The Virtual Storage Guy

Will Vivek Kundra’s Departure Impact Federal Cloud Computing Initiatives?

I recently had an impromptu run-in with Greg Gardner, our Chief Architect for Defense Solutions in NetApp U.S. Public Sector. One of the topics we discussed was the recent resignation of the Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and how his departure may impact the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy. I admit that I was somewhat surprised when Greg offered to author a post on the topic in order to share his perspective and insights with a broader audience. Thus, it is my privilege to share them with you here.

Greg's Perspective:

As most who watch the Federal IT market closely know, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, architect of the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy and the 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management, announced his resignation. What does this mean for the future of cloud computing in the Federal government and how will Vivek’s initiatives be executed going forward? Allow me to addresses these questions.

Simple Versus Complicated - Verified

One day after sharing with you my customer engagement where we discussed provisioning 'Storage for Desktops - Simple VersusComplicated' I was informed of a post from another storage vendor that verified my premise.

While my post discussed 500 desktops with VMware View and the latter covered 1,000 with Citrix XenDesktop, the information I shared relating to the storage complexities was verified by a team leader of a storage vendor.

I don't understand the need for this level of rigidity and complexity. Why would anyone want the following attributes from their storage platform?

• A requirement to provisioning physical RAID groups and map each to a function in the solution
• No sharing of capacity or IOPs between the RAID groups
• No dynamic resizing of the capacity in a RAID group if it is sized incorrectly
• SSD to compensate for the slow performance of the spinning media
• The increased financial cost of SSD drives (roughly still around 20X price premium per GB)
• The increased CPU cost to process the multiple RAID calculations of each group

I still believe the NetApp model is a much simpler & efficient model.

Storage for Desktops - Simple Versus Complicated

I’ve had some great meetings with a number of customers this week and in one of them they were very interested in understanding NetApp’s value proposition with VMware View. They were specifically interested in understanding how NetApp could deliver high levels of storage I/O from a dense, and cost-effective, storage footprint.

As a point of reference they drew what they perceived as a ‘simple’ storage layout on the whiteboard. They believed that such a storage configuration was an optimal means to deliver performance, cost savings, and operational simplicity for a View deployment of 500 users.

I was really surprised at what they drew and thought this would be a simple example to share with you how different NetApp arrays are from offerings from the traditional array vendors.

The image they drew included the layout I have recreated below.

Backup: Collateral Damage on the Journey to the Cloud

Last week I introduced you to SnapProtect, our unified business continuance suite that leverages NetApp’s hardware-accelerated data protection capabilities to enhance and simplify business continuance processes.

I believe the best way to share all of the goodness we have to offer with SnapProtect is to begin by reviewing the current state of business continuance. With a common point to communicate from, I’ll proceed into our integrated data protection technologies and additional partner solutions in follow-on posts.

Let’s get started…

Business Continuance is Backup & Disaster Recovery

I want to begin by asking you to look at backup and disaster recovery (DR) as two ends of the business continuance spectrum. Both functions provide processes and procedures as a means to return an application, or set of applications, to a normal operational state in the event of corruption, loss or disaster.

What truly separates backup from DR is the costs associated with each process. On a per copy basis, backup is much less expensive, and as such is the standard data protection process for all systems. By contrast DR is very expensive, which commonly relegates its use to a select set of applications and systems.

Outside of the desire for applications, systems, and facilities to never go offline, businesses truly only care about restoring services as quickly as possible. The means of recovery is irrelevant, it can be accomplished from either backup or DR.

Time is money.

Backup is Broken

Kudos to the Winners of the 2011 NetApp Innovation Awards!

Each year we sponsor the NetApp Innovation Awards for customers who find new ways to utilize NetApp technology in order to benefit their business. This year we received more than 100 submissions for our award categories from executives to the uber-geeks of the data center in industries ranging from healthcare and financial services, to entertainment and energy, to education.

I’d like to personally congratulate the 2011 winners:

Innovator of the Year – Americas
GoDaddy.com

NetApp Releases VSC 2.1 vCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere

NetApp has released the Virtual Storage Console 2.1 (VSC); our VMware vCenter plug-in. Behind the scenes the VSC is actually a framework from a number of sub-plug-ins (VSC, Rapid Cloning Utility and SMVI) delivered in a single installation. We created this sub-plug-in architecture as a way to enable new plug-ins without having to create multiple NetApp tabs in vCenter.

The main feature in the VSC 2.1 is a rewritten infrastructure discovery process. As I don't write code I am challenged to share with you the details of the changes made; however, I can share with you that a 30 node vSphere cluster, booting from SAN, with 1,505 virtual machines stored on 69 datastores used to take 35.45 minutes to discover. With version 2.1 the baseline discovery process now completes in 1.94 minutes and subsequent updates complete in 16 seconds!

The VSC also includes a new version of MBRAlign that supports I/O offload for correcting misaligned partitions in VMs running on NFS datastores. This capability reduces load on the hypervisor and storage network in order to reduce the time required to align the partition in the VMDK.

The VSC is the recommended best practice for deploying VMware on NetApp. It's also a free product available on the NOW site. Note, the backup and store capability requires a SMVI license.

Here's an overview of the capabilities of the VSC and enablments available in vCenter:

Supported Configurations

NetApp Ranked #6 on List of Great Places To Work in Europe

Quick post, did you see NetApp ranked #6 on the 25 Best Multinational Workplaces in Europe? The Great Place To Work Institute (GPTW) specifically recognizes companies that seek to create great workplaces across country borders and cultural and language differences. This year GPTW has implemented a new policy requiring companies up for consideration on the list to be listed on a minimum of 3 national Best Workplaces Lists in Europe.

This European ranking is a great accomplishment and an independent confirmation our rankings earned in 2011:

• Switzerland #2
• UK #2
• France #4
• Netherlands #5
• Germany #8

Overall the GPTW results demonstrate our commitment to becoming a company of excellence by living our corporate values. We plan to keep our strong corporate culture, integrate new team members, and achieve massive growth in the storage industry. We have a goal to becoming the #1 place to work in Europe in 2012.

With that said, why don't you consider joining us?

I’d like to thank Andreas Koenig, our VP and GM of NetApp EMEA, for allowing me to share a number of his thoughts in this post.