Around The Block Blog
by Ryan Sclanders, Infrastructure Manager, Credit Market Analysis — March 08, 2010
We are really excited to be ahead of the wave as one of Compellent's first EMEA customers to be part of its new Fluid Data strategy.
Financial institutions across the world depend upon our products and services 24/7. In a $34 trillion market, our clients rely on our pricing data to enhance their ability to manage risk, value their portfolios and understand market trends and themes.
The pressure is therefore on to make sure all of our IT solutions can support us and our clients. Compellent offers a combination of virtualisation and Fluid Data infrastructure, which made it an ideal choice. Not only is it easy to use, but its intelligent automated tiered storage allows the data to flow up and down the tiers. This reduces management costs, avoids unnecessary disk purchases and minimises power costs.
Editor’s Note: Ryan Sclanders of CMA is a Compellent customer and the contributor of this blog post. To learn more about CMA and their use of Compellent systems, watch this video and read this case study.
by Bruce Kornfeld, Vice President of Marketing — February 22, 2010
Last week NetApp’s Tom Georgens said the concept of automated tiered storage is “dying” and his comments were reported on The Register and Storage Soup from SearchStorage.
The only thing that's dying in storage is static data and the belief that the same old storage systems are intelligent enough to sort and store ever-increasing amounts of data in a budget-constrained world. Any vendor who believes that automated data movement is not the future of storage either misunderstands where the industry is headed, or simply can’t offer this feature in their portfolio. For some vendors, automated tiered storage is hard to deliver but most acknowledge that it is becoming a core requirement – just look at EMC’s recent intentions with FAST.
Typically, entire volumes of data need to be moved, which is time consuming and could cause application interruptions or slow-downs. When automated tiered storage is done inside the volume at the block level, there is no disruption to applications and admins don't even have to think about it. The fact is, if data isn’t being actively used or accessed by applications, why would anyone keep it on expensive storage if they don’t have to?
We believe this is a waste of scarce resources that could be better used. Furthermore, solving customers performance needs with very expensive cache is a throwback to the way things were done in the '80s and '90s and is a never-ending proposition for users—once you start you just can't stop. IT departments can't afford to manage data that way anymore.
Compellent’s Fluid Data storage enables automated tiering at a granular level between any drive technology, speed and even RAID level and we’ve been delivering this capability for over 5 years. We move all the inactive blocks of data to the lowest cost tier possible and free up the performance tiers to handle the active data. Shifting data between SSD, FC, SATA, and SAS works quietly and unobtrusively in the background. Our customers love our “set it and forget it approach” and 80 percent of their upgrade orders are for the slowest spinning, low-cost SATA or SAS drives. That’s why automated tiering has proven popular – because it saves customers a lot on disk drives, space and power costs. The fact that most large, legacy storage vendors are now introducing their own solutions only validate that customers are asking for automated tiered storage. Automatic tiering is one party no storage vendor can afford to miss.
by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — February 01, 2010
This is in followup to my post on performance considerations for automated tiered storage. In a recent blog, Martin Glassborow @storagebod posed some good questions about how admins can stay ahead of data loss in a tiered storage environment. He asked for vendor feedback, so this is Compellent’s.
In a Compellent storage system, customers can specify the volumes that get automatically tiered, so you know what applications are tiered and which ones aren’t. A customer may even choose to “lock” an application/volume to a single tier for a specific business reason.
In a tiered environment, or any for that matter, we also recommend clustering controllers for load balancing and failover (the Compellent controllers don’t have to be the same model so you can cluster a 1st generation controller from 2004 with a currently shipping controller).
In case of physical disk failure, our PhoneHome proactive monitoring will alert both the customer and Compellent Copilot team. Often, a new drive is dispatched before the customer is even aware there’s a problem. In the meantime, hot spares can be used for rebuild. Because with thin provisioning we only use up space when data is written, generally rebuild times are faster than for those drives with a bunch of zeros written to them (ie. In SANs using RAID ranks and groups).
In case of data loss, admins can also roll back to locally stored replays (pointer based snapshots) to quickly recover a volume without having to declare a DR scenario. If it’s a physical server issue – say a power supply conks out - customers can use replays in conjunction with boot from SAN to quickly boot and configure a bare-metal standby server with an image centrally stored on the SAN, and mount the volume to the new server. The administration for the entire process can be handled in several ways – via click-through menus from the Storage Center GUI, scripting using PowerShell cmdlets for Windows servers, or the command utility.
If you do have to declare a DR scenario, you can use Enterprise Manager software to initiate failover to replicated volumes stored at the DR SAN site. Enterprise Manager can be accessed remotely and can used to manage replication between multiple sites. Within Compellent’s environment, a production SAN with automated tiered storage can replicate to a secondary site that’s configured as a single or multiple tiers of completely different storage type, RAID level and speed. This lowers the overall cost of replication and DR because you don’t need a copy-exact config between the two sites to do replication. Some customers want the DR SAN to be a full production site for business continuity purposes so may deploy automated tiered storage at the second site too. Then you can revert back to the primary SAN after you’ve resolved whatever issues caused you to declare a disaster. Enterprise Manager also provides dashboards and reports so admins can monitor capacity utilization by volume, RAID level, disk type and business unit, and the status of the tiered or untiered storage at any site.
A lot of buzz is being generated about automated tiered storage but what’s most important is to think about tiered storage as an integrated part of a Fluid Data environment. What other aspects of automated tiered storage are you thinking about?