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Datacenter Storage Today and Tomorrow
October 16, 2012Varrow
Tony PittmanTechnical Consultant
t: @pittmantony w: tpittman.wordpress.com
Housekeeping
Continue the conversation: @pittmantony and tpittman.wordpress.com
Limited time today, reach out to me for deeper discussion of any of these points
Agenda
Datacenter Storage Concepts
Typical Datacenters Today
New Technologies and Concepts on the Horizon
Types & Use CasesDAS – Direct Attached Storage– Boot / OS volumes– Non-critical, low performing data
SAN – Storage Area Networks– Critical and/or high performing data– Shared storage for clusters (RAC, MS Failover Clustering, VMware)– Boot From SAN – enables replicated OS volumes and statelessness– Array-based replication
NAS – Network Attached Storage– Unstructured data (files and folders)– VMware and HyperV 2012 datastores can use NAS– Database backup destination– Array-based replication
DAS - Direct Attached Storage
Simplest type of datacenter storage
Includes spinning hard drives and flash
Connected by SAS, SATA, USB, PCIe (also IDE, SCSI)
Limited by number of devices, performance, availablity
SAN – Storage Area Network
Composed of:
– Storage arrays
– Host bus adapters – I/O cards in hosts allowing SAN connectivity
– SAN switches – Connect all the pieces together. Purpose built for storage connectivity
SAN – Storage Area Network
Storage Arrays:
– Purpose built
– Manage large amounts of storage
– Presented to multiple hosts
– Performance improvements built-in
• Tiering across multiple drive types to maximize performance and capacity for a given budget
• Read/Write DRAM Cache and caching algorithms
– Full redundancy – data, connectivity, management
SAN – Storage Area NetworkSAN Switches– FC, iSCSI, or FCoE – The Great Debate– Must be compatible with the storage array, ie: some arrays
won’t do some protocols– FC (Fibre Channel) - purpose built for storage, mostly
implementing 8 Gb/s but some 16 Gb/s models available.– iSCSI – rides on TCP/IP, *not lossless*, depends on
retransmits for packets dropped during heavy load periods. Network design is crucial. Recommend isolating from other network traffic. 10 Gb ethernet getting pretty common. (Is it the future?)
– FCoE – rides directly on ethernet, not TCP/IP. Lossless, uses DataCenter Bridging Protocol
SAN – Storage Area Network
SAN Switches - Analogy
iSCSI - similar to highwaysCan be more flexible. Traffic can be a problem.
FC - similar to railways. Purpose built, connected to predetermined specific endpoints
SAN – Storage Area Network
Array-based replication:
– Moves replication CPU overhead off of the host
– Can improve RPO by maintaining a journal of writes, allowing rollback to a specific point in time
– Simplifies management vs separate replications for each database, filesystem or drive
– Can be used to populate a test environment or backup server, duplicating the real Production environment
SAN – Storage Area Network
Array-based replication:
– Application Integration
– Usually required for geographically dispersed clustering
NAS – Network Attached Storage
NAS appliance – usually purpose built device running a flavor of Linux and serving up file shares and NFS exports from internal drives
Usually connects to existing server LAN
Operates via CIFS (SMB v2 and v3) and NFS
NAS – Network Attached Storage
Backups via NDMP, potentially reducing backup times for filesysetms with large number of files
Read/Writeable checkpoints
Application Integration
What’s Next?
DAS
NAS
SAN
Drive Types & RAID
Cloud / Hybrid Storage
Changes to DAS
PCIe Flash – FusionI/O, VFCache, etc
– Local storage, integrated with SAN
– Very low response time
VMware Distributed Storage
– Aggregates local storage from vSphere hosts in a cluster and presents that storage to all hosts in the cluster as a datastore
– Quality of local storage could become more important in the overall design
NAS
Hypervisor running on the NAS appliance– VMware vSphere running on Isilon
– Very high bandwidth access to storage
SMB v3 – Not supported on every NAS appliance yet
– Usable by HyperV 2012 to store VM’s
– Usable by MSSQL to store database files
Windows VM as NAS? VMware VADP Change Block Tracking (CBT) = Fast Backups
SAN
Infiniband becoming more common
– New (and existing) array technologies using Infiniband for internal communication. XtremeIO, XIV, etc
– New array technologies using Infiniband for “Cache Area Network”, read/write cache shared between clustered hosts (Oracle RAC and SAP use cases)
SAN
16 or 32 Gb FC and 40 Gb or 100 Gb Ethernet (iSCSI)– FC and Ethernet will continue to leapfrog. Emulex
already has an FCoE card that will do 40 Gbe + 16 Gb FC
Multi-hop FCoE
New startup companies shaking things up– All flash arrays and hybrid arrays
– Next year should see acquisitions
Drive Architecture Changes
Enterprise Grade MLC Flash
– Less expensive per GB
– SLC will probably stick around for write performance
Smaller drives going away
– Like the 72 GB drives of yesteryear, today’s 300 GB and 1 TB drives will be phased out. 600 GB + and 2 TB + will become the standard for spinning drives
Drive Architecture Changes
RAID may no longer be the standard – RAID designed for spinning drives. Workloads that
specify RAID type are usually considering head location and locality of reference. RAID still needed for spinning drives.
– Flash based arrays doing inline dedupe, pointer based blockmaps and redirect-on-first-access instead of Copy on Write.
– Caching algorithms traditionally sequentializeincoming I/O requests to work better with spinning drives. No longer necessary.
Cloud Based Storage
Lots of clouds: PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, DBaaS, BaaS, DRaaS
– Most solutions don’t require you to know the nuts and bolts of the underlying storage…
…BUT, we could soon see solutions involving all flash arrays on premise, connected to slower cloud-based storage.
My Blog: http://tpittman.wordpress.com
Twitter is @pittmantony
My Email: [email protected]
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