分类： 服务器与存储
2007-06-20 10:34:40
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are adopting iSCSI SANs for many different reasons. Some organizations buy iSCSI technology for its ease-of-use relative to complex Fibre Channel SANs. Others dabble in IP storage as a way to build out a tiered storage architecture.
Regardless of how the technology is applied,
SMBs need to squeeze as much value as they can out of every storage
dollar. The majority of SMBs cite cost as one of most important factors
in their buying decision, and most smaller companies rely heavily on
advice from their peers and partners to aid them in the evaluation
process. Despite some small bumps in the road, the SMBs profiled in
these case studies have each found that choosing an iSCSI SAN has
proved to be a cost-effective decision.
“We manage all of the city’s technology. If it has an on-off switch it’s ours, and over the past year the number of applications we’re supporting has grown dramatically,” says Arias.
Arias didn’t take the bait when major vendors began dangling pricey Fibre Channel solutions in front of him. “We told the vendors that we needed something stable that can support SQL Server, but nobody could give me a straight answer as to why iSCSI was not going to be good enough,” he says.
That’s when Arias went the route of many SMBs and tapped his peers for advice. “We talked to other government organizations with much larger IT environments than ours that were running the same applications as we were. They were doing it with iSCSI. That’s when I realized I didn’t need to spend a million dollars,” he says.
The City chose Siafu Software’s Swarm IP SAN appliances, beginning with a 30-day evaluation. Test driving iSCSI SANs is a critical step in the evaluation process, according to Arias.
“If you’re going to buy an iSCSI SAN you have to try it out to see what the administration is like and make sure it will do everything you need it to down the road,” he adds.
The City’s Siafu Swarm 3000 IP Storage Appliance provides 3.25TB to 6.5TB of RAID 6-protected networked storage and supports VSS-integrated snapshots and disk-to-disk and disk-to-disk-to-tape backup. Swarm 3000 systems also come in high-availability configurations.
One of the arguments against iSCSI SANs is latency, but user adoption seems to be on the rise now that IP SAN technology has been fine-tuned for reliability and speed.
“It was always said that iSCSI was not mature enough or ready for prime time. Last year, I think it finally came into its own,” says Chris Simms, a network administrator at Clayton County Water Authority, in Morrow, GA.
The Clayton County Water Authority’s storage requirements are increasing due, in no small part, to a document management system based on EMC/Legato’s AppXtender product. The document management solution accounts for almost 1TB of storage by itself and doubled the Water Authority’s backup workload overnight.
With a careful eye on the price tag, Simms put out some feelers for SAN solutions. Much like the City of Sunny Isles Beach’s Arias, Simms relied on his peers for advice early in the evaluation process.
“I went to the Georgia Department of Transportation for a site visit. Their environment is larger than ours and I wanted to see the technology work,” says Simms.
He then worked with VeriStor Systems, a systems integrator based in Duluth, GA, to migrate from a direct-attached storage (DAS) to an iSCSI SAN environment.
“Fibre Channel just did not jibe with me because of its innate complexity and the hardware buy-in,” says Simms. “iSCSI is more basic. If you go into iSCSI do you really need a storage expert? Why re-invent the wheel? We’re not very I/O-intensive right now, and iSCSI fits with what we’re doing.”
Simms opted for a pair of PS300E iSCSI SAN systems from EqualLogic. The PS300E systems feature 7TB of capacity using 500GB, 7,200rpm SATA-II drives. Simms has one box running at the Water Authority headquarters and another off-site for disaster-recovery purposes.
Other features of EqualLogic’s PS300E include dual controllers (each with 64-bit dual-core RISC processors), support for RAID 5/10/50, automatic volume replication and load balancing, and multi-path I/O. EqualLogic claims performance of up to 60,000 I/Os per second and 300MBps throughput.
It is not always a Fibre Channel-versus-iSCSI argument in SMB environments. Implementing iSCSI SANs as a complement to a Fibre Channel network is an ideal solution for tiered storage architectures for some users.
Andrew Collins is a network engineer for the Denton Independent School District, based in Dallas-Fort Worth. Collins has a team of three administrators supporting 26 campuses, more than 19,000 students, and a total of 100 servers, some of which are attached to the district’s primary storage pool on a 10TB Xiotech Magnitude 3D Fibre Channel SAN array.
The Magnitude 3D supports critical applications such as e-mail and frequently accessed home drives, but data growth in other areas prompted Collins to look for low-cost alternatives to Fibre Channel.
“Fibre Channel storage is rather expensive,” says Collins. “There are a lot of users in our school district that need large amounts of storage space, but not necessarily expensive storage space.”
For example, the district’s high school students generate a large number of multimedia files on a daily basis. That’s why Collins brought in the Magnitude 3D’s little brother-the Magnitude 750-an entry-level iSCSI virtual storage system.
The Magnitude 750 delivers up to 12TB of capacity sharable by up to 24 application servers, all in a 3U rack-mountable chassis. It was a no-brainer for the district. The Magnitude 750 is built on the same architecture as its Fibre Channel counterpart.
“They are siblings in terms of the information that’s stored on both of the arrays. Both support mapped network drives for our users, but the Magnitude 750 hosts our media drives,” says Collins.
Collins was evaluating NAS and DAS solutions from multiple vendors, but none seemed to fit his cost, capacity, and scalability requirements. “Cost and scalability are important for us. The infrastructure was already in place for an iSCSI implementation because the servers we have all include dual Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards. They were ready to go for this type of application,” Collins explains.
Setting up a tiered architecture using iSCSI can also be accomplished by reclaiming existing Ethernet-based DAS.
Web services firm eFashion Solutions develops and maintains e-commerce solutions for a “who’s-who” list of fashion designers and photographers. eFashion administrates Websites, takes and fulfills orders, and provides customer service for fashionistas across the globe from New York to Tokyo. (The company also runs a Website called Shopelvis.com.)
“We have a photo studio on the premises. Digital pictures take up a lot of room and we were running out of space and trying to keep a handle on what we had,” says Daniel Falcone, eFashion’s senior network administrator. Falcone is responsible for eFashion’s day-to-day IT operations, as well as budgeting, planning, and implementation of IT projects.
“A lot of small businesses in my situation go out and look for the resources they need to do something. But if you go to a SAN specialist, they will sell you a SAN. To a carpenter, everything’s a nail,” says Falcone.
For Falcone, the key to choosing and buying a storage solution was to understand the differences between SAN environments, whether they be hardware- or software-based. “You have to look beyond the acronyms and understand the concepts behind the products you’re buying. The result is to make sure the products meet the specifications of what your business needs,” he says.
Falcone is taking a relatively new approach toward meeting those needs with QLogic’s SANbox iSR6142 iSCSI multi-protocol router, which supports both Fibre Channel (including FCP-SCSI and FCIP) and Ethernet/iSCSI (10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet).
eFashion is using QLogic’s SANbox 6142 as a bridge between its existing Fibre Channel storage and its Ethernet-based server storage to create a tiered storage architecture.
Falcone says his high-performance applications, including databases, are supported directly by Fibre Channel storage, while the iSCSI links serve lower-performance application needs, such as storing digital media and pictures.
QLogic’s SANbox iSR6142 Series multi-protocol routers allow users to connect remote servers over iSCSI to Fibre Channel-based disk and tape storage for consolidation and migration from DAS to SAN configurations.
Used in pairs, SANbox 6000 routers can also provide Gigabit Ethernet connectivity between Fibre Channel SAN islands, facilitating disaster recovery and other long-distance applications.
“It gives us the flexibility to expand our iSCSI array cost-effectively so that we’re not locked into buying all Fibre Channel storage,” says Falcone.
Part 2 of this series will run in the February issue of InfoStor.
InfoStor January, 2007
When it comes to networked storage, total cost sits atop the list of buying criteria for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), followed closely by simplicity, product support, and, in some cases, the physical size of the solution, as shown in the following case studies.
Although he doesn’t suit up for games, Tod
Caflisch is part of the team when it comes to helping the San Antonio
Spurs in their chase for the NBA title.
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“Keeping the players and the team together is the number-one priority for the organization, but everywhere I can save a dollar really helps the success of the team. My contribution is to be as efficient as I can by keeping IT costs as low as possible,” says Caflisch, who is director of IT for the San Antonio Spurs, and Spurs Sports & Entertainment.
That’s why Fibre Channel storage was out of the running in the first round of his evaluation process for a new storage solution.
“What knocked Fibre Channel out was the sheer cost,” says Caflisch. “It would be nice to have a big, fast system and just press the start button and walk away, but we have an obligation of fiscal responsibility to our ownership group.”
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The Spurs’ franchise depends on Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, and applications such as ADP payroll and a Bortz sports inventory management application to maintain fan, player, and ticketing data. This means backups are critical to the franchise’s administrative success.
A little less than two years ago, the Spurs began looking for an up-to-date storage solution that was easy to manage and could accommodate moderate data growth. At that time, Caflisch was managing a collection of Windows file servers and DLT tape libraries. “It was taking us 12 hours to back up our e-mail server, and a complete backup was taking the course of a weekend to complete,” he says.
After talking to some of his peers, Caflisch decided on an iSCSI-based IP SAN solution based on hardware and software from StoneFly, a subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory (DNF). The configuration includes the StoneFly Backup Advantage (SBA) disk-to-disk (D2D) backup package.
The IP SAN and D2D backup solution slashed backup times from two days to about three hours and reduced restore time to a matter of minutes. (The previous approach relied on DLT tape drives and Veritas Backup Exec software.) The Spurs use CommVault’s Galaxy backup software in conjunction with StoneFly’s D2D configuration.
Whether you’re an NBA franchise or a small school, real estate in the data center is at a premium. But some small organizations have to be even more conscious of the size of their IT footprint. This is especially true when your data center is confined to a closet in a kindergarten classroom.
Charles Love is the director of IT for St. John’s Episcopal School in Tampa, FL, and space in the school’s “server room” was a top consideration when it came time to deploy additional storage to support Microsoft Exchange and file-serving applications.
Given its size, St. John’s relies on a lot of donated equipment to meet its IT needs, and its 200GB of data was in one proverbial basket. “Everything was stored on server disk. Our storage isn’t growing out of control, but we were getting low on space,” says Love.
Fibre Channel was out of the running for the obvious reasons. “One was cost, and two was size. Fibre Channel arrays alone usually take up four-to-five units of rack space,” explains Love.
St. John’s purchased a Hewlett-Packard All-in-One (AiO) disk array, which is designed for managing storage in Microsoft environments and includes point-and-click tools for working with Exchange and SQL Server. The AiO, which is about the size of a pizza box, also includes a full version of HP’s StorageWorks Data Protector Express Software for backup and recovery.
HP’s AiO systems are based on Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 and Serial ATA (SATA) and/or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives and support iSCSI and NAS (CIFS and NFS)
In addition to low cost, Love also based his decision on system management functionality. “The system has proven to be an extremely simple, low-cost solution to help us manage our growing storage needs,” says Love.
Drive about two hours north of St. John’s, and you will find that the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, located on the campus at the University of Florida in Gainesville, is also using iSCSI SAN technology to support its critical applications.
“We’re a relatively small museum, but we were experiencing growing pains,” says Dwight Bailey, the museum’s director of technology.
The museum features paintings, sculpture, and photographic works from across Asia and Africa and plans to digitize its collections in the future. When Bailey began researching his storage options, his goal was to find a solution that would solve his current capacity issues and meet his long-term storage requirements.
“We considered Fibre Channel, but did not see a reason to evaluate it because it meant purchasing additional products right off the bat and increasing the overall cost of the solution,” says Bailey.
In addition, upgrading his existing network and hardware to accommodate Fibre Channel was not an appealing prospect.
The museum opted for EMC’s Clariion AX150i iSCSI storage platform. The AX150i includes up to 12 SATA drives (250GB or 500GB) in a 2U rack-mountable enclosure. A single AX150i array provides capacities up to 6TB.
Bailey suggests potential users take the time to evaluate all of their software options when they are buying into the world of iSCSI-based IP SANs. “Thoroughly evaluate the software and make sure it will work for the long term. Some of the complimentary software that comes with the hardware, or is available as an add-on, can facilitate your business,” says Bailey. “And test the software before you buy so you see if it’s powerful enough and whether it meets your business needs.”
One tool Bailey finds helpful for capacity planning and developing future storage strategies is EMC’s VisualSRM, a monitoring and reporting application that helps track capacity utilization rates and provides details about data at the file level.
“Using VisualSRM helps us account for how the unit is being used,” says Bailey.
The Samuel P. Harn Museum is now looking ahead to using more software features, such as replication and virtualization services.
InfoStor February, 2007