Shared Storage
Storage 101 – Virtualisation Changes Everything!
Server virtualisation has set the stage for those who are rethinking how they design and implement their IT solutions. Whether you’re looking for new ways to lower cost, improve scalability, or improve service level agreements (SLAs), integrating storage as part of the overall solution will enable you to:
- Bring products, services, and projects to market faster
- Save up to 50% on storage power, cooling, and space and lower overall data centre costs
- Scale your virtualised environment and accommodate data growth without degrading performance or investing in additional storage
ViFX Storage Consulting Services
Establish Foundation for Secure, Reliable, Available Data Management in a Virtualised/Cloud Environment
List of detailed Storage Services (click to expand)
Storage, Virtualisation, & the Cloud
Information is the lifeblood of all business. In fact, in many businesses, information is the product itself. And information volumes are growing. According to some estimates, the amount of information created annually will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020 as the shift from analog to digital information in all forms completes. By 2020, more than 1/3 of all digital information created annually will either live in or pass through the Cloud.
Another factor driving the growth of information is Virtualisation. Virtualising essentially involves the digitisation and centralisation of physical machines as files, which must be stored, protected, shared, and migrated between centralised internal Storage Infrastructure and Clouds. In 2010, for the first time, the number of virtual machines created exceeded the number of physical machines manufactured.
ViFX Storage Consulting & Professional Services were established to help customers manage the complete lifecycle of their information, from creation/capture to retirement/archiving/deletion, minimizing Capital & Operational expenses while ensuring information is protected, shared, and continuously available. As a vendor-neutral and technology agnostic service provider, ViFX is well positioned to offer you pragmatic, actionable advice in your best interests.
Storage Strategy & Assessment Service
The first step in optimizing your Storage infrastructure is the ViFX Storage Strategy & Assessment Service. This comprehensive offering includes the following:
- Quantifying and documenting your current and future information management requirements
- Assessing your current storage assets, inclusive of capacity, performance, vendor, age, function, connectivity, etc.
- Mapping your requirements against currently available Storage technologies and individual vendor offerings
- Understanding and quantifying the impact of Virtualisation initiatives and moving to the Cloud
- Through a series of structured workshops and interviews with key stakeholders, ViFX develops and documents a complete Storage Strategy and Roadmap to guide future Storage procurement and deployment decisions.
Storage Reference Architecture
The ViFX Storage Reference Architecture Service targets Enterprises & Service Provider organisations with an existing, large-scale or complex, multi-site or multi-vendor storage infrastructure, who require assistance rationalising existing storage investments, optimizing new storage purchases, or both.
The Service is comprehensive in nature and looks at all aspects of an organisation’s storage strategy including the current environment, Business & IT requirements and constraints, and anticipated future needs. These are ranked and prioritized, based on importance to the business, cost to achieve, and ease of adoption.
Next, an Object Model, Component Model, and Strawman Reference Architecture are developed. Optionally, the Reference Architecture can be extended into a Detailed Design phase whereby specific vendors and products are selected, and a vendor/product-specific design is produced, which can be used as the basis for implementation.
Storage Design, Implementation & Optimisation Services
ViFX are uniquely qualified to implement and optimize your Storage infrastructure. No other vendor possesses the range of multi-vendor competencies and certifications, coupled with the experience of successfully delivering hundreds of storage engagements to satisfied customers.
For customers who already have an existing Storage infrastructure, and would like to realise greater efficiencies, ViFX will advise you on the appropriate implementation of Storage Optimisation products and services including:
- Storage Consolidation & Virtualisation
- Virtual Infrastructure Integration
- Management, Automation & Provisioning Services
- Compression & De-duplication
- Thin Provisioning
- Tiered Storage Implementation
Data Classification, Analysis, & Migration
Not all information is created equal. ViFX provides Data Analysis, Classification, Migration, and Optimisation Services leading to an idealised segregation of data according to business criticality and placement on the appropriate infrastructure or “tier” of storage. Data Governance and Regulatory Compliance requirements will also impact where data is stored and how it is protected.
ViFX consultants work with your key Business and IT stakeholders to understand, recommend, and document a Data Classification strategy that ensures the right data is stored in the right place with optimal cost and efficiency, in full compliance with Data Governance requirements. Optionally, ViFX Data Migration Services can be deployed to assist with data and storage migration, minimizing business disruption, accelerating migration timing, and minimizing project cost and complexity.
Data Protection Services
ViFX Data Protection Services ensure that critical enterprise information assets are always available, protected, and secured. Prominent among our offerings in this area are the following:
- Backup & Recovery Architecture (BURA) Services: A well-planned, well-designed Backup & Recovery infrastructure – paired with comprehensive, tested operational processes – forms the foundation for information protection in the case of device or site failure. ViFX works with you to understand, recommend, document, and implement your complete BURA solution.
- Data Security: Critical corporate information must be protected at all times ensuring confidentiality is maintained. Typically this involves an integrated solution comprised of identity, authentication, rights management, encryption, and a variety of physical and network data protection mechanisms to ensure data are always protected. ViFX employ experts in data and application security who will craft and implement a Data Security strategy ensuring all your key data assets are protected.
- Disaster Recovery: While the physical elements of IT infrastructure (Servers, Disks, Networks) are replaceable in case of loss, data is not. The only solution to ensure that data can never be permanently lost is to keep copies in an alternative location in the event of a site failure. ViFX will design and implement a Disaster Recovery solution protecting key corporate data and ensuring that information is available at all times to support ongoing business operations.
Independent QA & Audit
Many organisations are building confidence and competence in this critical new area. ViFX will stand beside a customer or outsourcer organisation, to provide independent review, objective measurement, expert advice and, if required, a detailed analysis and audit of storage project(s).
Health check
Business requirements, and therefore your VI and storage infrastructure, are changing and fluid. ViFX is able to perform periodic health checks, providing a snapshot of your infrastructure health and hygiene, along with either remedial services or a set of recommendations as appropriate.
Project Management
Pragmatic project management is a function which is key to the success of storage projects. As part of our overall quality assurance program and to ensure milestones, deliverables and outcomes, ViFX integrates an appropriate level of Project Management into each of its project engagements.
As-Built Documentation
Many customers neglect to maintain their environment’s “as-built” documentation. Current and up to date “as-built” documentation is an important intelligence file for strategic and tactical planning and risk mitigation.
As either a custom assignment, or as part of a project, ViFX can update your “as-built” documentation (including network and infrastructure diagrams).
Critical Care Support Services
Your organisation has probably invested in a sophisticated, flexible and highly functional virtualised infrastructure / environment. It is critical that this environment is managed and supported in order to maintain optimal operational health and efficiency and to minimise the cost and business impact of any interruption to the production services. ViFX offers 24x7 remote support services to provide crisis support and scheduled routine maintenence.
Technical Account Management
Your ViFX Technical Account Manager offers expertise, access, and commitment to help maximise your storage investment. The TAM leverages proven methodologies and serves as a technology advocate and an enabler to guide you in best practices, facilitate progress, and accelerate toward your goals.
The ViFX TAM is your trusted advisor who assesses your existing infrastructure, reviews the implementation plans for best practices, makes recommendations in line with your unique requirements and addresses technical or business hurdles. ViFX conveniently provides TAM expert services on either a program-of-work basis or on a term-residency basis.
Business Case Development & Decision Support
ViFX offers customers assistance to develop their business case for virtualisation and storage investments. Our experience across many customers allows us to add the value of that experience to help new customers develop their business cases or add to their business case with supporting intelligence.
ViFX uses its commercial consultants and management to facilitate these services. The program of work can involve stakeholder surveys / interviews / workshops, analysis and report preparation.
Training & Education
ViFX offers customers hands-on, environment-specific training aimed at adding value by building your IT staff’s confidence and capabilities to effectively and efficiently run and manage your new virtualised and/or storage infrastructure.
Training is one of the key elements which helps maximise the technology’s return on investment. We believe that training is an important investment which encourages the adoption of new technology and adds value by improving employee productivity and accelerating the benefits.
Beyond skill development, we target our training toward practically supporting your ICT organisation’s real-world processes and procedures.
Virtualising your servers is only half the story.
According to both Gartner and IDC, you need to consider storage as part of the solution if you want to realise the promise of a truly virtualised environment.
The momentum in data centre virtualisation has increased the focus on technologies which contribute to more effective application provisioning, business continuity, and resource consolidation. Storage virtualisation provides the ability to represent data independently of where and how it is physically stored, thus enabling increased asset utilisation, faster application recovery and reduced space, power and cooling requirements.
Solution planning is critical
The extent to which this technology is able to deliver such benefits will depend upon the completeness of the storage virtualisation solution and how well it is integrated into the core data management architecture.
Strategic planning is critical to your complete data centre transformation as making the wrong storage decisions as you build your cutting-edge data centre could be catastrophic. It is difficult to understate how many stories we have heard about companies undertaking server virtualisation initiatives only to discover major performance issues at the storage layer.
Storage virtualisation
‘Storage virtualisation’ refers to the process of abstracting logical storage from physical storage. The term is today used to describe this abstraction at any layer in the storage software and hardware stack.
Virtualisation of storage helps achieve location independence by abstracting the physical location of the data. The virtualisation system presents to the user a logical space for data storage and itself handles the process of mapping it to the actual physical location.
The actual form of the mapping will depend on the chosen implementation. Some implementations may limit the granularity of the mapping which itself may limit the capabilities of the device. Typical granularities range from a single physical disk down to some small subset (multiples of megabytes or gigabytes) of the physical disk.
- Block-based storage environment
A single block of information is addressed using a logical unit identifier (LUN) and an offset within that LUN - known as a Logical Block Address (LBA). The address space mapping is between a logical disk, usually referred to as a virtual disk (vdisk) and a logical unit presented by one or more storage controllers. The LUN itself may be also a product of virtualisation in a different layer. - Pooling
The physical storage resources are aggregated into storage pools, from which the logical storage is created. More storage systems, which may be heterogeneous in nature, can be added as and when needed, and the virtual storage space will scale up by the same amount. This process is fully transparent to the applications using the storage infrastructure. - Disk management
The software or device providing storage virtualisation becomes a common disk manager in the virtualised environment. Logical disks (vdisks) are created by the virtualisation software or device and are mapped (made visible) to the required host or server, thus providing a common place or way for managing all volumes in the environment.
Enhanced features are easy to provide in this environment:-
Thin Provisioning to maximise storage utilisation. This is relatively easy to implement as physical storage is only allocated in the mapping table when it is used.
- Disk expansion and shrinking
More physical storage can be allocated by adding to the mapping table (assuming the using system can cope with online expansion) Similarly disks can be reduced in size by removing some physical storage from the mapping (uses for this are limited as there is no guarantee of what resides on the areas removed) - Non-disruptive data migration
One of the major benefits of abstracting the host or server from the actual storage is the ability to migrate data while maintaining concurrent I/O access. The host only knows about the logical disk (vdisk) and so any changes to the meta-data mapping is transparent to the host. This means the actual data can be moved or replicated to another physical location without affecting the operation of any client. When the data has been copied or moved, the meta-data can simply be updated to point to the new location, therefore freeing up the physical storage at the old location.
The process of moving the physical location is known as ‘data migration’. Most implementations allow for this to be done in a non-disruptive manner, that is, concurrently while the host continues to perform I/O to the logical disk (vdisk).
The mapping granularity dictates how quickly the meta-data can be updated, how much extra capacity is required during the migration, and how quickly the previous location is marked as free. The smaller the granularity the faster the update, less space required and quicker the old storage can be freed up.
There are many day to day tasks a storage administrator has to perform that can be simply and concurrently performed using data migration techniques.
- Moving data off an over-utilised storage device.
- Moving data onto a faster storage device as needs require
- Implementing a Information Lifecycle Management policy
- Migrating data off older storage devices (either being scrapped or off-lease)
Improved utilisation. Utilisation can be increased by virtue of the pooling, migration and Thin Provisioning services.
When all available storage capacity is pooled, system administrators no longer have to search for disks that have free space to allocate to a particular host or server. A new logical disk can be simply allocated from the available pool, or an existing disk can be expanded.
Pooling also means that all the available storage capacity can potentially be used. In a traditional environment, an entire disk would be mapped to a host. This may be larger than is required, thus wasting space. In a virtual environment, the logical disk (vdisk) is assigned the capacity required by the using host.
Storage can be assigned where it is needed at that point in time, reducing the need to guess how much a given host will need in the future. Using Thin Provisioning, the administrator can create a very large thin provisioned logical disk, thus the using system thinks it has a very large disk from day one.
Fewer points of management. With storage virtualisation, multiple independent storage devices, that may be scattered over a network, appear to be a single monolithic storage device, which can be managed centrally. However, traditional storage controller management is still required. That is, the creation and maintenance of RAID arrays, including error and fault management.
Storage Consolidation
Consolidate and standardise your disparate DAS, NAS, and SAN environments into a unified infrastructure and realise significant cost savings today. Now you can boost utilisation AND increase data centre efficiency.
Business as usual is no longer an option in today’s economy. The more your storage demands grow, the more you need to reassess your infrastructure strategy. The traditional approach—deploying more systems for each particular application—results in islands of stranded assets that are hard to manage, inefficient, poorly utilised, and expensive to operate. Your systems administrators are mired in complexity and spend their days on routine and repetitive management tasks. The environment can’t scale, and your business can’t afford more people and resources to keep pace with data growth.
You can simplify your infrastructure by consolidating everything on one of our unified storage systems. CIFS NAS, NFS NAS, iSCSI SAN, Fibre Channel SAN, and FCoE SAN—put it all in one easy-to-manage, easy-to-grow system. Avoid or defer costly data centre expansion.
Reduce your space, power, and cooling loads through consolidation.
Infrastructure Consolidation
Our customers have reported 50% reduction in power, space, and cooling. They have realised 75% faster time to market in their application development. Now you can achieve these gains and benefit from a doubling, or more, of your storage utilisation.
Server virtualisation and consolidation
The underlying storage infrastructure is unified as part of your virtualised server solution.
NAS consolidation
Consolidation of individual NAS systems and file servers reduces file management complexity while increasing your storage capacity utilisation, reducing your network usage, and eliminating poorly utilised file servers.
SAN consolidation
SAN consolidation solutions for Fibre Channel, FCoE, and IP SAN (iSCSI) consolidate either your direct-attached storage (DAS) or your existing SANs into more efficient storage pools.
Unified storage consolidation
By unifying your storage infrastructure across storage protocols and storage tiers, we deliver immense performance and cost benefits.
Backup, recovery, and archiving
We can help you cure your backup, recovery, and archiving headaches. Streamlined and automated backup, recovery, and archiving processes simplify your day-to-day management tasks and improve the availability and performance of your applications and systems.
Risks
There are many risk factors associated with the implementation of virtualisation which is why customers are looking to work with ViFX as a credible, knowledgeable and experienced company.
Backing out of a failed implementation
Once the abstraction layer is in place, only the virtualiser knows where the data actually resides on the physical medium. Backing out of a virtual storage environment therefore requires the reconstruction of the logical disks as contiguous disks that can be used in a traditional manner.
Most implementations will provide some form of back-out procedure and with the data migration services it is at least possible, but time consuming.
Interoperability and vendor support
Interoperability is a key enabler to any virtualisation software or device. It applies to the actual physical storage controllers and the hosts, their operating systems, multi-pathing software and connectivity hardware.
Interoperability requirements differ based on the implementation chosen. For example virtualisation implemented within a storage controller adds no extra overhead to host-based interoperability, but will require additional support of other storage controllers if they are to be virtualised by the same software.
Switch based virtualisation may not require specific host interoperability — if it uses packet-cracking techniques to redirect the I/O. Network-based appliances have the highest level of interoperability requirements as they have to interoperate with all devices, storage and hosts.
Complexity affects several areas
Management of environment Although a virtual storage infrastructure benefits from a single point of logical disk and replication service management, the physical storage must still be managed. Problem determination and fault isolation can also become complex, due to the abstraction layer.
Infrastructure design Traditional design ethics may no longer apply, virtualisation brings a whole range of new ideas and concepts to think about (as detailed here)
The software or device itself Some implementations are more complex to design and code - network based, especially in-band (symmetric) designs in particular — these implementations actually handle the I/O requests and so latency becomes an issue.
Meta-data management
Information is one of the most valuable assets in today's business environments and when virtualised, the meta-data are the glue in the middle. If the meta-data are lost so is all the actual data as it would be virtually impossible to reconstruct the logical drives without the mapping information.
Any implementation must ensure its protection with appropriate levels of back-ups and replicas. It is important to be able to reconstruct the meta-data in the event of a catastrophic failure.
The meta-data management also has implications on performance. Any virtualisation software or device must be able to keep all the copies of the meta-data atomic and quickly updateable. Some implementations restrict the ability to provide certain fast update functions, such as point-in-time copies and caching where super fast updates are required to ensure minimal latency to the actual I/O being performed.
Performance and scalability
In some implementations the performance of the physical storage can actually be improved, mainly due to caching. Caching however requires the visibility of the data contained within the I/O request and so is limited to in-band and symmetric virtualization software and devices. However these implementations also directly influence the latency of an I/O request (cache miss), due to the I/O having to flow through the software or device. Assuming the software or device is efficiently designed this impact should be minimal when compared with the latency associated with physical disk accesses.
Due to the nature of virtualisation, the mapping of logical to physical requires some processing power and lookup tables. Therefore every implementation will add some small amount of latency. In addition to response time concerns, throughput has to be considered. The bandwidth into and out of the meta-data lookup software directly impacts the available system bandwidth. In asymmetric implementations, where the meta-data lookup occurs before the information is read or written, bandwidth is less of a concern as the meta-data are a tiny fraction of the actual I/O size.
In-band, symmetric flow through designs are directly limited by their processing power and connectivity bandwidths.
Most implementations provide some form of scale-out model, where the inclusion of additional software or device instances provides increased scalability and potentially increased bandwidth. The performance and scalability characteristics are directly influenced by the chosen implementation.
Welcome to your ViFX Storage Workshop.
We are an award-winning, leading consulting and specialist services practice dedicated to virtualisation, network and data-storage technologies and solutions.
ViFX provides independent expert services to customers wanting to leverage, accelerate and realise the benefits of infrastructure and desktop virtualization and quality data-storage solutions.
Customers enjoy a comprehensive portfolio of assessment, design, implementation, management, support and cloud services from ViFX. Cost savings, risk mitigation, design & build quality and solution resiliency are just some of the benefits achieved from ViFX expertise, experience and pragmatic service delivery. Our business model is about ... Expertise, Experience & Execution!
We would welcome the opportunity to tell you more about how we can save you money and add value to your organisation.
ViFX is offering new customers a 2-3 hour onsite workshop to review the current state of your data-storage , discuss pragmatic and real-world strategies and options you should be considering today with the view to help you define your direction and
NB. This is a no charge service so we need your stakeholders to participate.
Ahead of the actual workshop you will be contacted by a ViFX consultant and you will need to complete a pre-workshop survey. The survey will afford ViFX consultants a solid knowledge of your environment in advance so that the workshop is value-driven from the “get-go”.
To qualify a ViFX Storage Workshop please complete the online form below and expect our contact.