Storage environment freedom, reduce costs, increase performance and resilience to your applications

By Paul Rummery, Securenet Consulting

Storage Virtualization Solution

You have no doubt heard of and are familiar with server and desktop virtualisation.

Storage virtualisation is enabled by software a management layer, creating independence from proprietary hardware controller chassis and disk arrays and specific manufacture of disks – fundamentally maximises the availability, performance and utilisation of disks in data centers large and small, significantly reduce costs.

These storage platform are fully supported by Citrix, Hyper-V and VMware platforms.

Storage virtualisation software provides the resilient, responsive and flexible infrastructure required to fulfil several major IT objectives.

1. Keep down expenditure costs, when faced with the high cost of folk lifting out existing or old equipment.

2. Staying within budget - Reduce and contain costs of Storage Infrastructures by 60%!

3. Re-use existing hardware investments

4. Unify multiple storage hardware vendor systems and services under one central platform

5. Reduce equipment, space, energy consumption, & administrative tasks

6. Dynamically respond to new workloads by spreading them across different models / configurations of hardware

7. Meet business continuity & disaster recovery objectives – no single point of failure. Keep users and applications running undisturbed despite the general storage upheaval occurring behind-the-scenes.

8. Not tied into any one manufacturer / no hardware vendor lockin

9. Improves performance through increased I/O read write caching (reduces need for expensive disks) and Load Balancing.

10.Overcome performance I/O bottlenecks and help applications go faster

11. Use it to manage on-premises storage or build a cloud storage infrastructure.

12. Tight integration with VMware

13. Faster & more intelligent data snapshot capabilities

14. 24x7 Technical Support

15. Centralise management of all your data storage assets - Protect and Control Your Storage Infrastructure Centrally

16. Clustering - Provide clustered servers with non-stop access to shared storage pools split between sites within a metropolitan area.

Typical Centralised Management Capabilities

Virtual Disk Pool
Sync Mirroring (High Availability)
High Speed Caching
Auto Tiering
Load Balancing
Thin Provisioning
RAID Stripping
Virtual Disk Migration
Online Snapshots
Continuous Data Protection
Asynchronous Remote Replication

The storage hypervisor forms a transparent, scalable virtualisation layer across your storage infrastructure in order to enhance its capabilities and centralise its management. The many nuances that distinguish one model or brand of storage from another and render them mutually incompatible no longer stand in the way of using them together. Essentially, the hypervisor federates dispersed resources to:

a) maximise their combined value,

b) to overcome device-specific differences and

c) provide higher levels of service than the devices can offer individually.

This document will outline how implementing the storage hypervisor solution provides scalable and highly available storage, no matter what size the requirement, but it shall also demonstrate the key reasons for IT professionals choosing this solution over other technologies. Typically those reasons are that it is flexible, proven and with recognised performance benefits.

Storage hypervisors maximises the availability, performance and utilisation of disks in data centers large and small. Use it to manage on-premises storage or build a cloud storage infrastructure.

You have complete freedom to select the storage devices that make up your physical or cloud storage pool; mixing and matching as you see fit, even migrating between old and new in the background. Hypervisors work with all the popular models and brands of disk devices, allowing you to strike a balance between high-speed, premium-priced resources and lower cost, higher capacity gear.

It’s common and advisable to split the overall disk capacity evenly between a pair of hypervisor host nodes for high-availability and load balancing. The software accepts direct-attached storage (DAS), SAN arrays and solid state disks / flash cards with equal ease, connecting to them via any of the standard disk interfaces (SATA, SAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.,).

Summary overview of a basic storage hypervisor architecture.

The hypervisor, which is software that will turn a standard Windows server, is turned into an intelligent, powerful and resilient storage array controller. The recommended solution includes two host servers at your primary site, Auto Failover option will ensure the solution will be highly available, providing synchronously mirrored copies of data between the host servers, with Snapshot for improved back up. Additional resilience is ensured using an Asynchronous IP Mirror to a third host server for Disaster Recovery at your DR site. Using this technology, you can further utilise the AIM to replicate data from any further remote locations around the country to a centralised datacentre and this can be discussed in greater detail should it be required.

Flexibility - The flexibility hypervisor will allow you to share data from servers, irrespective of the operating system, in this case VMware and Windows. Should AIX, Unix, Linux, Mac or Sun servers etc. be deployed then these can also be part of the solution. Likewise they are designed to work within Fibre Channel and iSCSI, both at the same time if necessary. As with the disk. SSD, SAS, SCSI, SATA, Fibre Channel or a mixture are common in a deployment.

Scalable – can be scaled to manage up to 128TB disk in a highly available enterprise design, using synchronous mirroring across a campus and asynchronous IP replication for disaster recovery to a third site. Likewise could be employed to serve up a small amount of disk to just a few applications in a single server environment.

Growth – Instead of buying disk bays in advance, the solution offers storage on demand. Disk is purchased and added when it is required. It is storage on demand, without vendor lock-in.

Performance – Hypervisor solutions are chosen by many customers as it provides increased performance over traditional arrays. The Storage Performance Council tests prove the solution to be the fastest available storage, for its price.

Cost – The hypervisor is software that resides on standard Windows servers, the cost is typically a fraction of that charged for a traditional array. Likewise upgrading the hardware on a standard server is less costly than a proprietary storage array, even though the technology is similar.

Compromise – There is no need to compromise business needs against the cost of deploying a fully highly available storage solution. Time again we find organisations who have invested in a single traditional array because costs have made buying a second array prohibitive. Irrespective of any built in resilience a manufacturer may have built into their storage, a single array remains a single point of failure. The hypervisor solution will allow you the ability to deploy two storage servers with the resilience needed, today.

Open - Storage does NOT need to be identical for mirroring

Upgrades - Host Independents means only need to work with storage nodes. Upgrades are in one place not many. High availability means no downtime needed to hosts when upgrading.

Legacy protection - (and future legacy protection). Can re-use existing storage and mirror it to new storage allowing tiered storage solution as customer moves forward. Data migration is very simple as customer can choose any storage.

Proven – software has been used for over 11 years in the real world. Resilience against other components has been re-enforced over the years to provide a very robust solution.

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WANT TO LEARN MORE? Contact Securenet Consulting

SecureNet Consulting provide the following services to help you realise the storage hypervisor solution.

Storage Planning Assessment - assess you networks performance, need to identify the most suitable configuration for your environment.

Software & Hardware Procurement

Engineering & Support Services - for implementation and on-going technical support.