Around The Block Blog
by Greg Scott, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Intel Corporation — November 17, 2010
Interest in cloud computing is growing rapidly as organizations look for new ways to reduce costs and increase the flexibility of IT. For businesses building a private, internal cloud or planning to offer external cloud services, implementing the right storage solution is essential for maximizing that flexibility. Companies need storage solutions that support an on-demand model, providing the right resources at the moment they are needed without excessive costs.
As the Intel Architecture Group and Intel IT showed in the “Cloud on Wheels” demo at Storage and Networking World in October, Compellent Fluid Data Storage provides a strong platform for cloud computing environments. The Compellent solution, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, offers a virtualized storage area network (SAN) with capabilities that deliver the cost-effective flexibility users expect from cloud environments.
Rapidly scaling capacity with thin provisioning
Like server virtualization, storage virtualization can play a key role in cloud computing. By pooling storage resources, a virtualized solution such as the Compellent SAN can help ensure that applications have the capacity and performance they need, when they need it.
Thin provisioning capabilities, which are integrated into the Compellent SAN, can help optimize capacity utilization within that virtualized environment. With thin provisioning, administrators no longer have to anticipate and pre-allocate storage capacity for each volume. Instead, they can create virtual volumes of any size—applications consume capacity only when data is written. Especially useful in cloud infrastructures, thin provisioning enables administrators to rapidly expand or shrink volumes as usage levels change without having to purchase additional arrays.
Sustaining performance and controlling costs with automated tiered storage
Building a multi-tiered cloud storage environment can help optimize storage performance while controlling costs. With a multi-tiered environment, organizations can take advantage of multiple drive types with varying performance levels. Frequently accessed data stays on high-performance drives, such as Intel® Solid-State Drives, while archival data is moved to more cost-effective drives, such as SATA drives.
With the Compellent SAN, data is written first to high-performance drives by default to ensure the best performance. Automated tiered storage capabilities then automatically migrate block-level data from one tier to another—or one RAID level to another within a tier—based on administrator-set policies. The migration process runs in the background without affecting data availability or application performance. Many organizations can move as much as 80 percent of data to cost-effective drives, helping them cut costs while delivering high performance to the “hot data” or critical data. The benefit, is that the tiering allows highly accessed data to be placed on the performance tier dynamically, without having to configure or provision the data specifically.
Intel Xeon processors help the Compellent platform deliver the intelligence for automated tiered storage. By combining outstanding compute performance with large I/O and memory bandwidth, Intel Xeon processors enable the Compellent controller to continuously collect information about data usage and perform automated data migration without a significant impact on storage performance.
Building a better cloud
Intel is committed to helping organizations capitalize on the vast potential for cloud computing. In addition to providing key technologies for cloud solutions, Intel has launched the Intel® Cloud Builder program to streamline the construction of cloud environments by sharing reference architectures and best practices. As Intel, Compellent, and other companies are already showing, optimizing cloud storage can go a long way toward maximizing the flexibility and cost benefits of cloud computing.
For more information
Editor's note: Greg Scott is a strategic initiatives manager at Intel Corporation who is contributing to the Intel storage strategy for cloud computing. Intel is one of Compellent's technology partners. To read more about the "Cloud on Wheels" demo, check out this press release and blog post.
by Shane Burton, Microsoft Product Specialist, Dell Compellent — November 09, 2010
On-premise private clouds are becoming more popular among the enterprises we work with. These enterprises are virtualizing their storage and server infrastructures to increase efficiency and flexibility while reducing costs. To quickly and effectively manage virtualized IT resources, leading technology vendors, including Compellent, are making it easy by integrating with the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Self-Service Portal 2.0 Toolkit, a free partner-extensible cloud solution offered by Microsoft.
How does the Self-Service Portal 2.0 work?
The Self-Service Portal pools data center infrastructure resources – from networking to servers to storage – and makes them readily available to individual business units. Using Microsoft PowerShell scripts with Hyper-V and storage systems that integrate with these technologies, such as Compellent Storage Center, organizations can automate the deployment of their virtualized server and storage resources.
It’s all about efficiency and speed. From a data center management standpoint, what the business unit administrator wants to be able to do is quickly provision virtual machines (VM) without a lot of management overhead. That’s where the Self-Service Portal 2.0 comes into play. It provides a web-based interface where administrators can create whatever virtual machine they want, using pre-determined configuration options and pre-loaded VM templates.
Once a request from the business unit administrator is submitted, the system automatically notifies the IT administrator, who simply needs to validate the request and initiate the provisioning process. The Self-Service Portal takes it from there, utilizing built-in automation from Microsoft, Compellent and other DDA partners to rapidly deploy the requested IT services. Advanced PowerShell scripts reduce the manual steps associated with provisioning Windows Server/ Hyper-V VM resources, expediting deployment, ensuring accuracy and allowing administrators to focus on other important projects.
What Compellent brings to the table
Compellent comes to the table with a couple of things. Number one, its advanced storage technology is robust enough to do some pretty complex things from the storage layer at the same time reducing the complexity with operational efficiency for IT administrator. Number two, we’ve incorporated the OS-level integration with Windows Server/Hyper-V into the PowerShell piece. So that’s a huge enabler for us. Not only can we talk to our storage, but we can also talk to the OS itself without requiring special drivers to connect to the server host.
Compellent has created the Compellent Solution Pack for SCVMM SSP 2.0 that essentially incorporates two PowerShell scripts for the Self-Service Portal – one that creates one or more VMs using Compellent Instant Replays, and one that deletes VMs with automatic cleanup. We plan to offer this solution pack later this quarter.
The fluid nature of PowerShell automation
Traditionally, when data center administrators provision Hyper-V VMs using a template in SCVMM, the system created the VMs on the host itself using VHD copies via the LAN. The VHD is already sys prepped, providing a ready-to-deploy template complete with OS and applications. However, since each VM consumes just as much disk capacity as the base OS image – e.g., 10 GB – the provisioning process is time consuming and wastes disk space. Creating just one VM with this approach takes 5 to 20 minutes and, in this case, utilizes 10 GB or more of capacity.
With the Compellent “create VM” PowerShell script developed for the Self Service Portal, administrators can deploy the same Hyper-V VM in 20 to 30 seconds once the VHD has been sys prepped. Instead of creating full copies of the VHD via LAN, the script utilizes a gold image captured on the SAN as a snapshot. Each VM created shares the same gold image, and the only capacity consumed beyond that base image is the negligible space required for the unique characteristics of each VM.
For example, a small organization with four department that each need 25 physical boxes to do their work would traditionally be required to fill out a procurement order, put the OS on the hardware and ensure that there is enough energy to power 100 machines in the data center. The entire process would take about a week. With Compellent and the Self-Service Portal, it takes this organization 20-30 seconds to deploy a virtual machine. When deploying 100 machines required by the business, 12GB would be taken by the OS on each machine, meaning that an additional 1.2TB would be taken up just by the OS across the 100 machines. The same scenario on the Compellent would add up to 112 GB of space for the OS.
If changing business needs call for one or more VMs to be removed, the data center administrator can utilize the “delete VM” script. This script not only deletes the VM, but also performs a complete cleanup process – from removing the volume associated with the VM to unmounting the VHD and rescanning to ensure it has been removed.
From the beginning to the end – from the application and the OS to the storage layer, this process is completely fluid and abstracted from the general user. A few clicks on the self-service portal page and the business unit admin is all done. That is what Fluid Data is all about.
To learn more about the Self-Service Portal, please read the Microsoft blog.
by Roger Bearpark, Assistant Head of ICT at London Borough of Hillingdon — November 03, 2010
The London Borough of Hillingdon recently earned a place in the final three of the 2010 Gartner Green Data Center Excellence Awards, to be held on Monday November 22nd. It is an accolade we are proud of, and one we feel can help to dispel a myth that is too widely accepted in the storage industry. Contrary to popular belief, virtualisation can be accomplished without the need to learn a whole new skill set, and going green is less about environmental altruism in business, but more about making shrewd cost savings that directly affect your bottom line.
Since virtualising our storage and server footprint through Compellent and VMware, we have:
- Running over 90% of our servers, or 200 virtual machines, on nine physical platforms, including provision for DR, cutting the ICT space we occupy by 65% and power consumption by over 80%
- Saved > £93,000 on our annual energy bill
- Saved the generation of 171 tonnes of carbon emissions each year
- Reduced the 3 year cost per Terabyte of storage by >70%
- Lowered our carbon footprint by 20% over 18 months whilst accommodating the growth required by the organisation
What is more, our deployment was easy, and that is testament to the quality of the people involved. For such results to be achieved, you need to a mix the right technology with the right support, and Compellent has been there with us every step of the way.
Alongside our VMware deployments, Compellent’s support has underpinned what really counts – results. Many companies talk about difficult journeys, struggles and competing priorities with their moves to virtualisation. This story is different. For sure, there is some extraordinary technology inside those cabinets, but it is the people who have been inspired to develop it that count.
Working with a team that has the confidence and ability to make the journey a simple one is what makes green storage a reality. It is the people who have shared our ethos to be innovative and unafraid to do things differently who have ensured we have achieved an environment that Gartner deems worthy of excellence.
Flattering praise indeed; but our current results are not a final destination. They are a stop on the way to greater things, and therein lies the real result for a public sector organisation. What the people from Hillingdon, Compellent and other partners have achieved means that we offer better services at reduced cost to the people that we are here to serve.
Editor’s Note: Roger Bearpark of London Borough of Hillingdon is a Compellent customer and the contributor of this blog post. To learn more about London Borough of Hillingdon and its use of Compellent systems, please read this case study. Mr. Bearpark is one of the three finalists for the 2010 Green Data Center Excellence Award; if you plan on attending the Gartner Data Center & IT Operations Summit on Nov. 22, please come and support him at 17:40 – 18:30 in Park Plaza Westminster Bridge – Westminster B+C.