Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – NEC

July 16th, 2010 by jason No comments »

It’s the last presentation of the day and the last presentation overall for Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Seattle.  We’ve made a short journey from the Microsoft store in Redmond, WA to to NEC in Bellevue.  Anyone who knows the NEC brand is aware of their diverse portfolio of products and perhaps their services.  Today’s discussion, however, will focus on Storage Solutions.

First a bit of background information on NEC as a corporation:

  • Founded in 1899
  • 142,000 employees
  • 50,000 patents worldwide

Storage. NEC opened up with some of today’s storage challenges faced by many.  Enter HYDRAstor, a two-tier grid architecture comprised of the following key building blocks:

  • Accelerator nodes – Deliver linear performance scalability for backup and archive.
  • Storage nodes – Deliver non-disruptive capacity scalability from terabytes to petabytes.
  • Standard configurations are delivered with a ratio of 1 Accelerator node for every 2 Storage node – ie.:
    • HS8-2004R = 2AN + 4SN = 24TB-48TB Raw
    • HS8-2010R = 5AN = 10SN = 120TB Raw
    • HS8-2020R = 10AN+20SN = 240TB
    • HS8-2110R = 55AN+110SN = 1.3PB Raw

HYDRAstor delivers the following industry standard benefits:

  • Scalability – Non disruptive independent linear scaling of capacity and performance; concurrent multiple generations of compute and storage technology.
  • Self evolving – Automated load balancing and incorporation of new technology reduces application downtime and data outages.
  • Cost efficiency – Reduce storage consumption by 95% or more with superior data deduplication. Ever “green” evolution of energy savings features.
  • Resiliency – Greater protection than RAID witih less overhead.
  • Manageability – No data migration, zero data provisioning, self-managing storage; single platform for multiple data types, formats and quality of service needs.

A few of other key selling points about HYDRAstor:

  • Global Data Deduplication of backup and archive data is achieved during ingest by combining DataRedux with grid storage architecture.  Dedupe of 20% to 50% across all datasets.
  • Distributed Resilient Data (DRD) technology drives data protection beyond what RAID protection offers with less overhead.  At its native configuration, user data is protected against up to three simultaneous disk or node failures.  This equates to 150% greater resiliency than RAID6 and 300% greater resiliency than RAID5 with less storage overhead and no performance degradtion during rebuild and leveling processes.
  • Turnkey delivery.  According to the brochure, HYDRAstor can be installed and performing backup or archive in less than 45 minutes.  I’m not sure what the point of this proclaimation is other than it will most likely be purchased in a pre-racked, cabled, and hopefully configured state.  When I think about deploying enterprise storage, it’s not something I contemplate performing end to end over my lunch hour.

I know some of the other delegates were really excited about HYDRAstor and its enabling technologies.  Sorry NEC, I wasn’t feeling it.  HYDRAstor’s approach seems to consume more rack space than the competition, more cabling, and based on today’s lab walkthru, more cooling.

IMG00778-20100716-1554

Note : Tech Field Day is a sponsored event. Although I receive no direct compensation and take personal leave to attend, all event expenses are paid by the sponsors through Gestalt IT Media LLC. No editorial control is exerted over me and I write what I want, if I want, when I want, and how I want.

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Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – Compellent

July 16th, 2010 by jason No comments »

Gestalt IT Tech Field Day 2 begins with Compellent, a storage vendor out of Eden Prairie, MN.  Compellent has been around for about eight years and, like other well known multiprotocol SAN vendors, offers spindles of FC, SATA, SAS, and SSD via FC block, iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS.

Compellent’s hardware approach is a modular one.  Many of the components, such as drives and interfaces (Ethernet, FC, etc.), are easily replacable and hot swappable, eliminating the need to “rip and replace” the entire frame of hardware and providing the ability to upgrade components without taking down the array.

In April of 2010, Compellent introduced the new zNAS solution:

Compellent introduces the new zNAS solution, which consolidates file and block storage on a single, intelligent platform. The latest unified storage offering from Compellent integrates next-generation ZFS software, high-performance hardware and Fluid Data architecture to actively manage and move data in a virtual pool of storage, regardless of the size and type of block, file or drive. Enterprises can simplify management, intelligently scale capacity, improve performance for critical applications and reduce complexity and costs.

Fluid Data Storage is Compellent’s granular approach to data management

  • Virtualization
  • Intelligence
  • Automation
  • Utilization

Volume Creation

Volume Recovery

Volume Management

Integration 

  • VMware
    • Leveraging many of the features mentioned above
    • HCL compatibility although I don’t see ESXi in the list which would be a major concern for VMware customers given that ESX is being phased out.  Compellent responded they believe their arrays are compatible with ESXi and will look into updating their VMware support page if that is the case.  VMware’s HCL also shows Compellent storage is not currently certified for ESXi. Significant correction to the earlier statement: VMware’s HCL for storage is inconsistently different than it’s HCL for host hardware in that the host hardware HCL lists explicit compatiblity for both ESX and ESXi, whereas the storage HCL explicitly lists ESX compatibility which implies equivilent ESXi compatibility. Compellent arrays, as of this writing, are both ESX4 and ESXi4 compatible.
  • Microsoft
    • PowerShell (for automation and consistency of storage management)
    • Hyper-V

Compellent performed a live demo of their Replay (Snapshot) feature with a LUN presented to a Windows host.  It worked slick and as expected. Compellent’s Windows based storage management UI has a fresh, no-nonsense, 21st century feel to it which I can appreciate.

We closed discussion answering the question “Why Compellent?”  Top Reasons:

  1. Efficiency
  2. Long term ROI, cost savings through the upgrade model
  3. Ease of use

Follow them on Twitter at @Compellent.

Thank you Compellent for the presentation and I’m sure I’ll see you back in Minnesota!

Note : Tech Field Day is a sponsored event. Although I receive no direct compensation and take personal leave to attend, all event expenses are paid by the sponsors through Gestalt IT Media LLC. No editorial control is exerted over me and I write what I want, if I want, when I want, and how I want.

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Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – F5

July 15th, 2010 by jason No comments »

 

IMG00745-20100715-1434

 

We’re on to our 3rd and final presentation here at Gestalt IT Tech Field Day.  After a short road trip into beautiful downtown Seattle, we’ve arrived at F5.  At 1,800 employees strong, F5 was named one of the best places to work in the Seattle area.  From a high level, F5’s business goal is to optimize the end user experience.

Today, F5 showed us simulated long distance vMotion.  F5 enables this with mid-range BIG-IP appliances stretching a Layer 2 network between two geographically disbursed datacenters along with providing WAN Optimization to access IP based storage between datacenters.  In addition, the hardware appliances expose APIs which VMware Orchestrator uses to assist the F5 into directing traffic between sites.  F5 has tested at up to 300ms round trip latency and a 10Mbps link.  This is what it looks like:

 7-15-2010 4-02-32 PM

Another thing I learned today is that just a few months ago, in March 2010, F5 released the BIG-IP LTM VE.  This is a virtual appliance that falls in the BIG-F5 family of products.  Today that appliance is supported on only one virtualization platform and it should come as no surprise that the hypervisor of choice is VMware.

BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM) Virtual Edition (VE) takes your Application Delivery Network virtual. You get the agility you need to create a mobile, scalable, and adaptable infrastructure for virtualized applications. And like physical BIG‑IP devices, BIG-IP LTM VE is a full proxy between users and application servers, providing a layer of abstraction that secures, optimizes, and load balances application traffic.

Speaking of F5 and VMware, Why would you want F5 for VMware vSphere?

•F5 Management Plug-In for VMware vSphere
The F5 Management Plug-in simplifies common BIG-IP LTM administrative tasks in a vSphere environment, reduces the risk of error and enables basic automation.

•Integration with vCenter Server
Respond automatically to changes in the infrastructure with seamless integration between VMware and F5.

•Increased VM density by up to 60 percent
Free up server resources by offloading CPU-intensive operations to achieve maximum utilization and consolidation.

•Long-distance vMotion
Enable fully automated long-distance VMotion and Storage VMotion events between data centers without downtime or user disruption. 

•Acceleration of VMotion and Storage VMotion
Accelerate VMotion events over the WAN up to 10x by compressing, deduplicating, and optimizing traffic.

•Other virtualization considerations with F5
File Virtualization
Infrastructure Virtualization
Server Virtualization

 •F5 and VMware Solution Guide

What about F5 and Cloud Benefits?

•Reduce Complexity
With a reusable framework of services that can be leveraged across static, dedicated servers as well as across multi-site cloud deployments, you immediately gain value that grows as your applications grow.

•Increased Control
By integrating traffic management, dynamic provisioning, access control, and management, you can more readily outsource the processing of applications and data without giving up ownership and control.

•Context Awareness
Having a complete picture of the user, network, application, and services gives you a unique ability to use context to determine how applications and data are delivered.

•Reduced Switching Costs
With a centrally controlled method of delivering applications and data, you can move resources anywhere at a moment’s notice without worrying about the capabilities of host locations.

This was a great session where I think I picked up the most information so far.  F5 is one of those technologies I see a lot in the datacenter but I’ve not worked intimately with.  I like their value-added integration with virtualization and adoption of a cloud vision.

Note : Tech Field Day is a sponsored event. Although I receive no direct compensation and take personal leave to attend, all event expenses are paid by the sponsors through Gestalt IT Media LLC. No editorial control is exerted over me and I write what I want, if I want, when I want, and how I want.

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Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – Nimble Storage

July 15th, 2010 by jason No comments »

7-15-2010 11-31-48 AMNext up at Gestalt IT Tech Field Day is Nimble Storage who comes out of stealth mode and officially launches today.  Nimble Storage provides a unique iSCSI storage platform by eliminating traditional backup windows using efficient snapshot technology coupled with high performance flash drives.  A handful of use cases have already been identified for both virtualized and bare metal OS and application platforms.  I’m baffled as to how much competitive room there is in the storage realm, particularly with giants like NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, and others.  I believe this is a compliment to each of the players as it takes incredibly bright minds and innovation to stake and maintain a claim.

The secret sauce is in Nimble’s CASL (pronounced “castle” Cache-Accelerated Sequential Layout) Architecture which can be thought of as a reincarnation of VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum’s Log-Structured File System.

  • Inline Compression
  • Large Adaptive Flash Cache
  • High-Capacity Disk Storage
  • Integrated Backup

Resulting advantages provided are:

  • Inline compression (2:1 – 4:1 ratio)
  • High performance
  • Low cost SATA disk stores both primary data as well as 90 day snapshot retention
  • WAN-efficient offsite replication for cost-effective DR
  • Storage and Backup Optimized for VMware/Microsoft environments
  • Benefits for Sharepoint, SQL, and Exchange as well

From the Nimble Storage website:

Storing, accessing, and protecting your data shouldn’t be so complicated and expensive. Nimble’s breakthrough CASL™ architecture combines flash memory with high-capacity disk to converge storage, backup, and disaster recovery for the first time. The bottom line: High-performance iSCSI storage, instant backups and restores, and full-featured disaster recovery — all in one cost-effective, easy-to-manage solution.

Benefits for VMware Deployments

•Dramatic VM Consolidation and Cost Reduction
Groundbreaking CASL architecture includes innovations that enable dramatic consolidation of Virtual Servers and desktops. The hybrid flash and low-cost HDD-based architecture deliver very high random performance for demanding workloads at very low cost. Built-in capacity optimization and block sharing capabilities provide large capacity savings for both flash and disk. The net result is a single array that can easily serve the performance and capacity requirements for hundreds of high performance virtual servers, dramatically reducing cost, rackspace, power, and management expense. Further consolidation and cost savings come from the built-in capacity optimized backup capability, which eliminates dedicated disk backup devices, while enabling 90 days of efficient backup.

•Backup and Restore VMs Instantly
Nimble arrays enable instant Hypervisor consistent backup and restore of datastores and VMs, while eliminating backup windows. Nimble Protection Manager integrates with vCenter APIs to simplify management of Hypervisor-consistent backups, replicas and restores for VMware environments by leveraging Nimble’s instant, capacity optimized array-based snapshots. This converged solution enables dramatically better RPOs and RTOs compared with traditional solutions.

•Automated, Fast Offsite Disaster Recovery
WAN-efficient replication and fast failover enable quick, cost effective disaster recovery. Combined with instant backup capabilities, this enables rapid restore and very granular recovery points in the event of a site disaster. The entire failover process can be automated via management tools such as VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) which leverages a Nimble SRA to control the storage level failover capabilities.

•Simplified Virtual Infrastructure Management
Using predefined ESX performance and data protection policies, storage for new datastores can be provisioned and protected in just three steps. The Nimble Protection Manager integrates with vCenter APIs to simplify management of Hypervisor-consistent backups, replicas and restores for VMware environments, by leveraging Nimble’s instant, capacity optimized array based snapshots. A vCenter plugin simplifies and accelerates the task of cloning datastore or VM templates, by leveraging Nimble’s instant, high space efficient zero copy clones.

Two 3U capacity offerings available, both of which are served by an identical configuration of Active/Passive controllers, large flash layer, multicore Intel Xeon processors, and 2x quad GbE NICs (10GbE ready and available soon):

  1. CS220: 9TB primary + 108TB backup
  2. CS240: 18TB primrary + 216TB backup

7-15-2010 1-24-01 PM

Follow them on Twitter at @NimbleStorage.

Introduction to Nimble Storage at Tech Field Day Seattle from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

Note : Tech Field Day is a sponsored event. Although I receive no direct compensation and take personal leave to attend, all event expenses are paid by the sponsors through Gestalt IT Media LLC. No editorial control is exerted over me and I write what I want, if I want, when I want, and how I want.

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Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – Veeam

July 15th, 2010 by jason No comments »

Gestalt IT Tech field Day – Day 1:  First on the agenda this morning is Veeam.  Their focus for today will be on Backup and Replication which is great because I was wanting more details on their SureBackup offering.  A quick introduction on some products and Veeam’s charter:

Free Products

  • Veeam FastSCP
  • Veeam Business View
  • Veeam Monitor Free Edition
  • Veeam Reporter Free Edition (announced today, available within 30 days)

Pay Products

  • Veeam Backup & Replication
  • Veeam Reporter
  • Veeam Monitor
  • nworks

The Veeam Product Strategy Alignment:

  1. Past and Present: VMware vSphere
  2. What’s next: Hyper-V

Today’s focus: Veeam Backup and Replication

Virtualization introduces a paradigm shift in our datacenter processes surrounding data protection and business continuation planning.  Traditional tools don’t fit any more.  Veeam provides the right tools for the virtualized datacenter.

Veeam has also introduced vPower: Virtualization-Powered Data Protection.  vPower is not a single product or technology in and of itself, it’s a suite of existing and new technologies.  What are the key components of vPower?  SureBackup, InstantRestore, and SmartCDP.  Let’s take a look in more detail:

  • Run a VM directly from a backup file
  • Automatically manager isolated virtual lab
  • Instant VM recovery
  • Universal application item recovery (U-AIR)
    • Wizard driven recovery for technologies such as MS AD, MS Exchange, and MS SQL
    • User directed item recovery from any application or database
  • Recovery verification
  • Rapid execution keeping RTO to a bare minimum

Veeam proceeded with a live lab demo using alpha code.  There was plenty of enthusiasm in the room from the delegates about the technology as it relates to virtualization.  The delegates revealed a strong foundation in virtualization concepts.  Generally speaking, this is cool and revolutionary technology, however, there were concerns expressed in a few areas:

  1. Networking:  How do we ensure an isolated lab environment to avoid the pitfalls of duplicate machine identities or unintentional routing on the network?
  2. Performance:  How well does the VM run which is tied to archive files?  Is there measurable, and more importantly, predictable overhead for common workload types?
  3. Understanding:  This data protection and recovery approach, while innovative, is nonetheless new. Is there a with an inherent learning curve for datacenter operators or administrators?  Enabled with a wizard driven interface, I’d argue no, not really.  So long as the product works as designed, should we care how it ticks?  Like Lab Manager or Willy Wonka, you don’t ask how it works, “it just does”.

Veeam already has solid products but it is clear they aren’t content with resting on their laurels.  They continue to push the envelope in backup, replication, and disaster recovery, making the lives of data administrators and lowering RTO.

Availability: Q3 2010 (VMworld launch?)

Note : Tech Field Day is a sponsored event. Although I receive no direct compensation and take personal leave to attend, all event expenses are paid by the sponsors through Gestalt IT Media LLC. No editorial control is exerted over me and I write what I want, if I want, when I want, and how I want.

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Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Seattle

July 15th, 2010 by jason No comments »

Gestalt IT was gracious enough to invite me back as a delegate for Tech Field Day Seattle which is happening… well… now, not to put too fine a point on it.  I’m really excited about this opportunity!  For the next two days, I’ll be at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA taking in vendor presentations and participating in peer discussions spanning a few different technology verticals. 

We kicked things off tonight with dinner, discussion, and door prizes at Cedarbrook Lodge in Seatac, WA.  There are a lot of new faces in this group of delegates.  I don’t know most of the guys but that makes for a great opportunity to meet new people and network.  In a word, Cedarbrook is gorgeous.  It has more of a resort feel to it than a hotel.  It’s too bad I won’t be spending more time here but the show must go on.

Tomorrow (Thursday), the other delegates and I will be meeting with Veeam, F5, and a stealth company which officially launches in our very presence tomorrow.  I’m familiar with most of Veeam’s offerings but as a virtualization guy, I’m hoping to see more about their SureBackup technology.  I’ve known of F5 for many years but just recently I’m seeing them push their way into the virtualization arena.  Just last week they have expressed interest in participating in the Minneapolis VMUG.  I’m anxious in seeing what value they bring to the virtualized datacenter.  We cap off the day with a party at the Museum of Flight which should be really cool.

Moving into Friday, we’ll hear from Compellent on what they have been up to in the storage arena and how they are doing things differently than other storage vendors such as EMC, NetApp, Hitachi, HP, IBM, 3PAR, Dell, FalconStor, Pillar, etc.  We’ll also be spending some time with NEC.  I’m real curious as to what they are going to present.  Talk about a diverse portfolio of products (as well as professional services).  Whatever it is, I’ll be looking for virtualization relevance.  Not only that, but will we see a landscape that continues to cater to cloud agility?  Cloud has picked up a lot of momentum.  It’s real.  Adopt, adapt, integrate, or get run over by it.  There may be one more vendor on Friday… that remains to be seen at this point.  We end Friday with dinner in the evening and then some of us will start our journey back home.

I’m looking forward to a couple of great days.

Note : Tech Field Day is a sponsored event. Although I receive no direct compensation and take personal leave to attend, all event expenses are paid by the sponsors through Gestalt IT Media LLC. No editorial control is exerted over me and I write what I want, if I want, when I want, and how I want.

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New VMware vCenter Lab Manager Video Tutorial Series

July 8th, 2010 by jason No comments »

VMware has started a new Lab Manager video series and has kicked things off by posting three inaugural videos:

  1. Lab Manager Introduction and Product Overview
  2. Organizations within vCenter Lab Manager
  3. Workspaces within vCenter Lab Manager

VMware states that the next videos in the series will be:

  • Managing Users and Groups within vCenter Lab Manager
  • Networking within vCenter Lab Manager

The videos are authored by Graham Daly who works for VMware out of the Cork, Ireland office.  The videos are short at well under 10 minutes each and provide introductory level information on Lab Manager components and administrative containers.  If you haven’t used Lab Manager before, it’s enough to get you curious.

KB article (1020915) is going to act as a central location or a “one-stop-shop” for tutorial style videos which will discuss and demonstrate the various different topics/aspects of the Lab Manager product. As new videos become available, they will be added to the article.

I haven’t seen any books to date on use of Lab Manager.  From a training and education standpoint, the Lab Manager installation guide and the Lab Manager user’s guide actually isn’t too bad.  Someone last night was looking for advice on Lab Manager training and I recommended printing these two .PDF documents out and sticking them in a 3-ring binder like I did.  You’ll be able to whip through them in a few hours as much of the content is repeated time and again in the user’s guide.  Beyond that, the best Lab Manager training is continuous use of the product.  As I stated last night, Lab Manager is a bit of a different animal, even for a VMware junkie (like me).

Boil down the complexity and black magic of the Lab Manager product by looking at it as a tiered application consisting of

  • virtual infrastructure (ESX(i) and vCenter, you know this already),
  • a web front end (that’s the Lab Manager server, which by the way runs great as a VM),
  • and a database (which also runs on the Lab Manager server and only on the Lab Manager server – yep, it’s local MS SQL Express, and yep, it has scaling and migration issues).

The Tomcat on Windows web interface is the front end where Lab Manager environments are built and managed.  The web interface sends tasks to the vCenter Server which in turn commands the ESX(i) hosts (ie. build this VM, register it, power it on, make a snapshot, now clone it, etc.)  State information and other configuration items are stored in the database.  For obvious reasons, the database and vCenter always need to be on the same page.  When they get of sync is where hell begins but I’ll save that discussion for a distant blog post entitled “Lab Manager: fun to build and play with, no fun to troubleshoot”. It’s a lot like Citrix Presentation Server in that respect.

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