The Virtual Storage Guy

Introducing NetApp SnapProtect Backup

Over the past 5 years, server virtualization has changed the data center forever and these changes have had a far-reaching impact on data center architectures and operations. One of the areas often discussed as having been affected, is the ever increasing shared storage footprint. I’d suggest to you, that in my customer engagements storage costs are concern 1A closely followed by concern 1B, backup and recovery.

The shared physical infrastructure required with server virtualization has made completion of backup operations difficult. These challenges have led us to reevaluating how we accomplish business continuance goals, and the most logical place to start is the area with the most pain; backup and recovery. Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant report for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup & Recovery highlights the changes customers are facing and reinforces change is in tow.

• By 2014, at least 30% of organizations will have changed backup vendors due to frustration over cost, complexity and/or capability.
• By 2014, 80% of the market will choose advanced, disk-based appliances and backup software-only solutions over distributed VTLs.
• By 2014, deduplication will cease to be available as a stand-alone; rather, it will become a feature of broader data storage and data management solutions.

In order to increase our ability to meet the business continuance goals of today and tomorrow NetApp has announced the release of SnapProtect. The SnapProtect management software is our latest backup and recovery application that enables businesses to combine the benefits of our integrated data protection and storage efficiency technologies with applications and virtual infrastructures, provides a backup catalog supporting disk backups and tape archives, and provides the framework for enhanced disaster recovery capabilities (enabled by our virtualization partners) that are truly unmatched in the industry.

SnapProtect provides a plethora of capabilities that are too much for a single post to cover, so for today allow me to introduce you to some of the core constructs of SnapProtect.

The Industry’s Fastest Backup

SnapProtect provides a single interface to provide NetApp snapshot backups for physical and virtual servers. Snapshots are hardware based recovery points on the production array. They are created almost instantly and with almost zero impact on the production environment.

Congrats to Cisco… You're Making Server History!

Giving a quick shout out to our friends at Cisco – a heartfelt congratulations on Cisco’s incredible success entering the mature, stagnating server market and in just two years becoming the #3 player worldwide in x86 blade server factory revenue. By integrating compute, networking, and virtualization in a single platform with its Unified Computing System (UCS) blade server Cisco has prompted a disruptive change in the server market. There’s a great blog post on this by Cisco’s Soni Jiandani, Cisco UCS Changes Industry Landscape.

Not just here in North America but worldwide - from Australia to Hungary , Germany to Chile , Vietnam to The Netherlands and beyond – thousands of customers have replaced traditional, legacy servers with the revolutionary Cisco UCS server architecture. This is a pretty incredibly shift, and one that NetApp is proud to have been part of as a strategic Cisco Partner.

Voting for VMworld 2011 Sessions Ends Today

Just a gentle reminder that today is the last day to cast your votes for the break out sessions presented at VMworld 2011.

The list of NetApp-related sessions is here.

My comments on some of the multi-storage vendor panel sessions is here.

Why are you reading this line, Go Vote!

Has NetApp Abandoned Unified Storage?

The first and only unified storage array vendor, has long been the hallmark of NetApp. Yet with the acquisitions of Bycast and Engenio it appears NetApp may be abandoning the concept of a unified storage array. Is this true, has NetApp abandoned their position on unified storage?

If you’re a NetApp customer maybe you feel that your NetApp sales representative fudged the truth a bit when they stated that a NetApp FAS array could, ‘meet all of your enterprise data center and cloud computing requirements’.

Did we really move away from our roots? Did our acquisitions silently change the focus of NetApp and invalidate our message around delivering unified storage architectures? As I began thinking about our recent acquisitions they really began to make a lot of sense, and this time answered the unified question for me.

i want to share with you my thought process to see if you come to the same conclusion as I did. I think the correct place to start is by counting the number of NetApp storage array platforms.

Platform 1: NetApp FAS Arrays

This is the mainstay of the NetApp product line, the storage technology most associate NetApp with. FAS are natively multiprotocol enterprise storage arrays, offering RAID-DP, integrated block-level storage efficiencies with integrated data protection, which provide abstracted access to the array in the form of vFilers (just to name a few of the many capabilities).

FAS arrays are available in configurations ranging from the colossal FAS6280 (2.8 PBs of capacity) to the modest FAS2020 (68 TBs of capacity). They run Data Ontap, which is available in two modes.

Data Ontap 7-mode (or classic mode) allows FAS arrays to be deployed as a local two-node cluster, a geographically spanned MetroCluster, and as a remote distributed FlexCache, which enables capabilities like LDVM for VMware.

Microsoft Cloud Fast Track brings Hyper-V to the FlexPod Infrastructure

Today at Microsoft TechEd NetApp and Cisco announced their pre-validated configuration for Hyper-V as a part of the Microsoft’s Cloud Fast Track program. While technically this pre-validated shared infrastructure isn’t a FlexPod, it is built from the same components and process as a FlexPod with additional research and solution development provided by the Microsoft Technical Marketing team at NetApp.

While this solution is very similar in concept and architectural design to FlexPod, it is not part of the FlexPod program.

NetApp is the first storage vendor to be part of the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program and as a last Microsoft Storage Solutions Partner of the Year and a finalist for the Global ISV Infrastructure Partner and Virtualization Partner of the Year; NetApp is the storage platform of choice for Microsoft private cloud deployments.

Fast Track for Cisco & NetApp delivers a robust, innovative set of integrations in Micrososft’s System Center Opalis which provide faster solution delivery and consistency for private clouds.

• System Center Opalis integration to enable workflow reuse and composition
• Industry leading rapid provisioning performance of Virtual Machines for Cluster Shared Volumes
• Maximum PowerShell support for flexibility and customization
• PowerShell support for UCS

Hyper-V Integration Demos

New vSphere 4.1 Report: Measuring SAN & NAS Performance

NetApp and VMware performance engineering have completed a new storage performance technical report, TR-3916. This new report provides the relative I/O performance available from SAN and NAS storage protocols with vSphere 4.1 and a NetApp FAS array.

The testing in the new TR-3916 is a leap forward from our previous reports as it includes results obtained from shared and non-shared datastores, has VAAI enabled, and measures the gains provided by the Paravirtual SCSI adapter.

NetApp and VMware engineering believe that these tests result in the most accurate measurement of the performance capabilities of the storage protocols in vSphere as the test bed remains consistent throughout the testing. In fact, switching between SAN protocols with a NetApp array is as simple as mapping a different igroup (aka LUN mask). No reconfiguration or migration was required in completing the FC, FCoE, and iSCSI tests; just a simple rescan of the storage adapters from the hosts.

For the NAS (NFS) tests, our engineers simply created a FlexVol and connected it to the hosts in the cluster. The remainder of environment was unchanged, i.e. we leveraged the same arrays, disks, converged network adapters, etc… with the exception of the LUN we deleted.

The Test Bed

The test bed was comprised of a 8-node vSphere 4.1 cluster. Each host was powered by a Fujitsu Primergy RX200 with 2 Quad-core Intel Xeon E5507 Nehalem CPUs & 48GBs of memory, Qlogic CNA & HBAs, and Intel NICs. The I/O load was generated by 128 VMs, each running IOMeter.

VMworld 2011: Offering More G14 Classified Information from Storage Experts

Two of the mostly highly rated sessions presented at VMworld 2010 were TA8133: Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for VMware & TA8623: Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge. I believe part of the reason these two sessions were so highly rated was that they both presented the role and future direction of storage in a shared cloud infrastructure from multiple storage industry experts including NetApp, EMC, HP, and Dell.

Topics discussed by multiple storage vendors tend to be very popular with the public. Their appeal has also resonated in the blogosphere where joint efforts like the iSCSI & NFS posts are some of the most read on my blog.

Well some of us are back at it again, submitting a number of sessions for your consideration as sessions presented at VMworld 2011. If you’d like to get the inside scoop, literally G14 classified information on storage integration, performance, and capabilities, then please consider voting for the following sessions.

1623
Storage Super heavyweight Smackdown 2011
(NetApp, EMC, HP, Dell, VMware Professional.com)

System Manager 2.0 Public Beta Program

I'm happy to share with you that we have opened a public beta program for the upcoming release of System Manager 2.0. SM2 is the next generation of our GUI management tool that enables storage administrators to manage multiple arrays and storage elements from a single interface.

System Manager 2 provides a number of functions including but not limited to…

• Monitor and manage multiple physical and virtual storage arrays
• Configure and manage storage elements such as disks, aggregates, volumes, LUNs, qtrees, quotas, I/O interfaces, networking, etc…
• Provision and secure access for SAN (FC, FCoE, iSCSI) and NAS (NFS & SMB2 aka CIFS) storage
• Create, provision, and manage vFiler/vServer virtual storage arrays
• Configure, manage, and report on multi-array SnapMirror replication relationships
• Manage HA configurations such as execute controller takeover and giveback
• User management and role based access
• And much, much more…

The beta program is open to all NetApp customers and partners who manage FAS arrays in 7-Mode (a future beta program will open for customers who deploy in C-Mode). Registration and support for the beta program is available from the NetApp Community along with a large library of ‘how-to’ videos.

http://communities.netapp.com/groups/netapp-system-manager-20-public-beta

We’re looking forward to hearing your experiences and feedback on System Manager 2.0!

Manage & Provision vFilers/vServers

VMworld 2011 Session Voting is Open – Viva la community!

As a means to ensure the content presented in the breakout sessions at VMworld & VMworld Europe are cutting edge, real world, and appealing VMware allows customers, partners, industry analysts and VMware employees to participate in the content creation process. Frankly, I’m not sure any worldwide conference can compare to VMworld in terms of the amount of the influence their community directly has on determining the content presented at the shows.

“Viva la Community!”

Many in VMware responded to the April 12th call for papers. To those who submitted a session abstract, thank you! There are some truly great ones in consideration. The call for papers was only the start for the selection process.

If you plan to attend either the US or Europe event or have attended in previous years, it is time for you to cast your votes for the submissions that will comprise the breakout session catalog this fall. We need help whittling 1,1664 submissions down to approximately 170 unique sessions for the US and roughly 130 for Europe.

Don’t Dawdle. Don’t Hesitate. Don’t wait, procrastinate, stall or delay…
cast your votes today!

Note: If you don't have a VMworld account, it appears you can create a one and complete the process at a later time in order to cast your votes today.


The Submissions from NetApp

The Power of Innovative Datacenter Stacks

Joe Onisick at Define the Cloud posted a thought provoking article titled, “The Power of Innovative Datacenter Stacks” where he shares his views regarding the value and abilities delivered with 'single-vendor' and 'multi-vendor' integrated solution stacks such as FlexPod.

This post touches on a number of topics including the ability of a solution stack to deliver value, packaging best of breed technologies, and collaborative multi-vendor support models. As an architect for a leading systems integrator, Joe is as knowledgeable as one can be with leading data center technologies. You can be sure, Joe understands where 'the rubber meets the road' as he is responsible for delivering the capabilities available from today’s pre-packaged cloud architectures.

I’ve avoided mining Joe’s post for quotes. At just over 500 words, it’s straightforward and candid and I encourage you to read.

If you enjoy Joe's thoughts and would like to hear more, than I'd invite you to join Joe as he shares more of his thoughts and experiences live on the Innovative Versus Integration Cloud Infrastructure Stacks Webcast. This event is scheduled for May 26th and begins at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT.

NetApp Raises Over $1,000,000 for St. Baldrick’s

Childhood cancer takes the lives of one of every five kids diagnosed. It takes all of us to find a cure, and then some. Two weeks ago marked our 19th and final St. Baldrick’s event, which was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. NetApp raised $970,865 on the shaved heads of 353 volunteers and the donations are still coming in. When you add additional grants from our customers, NetApp will have raised well over $1,100,000 this year!

On behalf of NetApp I would like to thank all the ‘shavees’ whose fundraising efforts NetApp to becoming St. Baldrick’s top fundraising team! Truly an outstanding and incredible effort on many levels.

New FlexPod CVD Released – Microsoft SharePoint 2010

One of the key goals of the FlexPod architecture is accelerating the adoption of tier 1 applications. In delivering this goal Cisco & NetApp work with our infrastructure partners to producing and validating best in class architecture design guides that ensure solution design, supportability, availability and scalability. The use of these Cisco Validated Designs result in a reduction of resources required bringing a solution online.

We’ve released increase the FlexPod CVD library with the release of our SharePoint 2010 enterprise deployment design guide. This CDV details how to deploy Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for a real-world workload of 50,000 users. The design validation was completed using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate workloads and Visual Studio Load Test agents.