the same SAP configuration and transaction types and found that the vSphere virtualized HP ProLiant DL980, while driving approximately two-thirds of the users and IOPS of the tuned physical server, did so with half the dialog response time, which represents the delay users experience waiting for a transaction to complete.
• Considering that the SAP workload tested utilized only half of the CPU and one quarter of the available RAM installed in the DL980 tested, it is not unreasonable to expect that a single DL980 could easily support a second virtualized SAP workload at a similarly high utilization level and/or multiple less intensive workloads driven by other applications.

Virtual CPU utilization and dialog response time were monitored to confirm that vSphere 5 was distributing the load smoothly across all 32 vCPUs during testing and that transactions were being satisfied within accepted response time guidelines. Virtual CPU utilization was evenly distributed while transaction response time was low during the 4 vCPU test and remained low during the 8, 16, and 32 vCPU tests. The efficiency of VMware vSphere 5 running on a powerful HP ProLiant DL980 attached to a 1 GB iSCSI disk array with fast 15K RPM drives provided more than enough horsepower to support a very large and busy SAP server.

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

• An HP ProLiant DL980 physical server, running a tier-1 SAP ERP 6.0 implementation deployed within one VMware vSphere 5 virtual machine, scaled nearly linearly in performance as vCPUs and memory were increased—up to a total of 32 vCPUs in a single virtual machine.
• CPU utilization and response times remained low throughout testing, indicating significant headroom to support larger workloads with increased storage bandwidth and system tuning.
• A sustained CPU-intensive workload was evenly distributed across all 32 vCPUs in the virtual machine.

Issues to Consider

• While the scalability of both vSphere 5 and the ProLiant DL980 server are extensive (up to 1 TB per VM, 2 TB per host server), the tests ESG is validating were done without taking full advantage of the capabilities of this combination solution, using only 512 GB of memory in the server. ESG believes the performance of VMs with maximum allocations of memory running on the platform will be consistent with the results validated in this report.
• Capacity planning and performance analysis of SAP deployments is recommended to not only determine if your organization’s workload is suitable for virtualization, but also to plan the processor, memory, storage, and network resources that need to be configured within each virtual machine.
• SAP application and database server roles are both good candidates for virtualization. For database implementations at the very high end (ie:32 vCPUs in a single virtual machine),users would be well-advised to consider deploying application servers on virtual machines separate from resource-intensive database instances.
• The test results presented in this report are based on a simulated workload deployed against an SAP ERP 6.0 installation in a controlled environment. Due to the many variables in each production data center environment, capacity planning and testing in your own environment is highly recommended. Sizing SAP deployments is always under the purview of the hardware partner; work with your HP team for sizing, performance, and capacity planning.
• Default server BIOS, operating system, SAP, and SQL Server settings were used during ESG Lab testing. As expected after any performance test of this magnitude, analysis of the results indicates that tuning would probably yield higher absolute results. Given that the goal of this test was not to generate a big number, ESG Lab is confident that the results presented in this report demonstrate the performance and scalability of tier-1 application workloads running in consolidated VMware vSphere 5 environments.

The Bigger Truth

Server virtualization is being deployed by a large and growing number of organizations with the ambitious, parallel goals of lowered costs, improved resource utilization, non-disruptive upgrades, and increased availability. Each of these benefits is fundamentally enabled by decoupling servers, applications, and data from specific physical assets—bringing IT organizations one step closer to the ideal of a completely virtualized IT infrastructure. A recent ESG survey indicated that increasing the use of server virtualization was users’ number one IT priority over the last two years and will continue to be the top priority for the next 12-18 months. But while server virtualization continues to gain momentum, some IT organizations are still reluctant to fully embrace virtualization.

It’s a common strategy for organizations to focus server virtualization efforts on consolidation until they build the confidence and expertise to consider the next tier of applications; ESG found that 59% have yet to employ virtualization where it will provide the most benefit: their data-intensive tier-1 applications. For IT organizations supporting large numbers of users, this hesitance stems from the perception that it adds performance overhead and unpredictable scalability and availability challenges to the tier-1 applications relied upon by the majority of their users.

Multiple vendors currently offer server virtualization solutions and the field continues to expand. Choosing a solution set to best fit a specific environment, business need, or budget can be a significant challenge. HP, Intel, and VMware answer this challenge with massively scalable server platforms built on powerful, virtualization-optimized processors and robust, scalable, easy-to-use virtualization software which integrates seamlessly with HP server management software such as HP Insight Control for ProLiant.

The HP ProLiant DL980 platform is a dense, scale-up industry-standard server powered by the latest Intel Xeon processor technology and  designed to support the largest and most challenging virtualized applications and workloads with the added goal of fast, easy deployments that users can customize to grow computing power in the data center on demand.

VMware vSphere 5 virtualizes servers with the goal of transforming traditional x86-based IT infrastructure into an automated, always-on computing environment. Customers have reduced IT infrastructure costs while streamlining management of IT environments and delivering improved service levels to the business. vSphere 5 builds on the robust tools and capabilities of VMware, including the capability of creating virtual machines with up to 32 virtual CPU cores and true NUMA functionality, while VMware High Availability and Fault Tolerance capabilities integrate tightly with HP to offer business continuity.

ESG Lab hands-on testing has confirmed that HP, Intel, and VMware technology can be used to meet the performance and scalability requirements of virtualized tier-1 workloads. Predictably low response times and near linear performance scalability were achieved during testing as a single server hosting a virtualized SAP ERP deployment within one vSphere 5 virtual machine supported up to 3,000 simulated SAP users. Extremely low application response times were observed in an un-tuned environment, implying significant headroom to support more users when the environment and application are tuned for performance. Considering the large amount of unused resource capacity in the DL980 under test, ESG Lab believes that a single DL980 could easily support a second virtualized SAP workload at a similarly high utilization level and/or multiple less intensive workloads driven by other applications.

Virtualizing SAP and other tier-1 applications’ workloads with the HP ProLiant DL980, powered by Intel Xeon processors in combination with vSphere 5, enables businesses to overcome scalability and performance concerns as they lower costs and increase the agility and availability of a consolidated IT infrastructure. With the ability to host multiple, large-scale virtual machines with very large memory footprints inside a single physical server, administrators can support a very large tier-1 application environment in a very small data center footprint.

It’s clear to ESG Lab that the complementary technologies offered by HP ProLiant DL980 servers, Intel Xeon processors, and VMware vSphere 5 virtualization software can be used to effectively support vital enterprise workloads like SAP, providing the reliability and performance customers require while simplifying operations, lowering costs, and providing tier-1 class availability—all in a virtualized x86 environment.

Appendix

[2] Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.

[3] Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.

[4] Configuration details can be found in the Appendix.

[5] Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.

ESG Lab tested the iSR 6200 series and documents the results in a just-published  Lab Validation report that found it to be a flexible, easy-to-use, and high-performance universal data migration tool.

See also:  ESG Brief: QLogic iSR Accelerates Data Migrations

See also:  ESG Lab Report: QLogic iSR 6200 Series

While this is all pretty cool, the most interesting use case that I heard came from an end-user and had NOTHING to do with Data Migration (other than avoiding it altogether).

This end-user has month-end batch processes that require huge CPU, memory, and storage performance for just a few days each month. For the rest of the time, they need to have access to the data, but nothing much else happens. For less than one week a month, these apps live on big, honking, multi-core servers with massive amounts of RAM and 8G FC connectivity to enterprise storage arrays . Once processing is done, the VMs are moved using vMotion to 1u servers with minimal configurations and iSCSI connectivity only, freeing up resources on the big machines for other critical apps. They keep an iSR 6250 permanently inline to route between the iSCSI and FC SANs, so they don’t have to move the large dataset along with the VM.

While this is not a scenario we tested in the ESG Lab Report, it uses the validated capabilities of the iSR in a clever way to provide real operational efficiency.

Solutions like this is why technology will always be cool.

Tony

The report explores hands-on testing and validation of the QLogic 6200 series of Intelligent Storage Router (iSR), focusing on multi-protocol data migration and the simplicity, availability, performance, and cost-efficiency the QLogic iSR series brings to a heterogeneous storage environment.

The QLogic iSR series multi-protocol storage routers are based on QLogic’s dual-blade TrueFlex architecture. The QLogic iSR addresses the challenges presented by highly virtualized, dynamic data centers with a highly available fabric routing and application hosting platform that enables data migration services, multi-protocol routing, and SAN-over-WAN fabric extension. The iSR series utilizes initiator virtualization technology to provide a “virtualization layer” of storage connectivity for large numbers of physical and virtual servers. The dual-blade architecture is designed to offer the highly available, high performance flexibility required to support business and mission-critical applications for organizations of all sizes.

Testing was designed primarily to validate the QLogic iSR6250’s ability to provide non-disruptive multi-protocol data migration services in a heterogeneous storage environment. Areas of focus included ease of setup and administration, performance, and migration from traditionally provisioned storage to thin provisioned storage.

Click here to read the full report.

Background

Recently, ESG asked IT managers to name their top IT priorities over the next 12-18 months and the top two responses were to increase the use of server virtualization and to manage data growth.[1] When asked about their spending plans for storage infrastructure specifically, purchasing new SAN storage systems was high on the list, implying that many organizations are “managing data growth” by purchasing new storage. With IT under constant pressure to find ways to reduce costs and address data growth without interrupting business operations, rapid deployment of storage and IT resources to meet increasing demand becomes a necessity.

As businesses challenge IT to provide dynamic, flexible services, the need to move resources fluidly from one location to another and provide universal access becomes essential. As server virtualization becomes ubiquitous, moving data and applications needs to be fast and non-disruptive. Decentralizing services across multiple data centers in various locations demands the ability to extend the storage network infrastructure across the WAN.

The QLogic iSR Series

The QLogic iSR series multi-protocol storage routers are based on QLogic’s dual-blade TrueFlex architecture. The QLogic iSR addresses the challenges presented by highly virtualized, dynamic data centers with a highly available fabric routing and application hosting platform that enables data migration services, multi-protocol routing, and SAN-over-WAN fabric extension. The iSR series utilizes initiator virtualization technology to provide a “virtualization layer” of storage connectivity for large numbers of physical and virtual servers. The dual-blade architecture is designed to offer the highly available, high performance flexibility required to support business and mission-critical applications for organizations of all sizes.

Benefits provided by the QLogic iSR series include:

• TrueFlex architecture – provides any-to-any protocol flexibility and connectivity while the modular design enables easy upgrades to new protocols or technologies.
• Open fabric interoperability – supports heterogeneous existing networks, SANs, and WANs.
• Enterprise-class high availability – dual hot-swap power supplies and router blades provide no single point of failure.
• High performance – 8Gb Fibre Channel ports deliver up to 6.4GB/sec throughput and over 400,000 IOPS.
• Comprehensive Heterogeneous Data Migration – is supported across all major FC, iSCSI, and FCoE storage arrays, networks, and operating systems in an online, offline, local, or remote migration.
• Initiator virtualization technology – provides support for up to 1,024 virtual machines using 2,048 iSCSI initiators and 8,192 LUNs in a dual-blade iSR6260 configuration.
• Simultaneous iSCSI and SAN-over-WAN connections – using the same Ethernet ports reduces the cost of storage consolidation and distance connectivity for dynamic reconfiguration and simplifies ongoing management.
• Ease of implementation and management – installation and configuration wizards enable fast setup and simple administration.
• Data scrubbing – provides the ability to wipe existing data residing on a source LUN after migration for data confidentiality or re-purposing of the drive. Data scrubbing implements US Department of Defense methodologies including the data pattern written and the number of passes required.
• Remote migration – Online Remote Data Migration capability provides the ability to move datasets between data centers, simplifying management and dynamic reconfiguration.
• Disaster Recovery Capable – Online Remote Data Migration, combined with built in WAN optimization provides the ability to keep production data sets consistent with copies at remote locations.

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the QLogic Intelligent Storage Router in a QLogic facility in Aliso Viejo, CA. Testing was designed primarily to validate the QLogic iSR6250’s ability to provide non-disruptive multi-protocol data migration services in a heterogeneous storage environment. Areas of focus included ease of setup and administration, performance, and migration from traditionally provisioned storage to thin provisioned storage.

Getting Started – Integration and Management

The test bed used by ESG Lab is illustrated in Figure 3.[2] One VMware ESX server hosting a Microsoft Windows 2008 Enterprise Server was connected to a heterogeneous Fibre Channel SAN using a dual port QLogic 2500 8Gb Fibre Channel HBA. Two onboard 1GbE interfaces were used for connectivity to an iSCSI SAN. Fibre Channel storage for these tests was provided by an HP 3PAR F200 storage system and an EMC CX3-20 storage array. A Dell EqualLogic PS 4000 iSCSI SAN provided iSCSI storage. One QLogic iSR6250 was used for testing, with two 8Gbps Fibre Channel ports and four 1Gbps Ethernet ports.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab began with the Windows 2008 server mounting volumes from the EMC CX3-20 over the Fibre Channel SAN.   First, the QLogic iSR6250 router was integrated into the environment. After physical installation, the next step was configuration of the iSR’s IP information through the management port. Then the QLogic SANsurfer Router Manager utility was installed on the virtual Win2k8 server. QLogic SANsurfer can be installed on any system with IP network access to the iSR router and supports Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating systems. ESG Lab was able to connect to the iSR6250 through QLogic SANsurfer, which provided a clear view of the status of the router, including ports (shown in Figure 4), volumes, and replication sessions.

ESG Lab then drilled down to the port information from QLogic SANsurfer (shown in Figure 5), and validated link status, port speed, and iSCSi network settings.

ESG Lab continued the iSR integration process by zoning the iSR ports to the server and storage, presenting LUNs from 3PAR and EMC storage arrays to the iSR. The iSR automatically discovered LUNs from both the EMC and 3PAR arrays, discovered multiple paths for each LUN and represented the 3PAR F200 and EMC CX as two independent storage arrays.  iSR integration continued by setting the source and destination arrays (as shown in Figure 6), populating the Virtual Port Groups (VPGs) with the LUNS to be migrated, presenting the  LUNs to the host from the  iSR,  and finished with insertion of the iSR6250 into the host path.

Prior to insertion of the iSR, ESG Lab generated a continuous stream of IO to the volumes being migrated using Medusa Labs Test Tools Suite to simulate Microsoft Exchange 2010 database traffic as shown in Figure 7.

ESG Lab verified that IO continued to the devices with no errors or lapses in connectivity during insertion of the iSR6250 into all four host paths to storage. No new MPIO software was required to insert the iSR in the Data Path.

ESG Lab configured the iSR6250, identified the volumes to be migrated, completed all SAN zoning, and inserted the router into the host path in less than 25 minutes.

Highly Available Data Migration

The QLogic iSR6200 series is designed to provide online, server-less, minimally disruptive, data migration services. QLogic Intelligent Storage Routers combine dual power supplies and hot swappable dual blade configurations with redundant backed up configuration files for no single point of failure. Blade configurations and migration states are backed up by each blade in a configuration for the other so that a dual blade configuration can survive any issue up to and including a router blade outage. Figure 8 shows the test bed used to move volumes between heterogeneous storage arrays while a workload was running against them. As shown with the green arrows in Figure 8, the iSR6250 router will handle read/write requests during an online data migration.

ESG Lab Testing

With the simulated Exchange IO stream still running against the volumes in the EMC CX3 array (as seen in Figure 8), ESG Lab launched the Data Migration Wizard in QLogic SANsurfer and began configuring an online data migration of four fully provisioned 50 GB LUNs mounted from the EMC CX3-20 to four thin provisioned LUNs mounted from the HP 3PAR F200. The source and destination LUNs as seen by QLogic SANsurfer are shown in Figure 9. Selecting data migration source and destination LUN is a simple drag and drop procedure. QLogic data migration services required classification of arrays explicitly as source and destination which prevents source volumes from being accidentally overwritten.

Next, the data migration wizard prompted the user to select the data migration job options seen in Figure 10.

ESG Lab selected “Online” (Local) which enables data migration while applications remain online and continue to access data. “Schedule for later” provides the ability to schedule jobs at a specific time to optimize bandwidth and Thin Provisioning Validation (“TP Validation”) allows a traditionally provisioned source LUN  to convert to a thin provisioned destination LUN during migration and ensures that old data on the destination is cleared. After completing the data migration wizard, all the data migration jobs automatically started at the scheduled time, as shown in Figure 11.

Then, ESG Lab simulated a single iSR6250 blade failure while the four data migration jobs and simulated Exchange IO were running. The blade failure was simulated by rebooting the blade, which was executing all four data migrations.  While the blade was rebooting, the data migration jobs were suspended. Once the iSR6250 blade came back online, the data migration jobs resumed, as shown in Figure 12 by the QLogic SANsurfer Router Manager Log.

Although the data migration jobs paused while the blade was down, host IO stream continued to flow through the two active paths on the online blade. Because the configuration of each blade is stored on both blades, replacing a router requires no reconfiguration or restarting of migration jobs.

Performance

Organizations with increasingly dynamic, virtualized data centers measure performance of a data migration solution not only by the speed at which data can be moved between the source and target systems, but also by the impact of a migration when executed against systems with online applications.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested the iSR 6200 series’ performance by simulating an online application data stream using an attached server, and running multiple data migrations simultaneously. IO was generated using the Medusa Labs Test Suite, shown in Figure 13, and designed to emulate a Microsoft Exchange 2010 database workload running against a 50 GB volume hosted on the EMC CX3-20 array.[5] ESG Lab set the workload to run continuously throughout the test.

Once the workload was running, ESG Lab kicked off a migration of four 50 GB volumes from the EMC CX3-20 array to the 3PAR F200 array. Figure 14 shows the performance of the host, disk, and SSD arrays throughout testing. It’s important to note that the SSD array’s throughput was nearly 40 times that of the host or disk-based arrays. The data is represented in a logarithmic scale to allow all four streams to be represented on the same chart. In Figure 14, the server’s IO is represented by the blue line, while the source array’s IO is represented by the red line. When the data migration to the target array is kicked off, the source array’s IO increases while the host’s IO dips. This is to be expected as the disks on the host array are at this point serving host IO and transferring data to the target array. Next, a data migration was executed between SSD volumes. The SSD arrays were able to drive migration IO of more than 1,800 MB/sec. The iSR6250 was able to process this data stream with zero impact to the server’s IO or the disk to disk migration IO, which continued to run with zero degradation.

Table 1 presents the average IO rates throughout the duration of the test. Prior to the migration, the source disk array was servicing approximately 8 MB/sec of IO, which increased to 87 MB/sec when the disk to disk migration was kicked off. Note that there is no meaningful change of IO from the host, source, or destination array while the SSD migration is running.

What the Numbers Mean

• The iSR 6250 was able to sustain more than 2,000 MB/sec of mixed host and migration IO.
• Host application and disk-to-disk migration performance were stable and consistent, even when the router was under heavy load.

When running online migrations, maintaining application IO can be critical. When migrating from a legacy array with limited performance capabilities or when migrating in a very busy environment, providing effective quality of service control is essential to maintaining service levels while performing migrations.

Finally, ESG Lab tested quality of service control in the iSR6250 by executing a migration and applying an array bandwidth throttle while the migration was executing. The iSR series allows a bandwidth throttle to be applied to any attached storage array. Throttling ensures host IO performance is not negatively impacted by the addition of migration IO traffic on the source array.  Users can choose from a set of predefined bandwidth throttles or set their own custom throttle. As seen in Figure 15, ESG Lab selected the pre-defined “Slow” throttle, which limited migration traffic to 50 MB/sec for all migration jobs in the CX3-20 array.

Figure 16 displays output from the iSR CLI, showing the bandwidth in use for multiple migration jobs running across two 8Gbps Fibre Channel ports between two disk arrays consuming between 120 and 180 MB/sec of bandwidth. Within seconds of setting the throttle, migration IO dropped to 50 MB/sec and remained throttled for the remainder of the migration. The log in Figure 16 is reporting greater than 50 MB/sec of IO on the FC ports because host IO is included as well as migration IO.

Flexibility and Interoperability

ESG Lab validated the flexibility and interoperability of the QLogic iSR6200 series routers by configuring and executing a cross-protocol, online data migration in a heterogeneous SAN environment. As shown in Figure 17, the QLogic iSR 6250 router provides flexibility through unified storage connectivity with support for up to 8Gbps Fibre Channel and one or 10GbE iSCSI in a heterogeneous storage environment. ESG Lab used the same host configuration, running the same simulated Microsoft Exchange 2010 database workload.

The QLogic iSR6200 series routers support integration of enterprise-class features like thin provisioning into a complex, legacy storage environment to help reduce the cost and complexity of storage provisioning while providing significant capacity savings. QLogic SANsurfer’s wizard-driven configuration process and advanced management capabilities provide any to any protocol routing for all classes of SAN-attached storage arrays.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab performed a data migration from a traditionally provisioned Fibre Channel storage array to a thin provisioned iSCSI storage array. ESG Lab started by adding a Dell EqualLogic PS6010 Storage Array as an iSCSI destination shown in Figure 18 below.

The Data Migration wizard (shown in Figure 19) was used to configure two 100 GB fully provisioned LUNs from the FC HP 3PAR F200 as the source LUNs and two thin provisioned 100 GB LUNs from the iSCSI Dell EqualLogic array as the destination LUNs.

Finally, the FC to iSCSI data migration job options were configured. When ESG Lab clicked “Finish,” the Data Migration wizard created the new target volume, started the migration job, and moved the volume transparently to the new storage array with no impact to the reads and writes occurring on the host.

Data migration progress was monitored using the QLogic SANsurfer console, as seen in Figure 20.

When the migration completed, ESG Lab verified that the host was accessing its data exclusively from the target iSCSI LUNs by running the data scrubbing wizard on the source LUNS. Data scrubbing provides a highly secure method of wiping data from a LUN for security, compliance, or repurposing of the drive. As seen in Figure 21, the most stringent DoD algorithm supported by the iSR was selected.

When data scrubbing of the source volumes on the EMC CX3-20 array was complete, ESG Lab mounted the volumes from another virtual machine and confirmed that they now looked like new, empty LUNs.

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

• The iSR6200 series was very easy to implement and manage. In less than 25 minutes, ESG Lab was able to configure an iSR6250 router and insert it into a running host’s storage path without any disruption to IO or running applications.
• Performance was impressive. In ESG Lab’s testing, the iSR 6250 was able to sustain more than 2,000 MB/sec of mixed host and migration IO.
• Host application and disk-to-disk migration performance were stable and consistent, even when the router was under heavy load.
• ESG Lab used the QLogic iSR6200 series router to migrate from fully provisioned volumes to thin provisioned volumes, across heterogeneous Fibre Channel and iSCSI networks, between heterogeneous disk systems. Hosts and applications experienced minimal impact, remaining online and processing IO throughout the data migrations.
• ESG Lab found Data Scrubbing and detailed job reporting easy to use while enabling complete Data Migration services.

Issues to Consider

• While the QLogic iSR6200 series can be inserted into the data path of hosts online and non-disruptively, storage paths must be re-mapped after the migration is complete to remove the iSR from the storage path. It is important to note that this is a host OS requirement rather than a limitation of the iSR. Some users choose to leave the iSR permanently in place to facilitate server mobility across dissimilar platforms (e.g., moving an application from an FC-attached server to an iSCSI-attached server, maintaining access to the FC storage). A single dual-blade iSR 6250 can support a massively consolidated server and storage environment: 1,024 virtual machines, 2,048 iSCSI initiators, and 8,192 LUNs.

The Bigger Truth

Businesses face a number of serious challenges in the data center. The increasing use of server virtualization and accelerating data growth are driving new storage purchases. IT is being challenged to find ways to address data growth and server mobility without interrupting business operations. The deployment of new storage resources to meet increasing demand is a necessity and data migrations are playing a more prominent role.

The rapid rate of change taking place in the data center, combined with increased adoption of iSCSI and FCoE alongside Fibre Channel-based SANs, is driving organizations to look beyond traditional host- or array-based migration methods and tools. The QLogic Intelligent Storage Router is designed to provide advanced technology to enable IT to deliver flexible and dynamic data migration services to the enterprise.

The QLogic iSR6200 Series of Intelligent Storage Routers offer a powerful combination of cost-effective, high performance, multi-protocol storage connectivity with powerful online and offline data migration capabilities. Initiator virtualization technology enables IT to deliver these services with minimal impact to users’ networks.

ESG Lab found the QLogic iSR 6250 series very easy to install and manage. In less than 25 minutes, ESG Lab was able to configure a new iSR6250 router and insert it into a running host’s storage paths without any disruption to IO. The 200 GB data migration from traditional to thin provisioned storage completed without disrupting applications running on the test server and data migrations survived a simulated failure, automatically restarting when the node came back online.

Performance was excellent for both the data migration and the applications running on the server. ESG Lab observed minimal impact to server performance while the router was handling nearly 2 GB/sec of migration traffic. The QLogic iSR’s multi-protocol support was equally impressive, migrating from legacy Fibre Channel storage to a thin provisioned iSCSI array with the same minimally disruptive process as was used for migrating from FC to FC systems.

As organizations continue to expand their use of virtualization technologies and optimize their infrastructure based on criticality of applications and types of workloads, deploying a universal protocol connectivity tool makes sense.  The QLogic iSR6200 series leverages QLogic’s deep experience designing and bringing to market storage networking solutions for business-critical, open system environments that require ultra-high density, high performance, and enterprise class availability. Organizations in need of data migration and storage connectivity solutions for their data centers would be well advised to examine QLogic’s Intelligent Storage Router solutions for a flexible and easy to manage connectivity platform.

Appendix

[2] Configuration details can be found in the Appendix.

[3] Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.

[4] Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.

[5] Configuration details can be found in the Appendix.

[6] Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, January 2011.

The mantra “IT needs to be more tightly aligned to the business” has become more than just a lofty goal and is now a business mandate. Organizations are taking proactive steps to ensure this becomes reality, with more emphasis being placed on business process improvement.  However this transformation will require more than just changing roles and new paradigms for IT justification. Organizations also need to transform the infrastructure to build more agile and flexible IT environments by leveraging new technologies and management tools.

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of NetApp OnCommand Insight management software. The test environment was built to reflect a heterogeneous server and storage infrastructure to demonstrate the ability to manage across domains and provide end-to-end visibility from the applications down into the storage systems in both physical and virtualized IT infrastructures. ESG Lab followed the path a user might take to use OnCommand Insight to optimize their infrastructure for maximum benefit while simplifying planning and purchasing decisions, managing storage as an end-to-end service, and integrating storage into the IT service-delivery chain.

Click here to read the full report.

Introduction

The mantra “IT needs to be more tightly aligned to the business” has become more than just a lofty goal and is now a business mandate. Organizations are taking proactive steps to ensure this becomes reality, with more emphasis being placed on business process improvement.  However this transformation will require more than just changing roles and new paradigms for IT justification. Organizations also need to transform the infrastructure to build more agile and flexible IT environments by leveraging new technologies and management tools.

For many organizations, the goal is to create private cloud infrastructures, and technologies like server virtualization play a major role in the transformation process. In fact, respondents to ESG’s annual IT spending survey have reported “increasing the use of server virtualization technology” as their number one initiative for the last two years in a row (see Figure 1).[1]

The increased use of server virtualization and the desire to leverage advanced mobility functions are also driving an increase in the number of networked storage environments. The result is increasing complexity in the data center and more organizations reporting that managing data growth is a top priority.[2] To balance the faster service delivery and effectively manage these expanding virtualized environments, organizations need new management solutions that give them the requisite visibility and control. ESG research confirms just how much these new solutions for virtualized environments are needed: an impressive majority, 92 – 98% of survey respondents responsible for network, storage, and server domains reported that server virtualization is having either some or a significant impact on existing management tools and processes.[3] Server and application mobility in virtualization and cloud environments creates interdependencies that can be quite complex and opaque. Analytics tools are becoming a requirement to correlate the interdependencies between applications, virtual machines, physical servers, and storage.

Existing tools (primarily designed with physical environments in mind) are challenged when it comes to providing the following services to users:

• Cross-domain (end to end) visibility–the ability to immediately see the dependencies and relationships that permeate the virtual environment.
• Prediction and prevention of performance issues and root cause determination in virtualized environments.
• Storage capacity management and forecasting.
• Preparation for the cloud with chargeback and multi-tenancy.

As organizations continue to mature their virtualized environments and build out private clouds, they will need solutions that enable future growth and agility, not hinder their progress. This ESG Lab Validation will focus on the NetApp OnCommand Insight family of products and will demonstrate how their capabilities in highly virtualized environments can accelerate the adoption of private clouds.

NetApp OnCommand Insight

Users need end-to-end visibility into these complex virtualized environments. With Insight, IT has a set of tools through which to monitor and manage their heterogeneous environment.  These tools are designed to deliver:

• Pinpoint prediction of problems for proactive infrastructure management: End to end visibility ensures that both availability and performance SLAs are met.  Service analytics predict performance issues before they affect application performance and rapidly determine root cause if there is an issue, reducing troubleshooting time.
• Better compliance and control: Insight ensures that configurations are in line with service requirements. IT can implement best practices as well as view vulnerabilities and violations to drive availability and efficiency.
• Optimization and capacity planning of shared infrastructure: Once IT has the environment under control, they can begin to analyze and optimize their existing VM, physical servers, and storage resources with service analytics. All of the data is captured and stored, and IT can review reports on actual usage and effectively plan for future needs.   This way, organizations are buying only what is required, at precisely the right time.
• Preparation for the cloud: Service analytics also means IT can report costs, and this can be used for chargeback/showback of storage services—part of an overall IT-as-a-Service, a.k.a. private cloud, strategy.

OnCommand Insight is comprised of four modules: Balance, Assure, Perform, and Plan.

• Insight Balance–provides workload performance and performance capacity management, enabling analysis across IT virtualization layers and technology silos for both virtual and physical servers and storage. This ensures that critical business applications are optimally performing at the lowest possible cost in either a physical or virtual environment.
• Insight Assure–dynamically discovers all infrastructure resources and provides a complete end-to-end view of the entire storage service path from an application, through the virtual server and hypervisor, to storage. This end-to-end view is referred to as the service path. With Assure, users are able to see exactly which resources are being used and who is using them, and then establish policies based on best practices, which enable Assure to monitor and alert on configurations that fall outside those policies (e.g., policy violations).
• Insight Perform–Provides visibility into real resource consumption and enables alignment between resources and workload requirements. Perform enables reclamation of orphaned storage and re-alignment of tiered resources based on actual and historical usage to get the most out of investments in infrastructure.
• Insight Plan–provides trending, forecasting, and reporting for capacity management. Insight Plan reports on usage by business unit, application, data center, and tenants. Insight Plan provides user accountability and cost awareness, enabling automated chargeback reporting by business unit, applications and service levels. Insight Plan also offers flexible report writing, enabling users to create custom reports to support their specific needs for capacity planning, purchasing, storage-tier analysis, storage service catalogs, trending and historical usage, audit and chargeback / showback.

To stay competitive in the current global economy, businesses must be able to react quickly to changing market conditions. IT plays a major role in that effort. Businesses depend heavily on technology, and their ability to maneuver will be enhanced by the ability of IT to change course quickly and head in a new direction, while remaining tightly aligned to the business. To do that, IT needs to understand where it is, where it is going, what it needs to do and what resources it will need to get there—all with shrinking budgets, of course. This is where NetApp OnCommand Insight Management Software can help. It provides visibility and analytics to optimize IT and business alignment while ensuring the underlying infrastructure is efficiently deployed.

An easy to understand analogy would be a car’s dashboard, complete with GPS navigation, as illustrated in Figure 2. The dashboard dials and gauges all provide insight into the infrastructure (fuel, temperature, RPM), while the GPS unit provides the directions to get you where you need to go and can predict when you will arrive based on driving and traffic conditions. OnCommand Insight management software provides the same functionality for your data center.

Insight Balance provides the end-to-end view organizations require when managing mission critical applications, and when there is a problem, it will quickly identify where the problem is and provide a solution—similar to a GPS unit recalculating a route around traffic. This helps keep those highly dynamic virtual environments optimized to deliver value to the business. Insight Assure provides the analytics to understand and ensure that service levels are being met, and predict when an activity will put those service levels in jeopardy. Insight Plan and Perform act as instrumentation and gauges for IT, monitoring the equipment to ensure everything is working as it should and will provide insight to future purchases, just like a low fuel warning alerts drivers to get more gas.

As environments become increasingly more virtualized, ensuring application performance and availability becomes a crucial concern. Specifically, few storage management tools have the ability to detect and manage the relationship between physical and virtual infrastructure. Even fewer can do it without agents. The ability to track applications located on virtual machines through physical servers to the storage is critical to effectively manage, optimize, and plan for service levels required by the business. This is exactly what NetApp OnCommand Insight was designed to do.

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of NetApp OnCommand Insight management software at a NetApp facility in Waltham, Massachusetts. The test environment was built to reflect a heterogeneous server and storage infrastructure to demonstrate the ability to manage across domains and provide end-to-end visibility from the applications down into the storage systems in both physical and virtualized IT infrastructures. ESG Lab followed the path a user might take to use OnCommand Insight to optimize their infrastructure for maximum benefit while simplifying planning and purchasing decisions, managing storage as an end-to-end service, and integrating storage into the IT service-delivery chain.

Getting Started

ESG Lab began with a new NetApp OnCommand Insight installation Insight Balance is a virtual appliance distributed in a Compressed (zipped) folder.

Balance installation started with extraction of the three files from the compressed folder using the native Windows interface. Once the files were extracted, VMware vCenter Converter within vCenter Server was used to bring the virtual appliance into the vSphere host. Balance runs a MySQL database on Debian GNU/Linux. The MySQL database is the central repository for all information collected by Balance. Installation and configuration of the Balance virtual appliance was completed in approximately 40 minutes, after which the appliance was collecting data.

Insight Assure, Perform, and Plan are installed on either a virtual or physical server using standard msi install packages.  The installation of the Insight server, for the Assure, Perform, and Plan modules, was also fast and easy. The Insight server install completed in less than five minutes and the data warehouse installation was done in just over 15 minutes.

Agent-less discovery of resources in an environment and creation of a browsable inventory is a standard function of the OnCommand Insight suite and is included with the Assure, Plan, and Perform modules. The inventory includes virtual machines, the servers they are running on, SAN switches, and zoning data, as well as datastores housing virtual machines and the storage arrays that they reside on. OnCommand Insight operates without agents in near real time, and it works with all major storage platforms, SAN and NAS environments and protocols.

Balance

First, ESG Lab examined OnCommand Insight Balance. While Insight Balance is designed to meet the needs of highly virtualized environments, it will provide detailed performance and capacity management for physical servers and storage. Sophisticated analytics provide intelligent alerting, actionable recommendations, and proactive service management guidance to help with remediation, optimization, and planning. Insight Balance, like all other Insight modules, is agent-less. Four specific use cases where Insight Balance can provide differentiation were explored:

• Troubleshooting mission critical apps
• Optimizing Virtual Machine workloads
• Identifying Misaligned LUNs
• Reclaiming memory using the virtual machine scorecard

ESG Lab used a test bed composed of virtual servers running typical business applications, on a heterogeneous storage infrastructure, as shown in Figure 3.

Troubleshooting Performance

Insight Balance was used to examine the server and storage infrastructure. The infrastructure can be viewed from the application, server, or storage perspective. The server “Windows2003_1_MsSQL”, hosting a Microsoft SQL database was observed to have an overall status of red, indicating a problem.

ESG Lab clicked on the server name “Windows2003_1_MsSQL” which brought up the server summary page, as shown in Figure 4.  The Server summary page presents detailed information about the server. The red exclamation on the Storage tab indicates the presence of a storage-related performance issue.

The “1d” radio button was used to zoom in on one day of performance history, as shown in Figure 5.  The Infrastructure Response Time (IRT) graph presents the average total response time for the virtual machine’s data processing events, broken down by CPU response time and storage response time. In this chart it can be seen that storage latency is contributing between 300 and 345 milliseconds of latency to the IRT, while CPU is contributing almost no latency at all.

Clicking on Data Topology provided a view of the environment that showed what infrastructure components were involved in the flow of data, as seen in Figure 6. This view placed the Microsoft SQL Server application on the left and showed the virtual server, physical host, and storage proceeding left to right.  Note how the health status of each resource is displayed in red, yellow or green—allowing administrators to quickly view the current state of the infrastructure.

The Data Topology view shows that two virtual machines are hosting database instances: Windows2003_1_MsSQL and MasterMsSQL.    The MasterMsSQL instance has objects on two volumes: the C: and E: drives. The status of the C: drive is green, while the status of the E: drive is red.  This would suggest that the storage volume supporting the E: drive, disk group 1 (a RAID set composed of 4 drives), is experiencing performance issues.

Looking at the path from the server to the storage, it can be seen that all objects on the path are experiencing performance issues.  In general, Insight Balance best practices recommend troubleshooting an issue from right to left in the interface, as “upstream” objects, like servers, inherit problems that are experienced at the physical disk layer. ESG Lab right-clicked on the red storage array disk group 1 (labeled 1(4)) and selected Re-orient Topology. As Figure 7 illustrates, re-orienting the topology shifts the focus and the view is now centered on disk group 1, which is highlighted in yellow, showing all infrastructure elements with dependencies on disk group 1.

Re-orienting the topology shows that three application servers have performance issues that trace back to disk group 1. To determine what storage dependency the three servers have in common, ESG Lab right-clicked on the disk group and opened the Performance Summary page. The performance summary page presents a tremendous amount of useful information in one view. The top graph shows three months of disk utilization history, with the remaining graphs detailing not only utilization, but response time, and disk IOPS. At the bottom are summaries for each server with storage on disk group 1.

As seen in Figure 8, disk utilization for the disk group is frequently approaching 100%, and, as disk utilization increases, response time increases. The next graph displays IOPS the disks performed during the same time interval.

ESG Lab noted that disk read activity was 908 IOPS during this period and disk write activity was 567 IOPS for a total of 1,475 IOPS. Considering that an individual Fibre Channel drive can support about 200 random IOPS, and this is a four disk RAID group, protected with RAID 5, it is a logical conclusion that the number of IOPS being driven by applications is exceeding the IO capacity of this disk group.

The set of graphs at the bottom of the page presents the list of servers using disk group 1, with those consuming the largest volume of resources (the “Top Talkers”) at the top of the list. As virtualization relies on shared resources, any VM that consumes excessive resources may affect the operation of other VMs relying on those same resources.

At the top of the list of VMs are Win2K3 Converter and the MasterMsSQL server.  Since the Win2k3_Converter server was at the top of the list, ESG Lab clicked on the server name, then the Volumes (3) link to view the IO break down by volume.

Considering that this server was at the top of the list of resource consumers, there is a strong indication that it may be the source of the performance issues. The volume details overview provides detailed performance information including “Perceived Disk Utilization,” as shown in Figure 9.

Since Insight Balance has end-to-end visibility into the storage infrastructure, it represents the state of disk utilization accurately, taking into account all parts of the storage fabric. When the amount of Perceived Disk Utilization exceeds both the warning and critical threshold (the yellow and red lines) by a significant amount, the server using this volume is clearly experiencing constrained IO. Examining the IOPS graph (Figure 10) shows that Win2K3_converter is generating about 350 IOPS, nearly evenly distributed between reads and writes. This contribution is driving the disk group over the maximum traffic it can manage. Compounding the problem is the ratio of read IOPS to write IOPS (nearly 1 to 1). RAID-5 is optimized for read operations. A workload with this percentage of reads to writes is not optimally serviced with a RAID-5 configuration, especially a RAID group with only four disk spindles to share the load.

Essentially, this server was not able to service the IO requests that its applications were demanding, which confirmed that this volume on this server was the likely culprit. The volume of IO being directed to the RAID group this volume is on (1,475 IOPS, seen previously in Figure 8 ) is more IO than can be reasonably sustained by a four-disk RAID set.  The cause of the performance problem: an over-utilized RAID group with excessive IO activity caused by a single virtual machine.

Optimizing Virtual Machine Workloads

ESG Lab next focused on maintaining performance of virtualization infrastructure. With the benefits of virtualization (mobility, flexibility) come challenges. Administrators must optimize virtual environments to distribute load evenly across physical infrastructure to avoid both performance issues and wasted resources. Administrators need to know how many workloads each host in their environment can support, especially in the face of constrained resources and stagnant budgets.

Insight Balance provides a unique metric to enable administrators to quickly and easily evaluate a physical or virtual system’s performance.  Performance Index (PI) is an analysis based on the sum of CPU, memory, and storage activity of all applications running in a system. Data must pass from the CPU, to memory, to storage, and back before an application can act on it, making these resources critical components in the data processing path.  Using a queuing network model proprietary to NetApp, Insight Balance analyzes performance information for each of these resources to compute the Performance Index.

As workloads are increased on a system, response times rise, degrading performance.  Insight Balance calculates the point at which the performance cost of adding an additional workload exceeds the benefit of the work it performs, and assigns a value of 100 to that point. That value is the “Optimal Point,” the basis for the Performance Index. PI can be examined at the host level, looking at workloads driven by all guests or VMs running on that host, or, more granularly, at the virtual machine level, looking at the applications running in that VM.

Figure 11 shows the PI view for an ESX Server.  The PI view shows an hourly average for PI of the host in the upper graph (with the horizontal blue line showing the Optimal Point of 100). The detailed view for any selected point in time is shown in the lower graph. The text on the right shows the actual data used to calculate the point in time graph.

This graph shows that on a daily basis, the PI of the server is exceeding 100, indicating that the server is operating outside its zone of optimal efficiency. To learn more, ESG Lab zoomed in.

Examining the point in time of 11AM on 10/31, it’s clear that the system is severely over-utilized. The Current Operating Point has a PI value of 310.26. The detail pane reveals that CPU Utilization is only 25%, while IOPS significantly exceed the optimal value. This indicates that the issue is not CPU related, and VMs are generating more IO than the host can handle. The average response time also exceeds the optimal value, suggesting that the greatest contributor to poor performance is storage latency. To optimize performance, an administrator would move some of the VMs to a host with a lower PI, then use Balance to troubleshoot potential storage performance issues.

Identifying Misaligned LUNs and VMDKs

Misaligned LUNs are the result of a configuration mismatch between an operating system-defined partition and a storage controller. When installing an operating system on a logical (SAN-attached) disk, file system blocks are not automatically aligned with disk sectors.

When an OS file system and a storage controller are misaligned, storage IO generated by the OS multiplies activity for the storage controller and its disk.  Effectively, file system misalignment raises the volume of storage IO artificially. A single IO event triggers numerous IO events on the storage layer.  The artificially high volume of storage activity consumes storage resources with excessive IO, making them unavailable for real work.

The problem is more critical in a virtualized environment. Because each VMDK contains its own file system, each virtual machine can suffer from misalignment. Large storage volumes can contain tens or hundreds of virtual machines, concentrating the issue and amplifying its effect.

The Insight Balance Misalignment Report, shown in Figure 13, gathers the list of misaligned partitions onto a single page, and ranks them by the amount of IO activity each is experiencing.  In this case,  the report shows that the Windows 2003_1_MsSQL VM is generating the most misaligned storage traffic, and is the most likely to cause performance problems. Prioritizing misalignment in this way is important because it identifies which applications are at highest risk for performance problems. Correcting the issue takes time, so it’s crucial to know which ones need to be fixed first.

The Alignment Offset column shows the current alignment settings of the partition, while the Vendor Recommended Alignment column shows the optimal value.

At this point, an administrator could use the NetApp Virtual Storage console or the mbralign tool to correct the issues.

Reclaiming Virtual Machine Memory

The “Scorecard” reporting feature of Insight Balance enables administrators to monitor infrastructure performance and identify issues. Balance generates reports that identify problems and/or targets of optimization in the environment and notifies IT automatically.  Scorecards provide summarized presentations of infrastructure attributes in a format that can prompt and guide immediate action. Scorecard Reporting can also be configured to generate and send reports automatically, on a predefined schedule.

Figure 14 shows a Virtual Machine Scorecard report for a production cluster. The report contains actionable information on Virtualization hosts, the virtual machines running on each host, and CPU, Memory, and Storage utilization for each system.

Looking at VM memory utilization for virtual machine Windows2003_1_MsSQL, it can be seen that the VM is allocated 2GB of RAM, but has never needed more than 30% of that amount. In an environment with tens or hundreds of virtual machines, this could represent a significant amount of memory allocated to virtual machines unnecessarily.

Assure

OnCommand Insight Assure enables organizations to visualize and monitor heterogeneous storage environments. Administrators can define global policies, simplifying management of complex virtualized datacenters. It provides full visibility into the storage environment, including host-to-storage access paths, storage availability, and change management. Insight Assure is also designed to provide compliance for required IT audits. It produces comprehensive audit reports, including a detailed audit trail of all change events and their impact on the environment. Change plans are automatically checked to minimize impact, while downtime and root-cause analysis capabilities improve incident management.  All of this information is collected in a data store.

Figure 15 highlights the datastore inventory of the test environment using Insight Assure. Information available at a glance includes the storage system housing the datastore, the datastore name, and IP address, as well as the actual, provisioned, in-use, and free capacity.

ESG Lab began with a look at policies as seen in Figure 16. Insight Assure enables definition of global, application, or host-based policies on parameters such as capacity, security, sharing, sessions, and minimum connections. Assure then will validate changes made to applications, servers, or storage against the resulting service model.

ESG Lab next examined service paths. A service path is defined as the entire path from an application, through the virtual server and hypervisor, to storage. Insight Assure identifies and correlates physical connectivity, zoning, and masking into a set of storage services that describe the relationship between a particular application and its data as shown in the graphic at the center of Figure 17.

Assure uses a color coded scheme for the visual representation of the storage service path in combination with detailed data to provide easy identification of errors and recommended solutions. Green means all elements are good and connectivity is live. Errors are color coded, showing that the path is down, and why. In the example in Figure 17, the path is up through the switch labeled F4brcd-a, while the path to storage is down through the switch F5brcd-a, triggering a violation: Missing Redundancy.

To determine root cause, ESG Lab right clicked on the violation alert and Selected Analyze Violation. Figure 18 shows how Insight Assure identifies the precise cause of the violation: volume masking was removed, denying the host access to the volume through the storage port attached to switch F5brcd-a.

It’s important to note that the application accessing this storage is not down and there was no indication from the application side that anything was wrong at all. A failure on the remaining path would take the storage for that application completely down.

Finally, ESG Lab tested Assure’s ability to model potentially disruptive change activities. As seen in Figure 19, an HBA replacement was defined along with several other maintenance activities and a what-if scenario was run.  OnCommand Insight Assure tests execution of every step that would be required to perform a particular activity using detailed knowledge of the storage service path. In this case, the Missing Redundancy violation alerts indicate that the activities required for replacing the HBA will cause multiple path outages.

Perform

OnCommand Insight Perform collects performance information from the storage infrastructure, arrays, virtual machines, and hosts and correlates them to the performance of applications from end to end.  Insight Perform gathers near-real-time virtual machine, Fibre Channel/iSCSI fabric, and storage performance data from the environment and maps it to applications, hosts, and service paths, enabling administrators to:

• Improve Virtual machine, server, array, switch, and fabric utilization without compromising performance.
• Identify the best VM, host, array, and switch resources to allocate to a new application.
• Optimize storage allocation to accelerate application performance.
• Validate tiering allocations and make sure all datasets are on the optimal tier.

ESG Lab first examined the Insight Perform menu. Performance can be monitored from the point of view of the application, the physical host, virtual servers, through the SAN or at the storage.  As can be seen in Figure 20, Perform captures not only the standard performance metrics of IOPS, throughput and response time, but also captures capacity utilization.

Deep internal performance metrics are gathered through Insight Perform’s integration with VMware vCenter. Figure 21 shows performance analysis for a datastore hosting several virtual machines, with visibility into the virtual machines that live on the datastore, down to the individual disks that it’s hosted on. The chart in the lower left shows performance details for the disk selected in the lower right.

Figure 22 shows performance for six virtual machines on a single ESX server. Performance is color coded by virtual machine to make it easy to compare resource utilization across all VMs on a physical server. In this case none of the virtual machines are working very hard, indicating that this server is underutilized with respect to CPU and could potentially host more virtual machines.

Plan

OnCommand Insight Plan is designed to help users make informed purchasing decisions and provision capacity more effectively and in line with their business. An open schema, enterprise-class data warehouse aggregates data from multisite environments, provides global visibility across distributed infrastructures, and enables users to take advantage of detailed analysis and reporting capabilities. Resource allocation can be audited by business unit, data center, and in multi-tenant environments for conformance and cost accountability. Relevant virtual machine, storage system, and fiber channel switch information from multiple OnCommand instances can be aggregated into a single view, providing a global view of asset utilization over time.   Additionally, business entities and application correlation that has been defined in Assure are carried through to Plan to provide visibility and reporting of infrastructure use and forecasting from a business perspective.

ESG Lab first examined a simple report that showed the number of volumes in an enterprise sorted by the amount of IO each volume was driving over the course of the previous week.  This report is useful in identifying potentially reclaimable storage which is not being actively used by any host or application. In this example, there are over 2,000 volumes that have generated 0 IOPS in the previous week, which collectively represent more than 375 TB of capacity that could be reclaimed and re-purposed.

Another example of enterprise wide data collection and analysis is the capacity report for consumption analysis and forecasting. The Insight Plan capacity trending reports forecast storage needs based on actual usage over time, as seen in Figure 24. Consumption forecast reports enable organizations to forecast storage depletion by both tier and data center.

ESG Lab next looked at Insight Plan’s ability to use the Business Entities defined within OnCommand Insight Assure to correlate business intelligence around storage users. As seen in Figure 25, the Cloud Tenant and Application Service Level Chargeback report provided detailed service level, cost and capacity reports. Combined with the provisioning and utilization reports for the same business entities, organizations can make informed decisions  on how to store, tier, or archive data and recover valuable resources.

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

• OnCommand Insight Balance was installed in an existing, heterogeneous application, server and SAN attached storage environment in less than 20 minutes. Since OnCommand Insight is agent-less, it was not necessary to install any local software and there was no impact to running applications.
• ESG Lab validated that Insight Balance can be used to accurately predict application performance issues, identify application interdependencies and interactions, optimize workloads, identify and prioritize misaligned LUNs on multiple virtual machines, and identify over-provisioned virtual machine memory.
• ESG Lab used Insight Assure to define global policies for applications, servers, and storage, but to also see a complete picture of the path between an application and its storage, identifying errors and actionable recommendations to address the root cause.  Additionally, Assure was used to predict the impact of routine maintenance, identifying potentially disruptive scenarios before any action was taken thus reducing the risk of changes.
• ESG Lab used Insight Perform to quickly and easily identify and analyze application performance metrics of IOPS, throughput, response time, and capacity utilization
• Insight Plan helped ESG Lab analyze capacity utilization issues, show growing requirements based on trending and actual usage and provided robust reporting through the data warehouse around capacity management, tiering, accountability and chargeback at the application and business entity levels.

Issues to Consider

• While the OnCommand Insight software suite is tightly integrated, the Assure, Perform, and Plan modules all leverage a shared data warehouse and run on the same windows server, while Insight Balance is currently packaged as a separate virtual appliance. When deploying OnCommand Insight in a virtualized environment, the products can leverage the same server hardware. NetApp informed ESG Lab that merging the products onto a common platform is under development and will be part of a future release.
• Insight Balance requires read-only administrator level access to application servers, switches and storage arrays. Instead of handing out un-restricted administrative access, a number of data center administrators ESG spoke with are setting up read-only management domains for management applications like Insight Balance. This requires some planning and effort, but is a recommended best practice for optimal security.
• OnCommand Insight Balance supports visibility of virtual and physical machines in a VMware and Microsoft environment, but does not yet support server virtualization solutions from other vendors (e.g. the Xen Hypervisor).  As server virtualization continues to gain in popularity, it will become important to support virtual machines in a heterogeneous operating environment.

The Bigger Truth

As organizations’ virtualized computing environments continue to mature into private clouds, it is imperative to deploy management solutions that provide end-to-end views and can scale to meet rapidly changing demands. Having a complete understanding of the entire environment, including performance analytics, will be critical as organizations move production and mission critical applications onto virtualized platforms and cloud computing environments. Having a flexible and agile data center is important, but it can’t come at the cost of application performance. NetApp OnCommand Insight solutions demonstrate that you don’t have to choose between one and the other. OnCommand Insight Balance ensures that production applications can be virtualized and provide equal or better performance. More importantly it can ensure that they stay that way by quickly identifying threats to performance and availability and allowing IT to proactive correct the situation.

ESG lab used the NetApp OnCommand Insight suite to provide a cross-domain view of IT infrastructure quickly and with minimal effort.  ESG Lab was impressed by the crisp presentation of end-to-end application, infrastructure, utilization, and performance data provided by the intuitive web-based OnCommand Insight GUI—particularly when used to manage the relationship between virtual machines and applications and the underlying infrastructure supporting them.

OnCommand Insight enables IT managers to utilize advanced analytics to identify and remediate problems at the application level and make informed recommendations for the optimized utilization of virtual machine, server, and storage resources. ESG Lab has confirmed that Insight provides cross-domain intelligence to enable cost-effective delivery of transparent IT services.

As organizations continue to invest in and deploy virtualization technologies across server and storage environments, it would be wise to remember that technology itself will only take the environment so far. In order to truly develop a “private cloud” capable of rapidly adjusting to business needs, sophisticated and tightly integrated management software will be the key to long term success. NetApp’s OnCommand Insight management software can play a major role, with solutions available today that can drive more optimized and efficient cloud computing environments into the future.

Ibid.

Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.

Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.

Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.

Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.

Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.

Introduction

Background

As shown in Figure 1, organizations report multiple challenges with network infrastructure when supporting server virtualization’s requirements.[1] The number one challenge reported was the cost of new network infrastructure, closely followed by the need to keep network professionals understanding of virtualization up to date as well as the prevalence of network management tools built with only physical devices in mind. The clash of physical and virtual environments seems to be foremost in the minds of network administrators, with some raising concerns that existing network management tools are not designed for virtual technology and others pointing to the difficulties associated with mapping VLANs to new virtual server infrastructure.

Traditional enterprise IT environments supporting multiple business units with a wide range of needs and service level requirements are increasingly finding themselves competing with external service providers and are challenged to prove themselves the most agile, cost-effective option for the business.  Cloud service providers are not immune to these same networking issues as they are tasked with the important challenge of managing virtualization amid the complexity of multi-tenant networks. As both enterprise and service provider networks grow and demands for more scalability and elasticity of resources increase, the pain of maintaining complex network architectures to satisfy customer requirements will increase as well.

Ethernet Fabric

There has been a lot of discussion in the industry using the term “Ethernet Fabric” to describe new network technology and architecture designed with the lofty goal of shifting the network paradigm away from physical switch-based configuration and management toward a virtualized, automated network infrastructure that is self-discovering, self-aggregating, and optimized for virtualization.  Without talking about specific vendors or protocols, there are a few elements that most can agree are attributes of Fabrics: They are flat, eliminating dependence on Spanning tree, but should still interoperate, to preserve existing investment. They are flexible, enabling a dynamic topology that changes as physical elements are added or removed. They are resilient, responding to failures and interruptions with no disruption to clients. Scalability is important, allowing for seamless addition of connectivity and bandwidth as needed and finally, the solution should be standards-based, enabling maximum interoperability. This is not a comprehensive list, but covers the most common attributes discussed around generic Ethernet Fabrics.

Brocade VCS Fabric Technology

Brocade VCS fabric technology builds on the foundation of Ethernet Fabric and adds powerful capabilities designed to resolve many of the traditional Ethernet-imposed challenges of server virtualization, while providing dynamic, virtualization-optimized automation and services that go beyond the capabilities provided by basic Ethernet Fabrics. Multiple interconnected VCS-enabled switches automatically form a single fabric, flattening the network architecture, reducing the number of tiers, and simplifying network design, as shown in Figure 2. The VCS fabric can be managed as a single switch with shared and dynamic control of network policies and behavior.

The Brocade VDX family of data center switches, available in 16- through 60-port models with port on demand licensing, is the first to deliver Brocade VCS fabric technology. A new hardware design, combined with Brocade Network Operating System (Brocade NOS), is designed to improve network utilization, maximize application availability, increase scalability, and dramatically simplify network architecture in next-generation virtualized data centers. Some of the key benefits provided by Brocade VCS technology are:

• Non-stop Networking–Enterprise class availability, scalability, and resilience with domain based management of the network as a single ‘logical chassis’.
• Simplicity Through Automation–Automatically aligning virtual machines with the correct network resources, anywhere in the data center with distributed intelligence.
• Evolutionary–Top of Rack architecture designed to address east-west (server to server) traffic growth with less disruption and a lower cost of entry than traditional aggregated data center networks or fabric architectures based on core switches.

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of Brocade VCS technology and VDX data center switches at Brocade’s San Jose, CA facilities. Testing was designed to document the capabilities of Brocade VDX 6720 switches leveraging VCS fabric technology to improve network performance and utilization while simplifying integration and increasing network flexibility.

Getting Started

The test bed used by ESG Lab is illustrated in Figure 3. An ESX server was connected to an Ethernet Fabric composed of four Brocade VDX 6720 Data Center Switches running VCS fabric technology. Traffic was simulated using BreakingPoint Storm CTM and Spirent TestCenter workload generators to create and measure various types of network traffic. Testing was designed to emulate traffic in an enterprise data center network environment.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab used the VDX switches’ CLI to view the default settings and examine the steps needed to add and configure new switches. When a new VDX switch was connected to the existing fabric, it inherited the configuration of the fabric, automatically created ISLs (inter-switch links) between switches, and became available immediately. ESG Lab started with one switch in its default configuration as shown in Figure 4.

ESG Lab then connected three additional VDX 6720 switches to the fabric and examined the switch configuration again. As shown in Figure 5, the Ethernet fabric included all four switches as well as Brocade ISL Trunks which were automatically created between switches when multiple ISL connections were made.

In less than ten minutes, a fully meshed network was created with inter-switch links automatically created between all four switches with no manual configuration required. In ESG Lab’s experience, the process required significantly less time and effort than installing and configuring traditional Ethernet switches.

Scalability and Performance

Application response time—and the ability to scale network capacity to meet increasing demands—are key challenges for any network environment. Brocade VDX switches with VCS technology offer ‘Ports on Demand’ with wire speeds of up to 10GbE across all ports, enabling an easy and cost-effective scaling model where users purchase only the quantity of ports required with the ability to seamlessly scale by applying a software license to enable additional ports as needed. In this way, individual VDX switches can scale from 16 to 60 ports. VCS technology enables VDX switches to inherit the fabric configuration as they are attached to the network and automatically create ISL trunks between switches, scaling performance on demand.

ESG Lab Testing

First, ESG Lab connected an ESX server to the network using two Emulex Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) and a Brocade MLX router with Multi-chassis Trunking (MCT) enabled. Then virtual Link Aggregation Groups (vLAGs) were configured.  vLAGs provide active-active links for core router connections to the Brocade VCS fabric as well as active-active links for server connections to the Brocade VCS fabric.

Next, ESG Lab tested performance by generating 40,000 sessions of client to server and server to server traffic using the Spirent TestCenter simulator. Client-server applications simulated included HTTP and HTTPS workloads like Twitter, Facebook, and Instant Messaging, while server-server traffic emulated NFS, and CIFS protocols as used by Oracle and SQL Server. In a traditional Ethernet network using the Spanning Tree Protocol for network resilience, half of the inter-switch links would be unusable, limiting available inter-switch bandwidth. Using the Brocade VDX CLI, ESG Lab confirmed that all inter-switch links configured in the vLAGs were passing traffic.

Next, ESG Lab generated the same mix of network traffic using the Spirent TestCenter to measure latency between ports on an individual switch as well as between physical switches. The test started with 64 byte frames and walked up to 1518 byte frames passing data through one switch. Latency was measured by Spirent TestCenter’s traffic analyzer. Figure 6 shows the latency for 1024 byte frames, measured in microseconds.

ESG Lab then repeated the test moving the data across two switches to capture the switch to switch latency. The port to port latency of the Brocade VDX switches is graphed in Figure 7.

The VDX switches showed extremely consistent port to port latency of less than a microsecond throughout the range of frame sizes tested. The detailed results are shown in Table 1.

What the Numbers Mean

• Brocade VDX 6720 switches showed a very consistent port to port latency between 690 and 800 nanoseconds as frame size was increased.
• Switch to switch latency was also consistently low and, in combination with observed port to port latency, validates the VDX’s highly scalable performance compared to traditional Ethernet switches ESG Lab has worked with.

High Availability and Optimization

Server mobility presents multiple challenges in static networking environments. IP addresses must be changed, and router, switch, VLAN, and ACL configurations all need to be updated to ensure access to the moved server and applications. Brocade employs network policy portability as part of VCS technology, which allows virtual machines to migrate within a subnet without requiring changes to the network or the IP address of the virtual machine.

Automated Migration of Port Profiles (AMPP)

AMPP is a Brocade VCS feature which addresses virtualization challenges in Ethernet environments by virtualizing network policies and detaching them from physical ports in a VDX switch. This enables servers to move at will throughout the environment, carrying their network profile with them automatically, without administrator intervention.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested network policy portability by moving a virtual machine between two vSphere servers located on different IP subnets on different physical switches. As seen in Figure 8, the test environment contained multiple virtual machines hosted on multiple physical servers and attached to multiple physical switches in a simulated data center. Some virtual machines were configured on different subnets and VLANs to validate that AMPP network policies were consistent after a VM migration.

ESG Lab configured network policies to enable communication between two virtual machines in a single subnet and prohibit traffic to virtual machines on another subnet. The policy was assigned to a virtual machine’s MAC address and then vMotion was used to move the running virtual machine to another vSphere server located on a different physical switch. A continuous workload was executed between the migrating host and another server on its subnet. The virtual machine moved, retaining its IP address, VLAN ID, and connectivity to the server on its subnet with no disruption to communication. ESG Lab also confirmed that the moved virtual machine was still unable to communicate with virtual machines on the prohibited subnet.

Next, network resilience was tested to validate that link addition or failure is non-disruptive. For this test, multiple high bandwidth workloads were simulated using the Spirent TestCenter that included both HTTP/HTTPS Internet workloads (webmail, IM, streaming video) as well as traditional data center workloads like Oracle, SQL, and file services (NFS/CIFS). In total 40,000 sessions were simulated during these tests.

While traffic was flowing, a link was added to the Brocade ISL Trunk between two switches. ESG Lab observed zero disruption, even as the newly added link began passing traffic.

ESG Lab next pulled a cable on one VDX switch to simulate a hardware failure and monitored the traffic using the Spirent Test Center’s GUI to observe the results of the broken link. There was no disruption to connectivity as traffic continued to flow over the Brocade ISL Trunk. This differs from traditional Spanning Tree protocol failover where all traffic travels over one path (or aggregate) and fails over to a second path when a connection is lost. This can take tens of seconds to make the switch to the new data path, depending on the size and complexity of the network, which can lead to application timeouts and very noticeable loss of connectivity.

ESG Lab observed extremely rapid fabric convergence time for high availability, when compared to traditional Ethernet, where convergence can take from seconds to minutes. Failover from the removed path and recovery to the restored path were both instantaneous with no detectable impact from frame loss.

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

• When a new VDX switch was added to an existing fabric, the new switch inherited the fabric configuration, automatically created ISL links, and joined a Brocade ISL Trunk between switches with none of the manual configuration required with traditional networks.
• Brocade VCS technology’s Logical Chassis functionality can provide the ability to scale and manage the Ethernet fabric as a single logical switch.
• Network configuration for vMotion was simplified using AMPP as all Mac, IP, and ACL information was transferred with the virtual machine as it moved in the network compared to having to update that information manually as is necessary in static networks.
• ESG Lab verified port to port latency on a VDX 6720-60 as low as 690 nanoseconds.
• During a link failure, the VDX switch experienced a sub-second pause in traffic flow with zero to minimal frame loss. In traditional Ethernet Networks, recovery could take tens of seconds to minutes depending on complexity of the network.

Issues to Consider

• The benefits specific to Brocade VCS technology require a homogenous network of Brocade VCS enabled switches. It’s important to note that VCS technology still operates non-disruptively within standard Ethernet architectures, even if fabric architectures from different vendors are not interoperable amongst themselves. Although Brocade VCS fabrics are interoperable with existing networks, that does not mean Brocade VCS technology features extend to existing infrastructure.
• Advanced functionality like network extension over distance, native Fibre Channel connectivity, Layer 4 – 7 services (such as Brocade Application Resource Broker), and enhanced security services (such as firewalls and data encryption) can be attached to a VCS Ethernet fabric but are not presently supported within the fabric itself. Brocade has discussed plans for future releases with ESG, where switches with these unique capabilities will be able to join the Ethernet fabric, adding a network service layer that is available across the entire fabric.

The Bigger Truth

Server virtualization has been a disruptive technology that has allowed companies to recognize true capital savings by consolidating server infrastructure and reducing data center floor space while also maximizing utilization of existing assets. It’s no surprise, then, that increased use of server virtualization (30%) tops the list for IT spending priorities according to ESG research.[2] As server virtualization deployments grow, IT faces an increasing challenge to keep up with the demands of virtualization, including application mobility, load balancing and resilience within existing network infrastructures.

Virtualization is also the catalyst that has allowed the emergence of cloud solutions promising further cost capital reductions as enterprise IT services begin to move out of corporate data centers. The promise of cloud computing solutions that deliver scalability and elasticity will be difficult to achieve with today’s traditional networking architectures. A network that performs with the same flexibility and ease of management that is attained with virtual servers will be required as cloud solutions mature and become ubiquitous.

Brocade has developed an enterprise-ready, virtualization-aware network solution that delivers on that promise. Brocade VCS technology solves more than just network problems, enabling VM machine mobility free from network reconfiguration requirements.

With VCS technology, enterprises and service providers can rapidly create flexible, resilient, high performance networks without the management overhead that exists with traditional Ethernet switch architectures today. These networks can be managed as a single logical chassis, significantly simplifying physical topology, load balancing, and path management.

ESG Lab was able to build a fully meshed Ethernet Fabric with resilient inter switch links in minutes, by simply powering on and plugging switches together. Load balancing was automatic and incredibly flexible, even load balancing traffic from a single user running a single stream across multiple links using vLAGs.  Link failures were handled instantly and completely non-disruptive to running applications. Automatic Migration of Port Profiles enabled the movement of a virtual server running a live workload between switches using while retaining its IP address, VLAN tags and network policies.

As companies look to build networks that can respond to the business needs of increasingly virtualized enterprises, VCS technology from Brocade is a much needed step toward providing a truly scalable, flexible, and resilient network to enable and enhance the value of server virtualization customers are beginning to achieve today.

Appendix

[2] Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.

We are just getting started, but we hope you enjoy the new blog.

Be sure to also follow our new team Twitter account @ESGLAB or track our #ESGLAB topics.

Thanks for reading !

This ESG Lab Validation analyzes the operational efficiency of NetApp FAS and V-Series data storage systems in real-world, mission-critical, enterprise e-mail environments to validate the tangible business value offered by NetApp in enterprises utilizing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

Click Here to read the lab validation.

             .