Around The Block Blog

by Justin Braun, Manager, Microsoft & Virtualization Solutions, Dell Compellent — February 28, 2008

This morning, the launch kicked off with retired NBC Nightly News anchor, Tom Brokaw, addressing attendees about the role technology plays in our lives and the dependency on IT in most things we do. Brokaw then introduced Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

Ballmer discussed the concept of “Dynamic IT” where you enable and provide agility through new technology. Dynamic IT is seen as an overall strategic business asset versus just a cost center. Microsoft continues to focus on industry trends like software and services, developing for openness, the rich user experience, and virtualization. Microsoft sees virtualization as still being in its early stages in the industry and according to Ballmer, less than 10% of the world’s servers are virtualized.

Windows® Server 2008 has been a long time coming, but now that it’s here, let’s talk about some examples of the interoperability between Windows® Server 2008 and the Compellent Storage Center SAN:

Certified for Windows® Server 2008
The Compellent Storage Center 4.0 carries the “Certified for Windows® Server 2008” qualification on both the 32-bit and 64-bit platform. You can find us in the Windows® Server Catalog.

No Server Agents
We don’t require any special drivers to use our storage in a Microsoft environment. Connect your server via your Fibre Channel or iSCSI infrastructure to the Compellent Storage Center and within a few minutes you're ready to go.

Thin Provisioning
With the thin provisioning capabilities of Dynamic Capacity™ technology we don't need to pre-allocate space for volumes or Replays (snapshots). With Windows® Server 2008, the standard installation will consume around 6GB of disk space. The recommended volume size for a boot volume is now 40GB for Windows Server 2008. You shouldn't have to consume all that space before the data is written. You can extend those capabilities by creating a “gold” image of your Windows build, take a Replay then use the Replay for the boot volumes in your environment.

Remember, on the Compellent Storage Center Replays only consume space for the deltas—that is, the changes between the snapshot and any new data that is written. With Dynamic Capacity™ and Data Progression™ (automated tiered storage), you can cut your disk space utilization and costs drastically in your Windows environment.

by Larry Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer (retired), Dell Compellent — February 05, 2008

Today’s the first day of the Green Grid Technical Forum conference (Compellent is a member), so it’s appropriate to think about how companies can reduce data center costs while also reducing the carbon footprint of their data centers. Through some new ways of thinking about storage you can reduce the overall number of disks needed and reduce physical space needed. That might sound odd coming from a co-founder of a SAN company—after all I’m rewarded for the amount of storage systems our company sells—but reducing your storage usage is the best, long-term approach to the problems many businesses are facing now.

So what’s the recipe for an energy efficient SAN? Here are five key ingredients:

1. Thin provisioning – It’s a must have for a cost-effective, “green” data center. Remember, by increasing the amount of utilization—the percentage of the drive that’s taken up by actual data, not just allocated space—you’re going to lower the number of overall drives required. You’re no longer pre-allocating storage capacity to volumes before that capacity is used.
2. Automated tiered storage – Distributing data across a combination of disks by continually tracking usage and automatically moving data between tiers based on predefined rules and frequency of access. By automatically moving infrequently used data from tier 1 storage, which is almost always power-hogging 15K RPM Fibre Channel drives to energy-efficient, higher-capacity SATA storage, you can greatly reduce the number of high-energy drives. And as a result, cut down on the cost of powering your storage system.
3. Storage virtualization – You need to merge all your disks into a single pool of storage, allowing any volume to use all disk drives simultaneously to access data. That way, you can separate applications from physical storage devices to get the same performance with fewer drives compared to a non-virtualized storage environment.
4. Boot from SAN – By putting an OS boot volume on a SAN rather than on the server, you don’t need internal server disks. You can rack up diskless blade servers to save space, power, cooling, and cabling costs. You could save thousands of dollars per server by going diskless, too. But beware the fine print. Not all boot-from-SAN solutions are equal. Make sure that you don’t need third party agents or apps (which means internal server disks!) to point your servers to the “gold image” stored on the SAN.
5. Continuous snapshots – Using a multi-tiered storage system lets you store read-only data such as snapshots on cheap disks. Some snapshot technologies are more space-efficient than others—with pointers to changed data instead of mirrored data. That way, when a snapshot is taken, the storage within that volume becomes read-only, so that it doesn’t need to be written again. That means instead of RAID 10, you can use RAID 5 and save yourself some drives, and just as important, use less power and cooling than the RAID 10 configuration for active, read-write data.

Like I said yesterday real estate is a prime commodity and many businesses don’t have space to spare for larger data centers. If your IT initiative for 2008 is to reduce the number of disk drives required—and therefore reduce the amount of space and energy you’re consuming—take a look around at the innovative technology available today. I don’t believe we need to compromise data storage functionality for energy efficiency, any more than we’d compromise our favorite family recipe—we're just updating it. Let me know if you agree there is such a thing as an energy efficient SAN. In a future post, I’ll analyze the positive impact on disk drive and energy usage using the above storage technologies in a data center.