The Virtual Storage Guy

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.

An Important VMworld Announcement

This just in, I'm very proud to announce that Chad Sakac has asked me to join him in presenting TA8133 - Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for VMware, at VMworld in San Francisco and Copenhagen.

Needless to say I'm honored to be asked and uber excited to present this content. In fact we've already begun creating and compiling content. This session will follow the them of our previous joint best practice posts on iSCSI and NFS where the content will speak to storage related challenges facing VI and cloud administrators in vendor neutral terms (well as much as we can be neutral).

This is a big win for customers as they learn about and how to address the most common storage related challenges from the two vendors with the largest install base of VMware 2.5, VI3, and vSPhere deployments!

vSphere 4.1 and vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)

What began in late 2005 with Vanderpool continued today with the release of vSphere 4.1…

Vanderpool was the code name of Intel’s Virtualization Technology of x86 (or VT-x), which introduced extended page tables and enabled multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on an x86 computer in a safe and efficient manner. VT-x was the first means of hardware acceleration for VMware and the other x86 hypervisor vendors.

With today’s release of vSphere 4.1 VMware has delivered the first set of vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). VMware and key storage partners, led by Dell, EMC, and NetApp, have continued the direction originally established by Intel to extend the scaling of virtual infrastructures by enabling hardware acceleration with storage arrays serving ESX/ESXi clusters.

Today’s post is on VAAI, which is merely one of the three primary vStorage constructs available with vSphere 4.1. The other two are:

• Storage I/O Control (SIOC) - Set storage quality-of-service priorities for each virtual machine to guarantee access to storage resources
• Performance Reporting - Deliver key storage performance statistics regardless of storage protocol

Either I or one from the vSolutions Engineering team will post more on SIOC and Performance Reporting later this week.

VMware vSphere VAAI Demo with NetApp

With today’s release of vSphere 4.1 I’m confident that some may want to see the vStorage APIs for array integration (VAAI) in action with NetApp arrays. If you count yourself in this group you can catch the NetApp demo of the APIs from VMworld 2009 (September, 2009).

If we had the APIs in Data ONTAP ready back in the fall of 2009, just imagine where we might be with the next release of VAAI APIs…

VMworld 2010 Session 'Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge' with HP, EMC, and NetApp

Many of you have been asking for the status of the sessions submitted for VMworld by NetApp, our customers and partners. It looks like the VMworld 2010 Content Catalog has been posted. While I haven't received confirmation from John Troyer, it appears the catalog is a work in progress. I make this suggestion, as a number of our session confirmations have yet to be published online.

As many of you may know, past two years Chad Sakac (EMC), Adam Carter (HP), and I have attempted to host a storage panel where we discuss the current state and future direction of storage with cloud deployments. If you have been one of the many who expressed interest in attending such a session then you're in luck; VMware has approved our session for VMworld 2010!

Session TA8623

Title: Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge

Abstract: Panel session to discuss all things storage, paneled by some of the best known storage experts from the major vendors.

US Speakers:

• Chad Sakac, VP of VMware Alliances - EMC
• Adam Carter, Worldwide Product Manager HP Storage - Hewlett Packard
• Vaughn Stewart, Virtualization Evangelist - NetApp

Technical Level: Technical
Track: Technology and Architecture
Subtopic: Storage
Area of Interest: SMB
Length: 60 minutes


The session title cracks me up!

You may recall Chad, Adam and I participated in the very popular "Super Friends" iSCSI best practices blog and VMworld Communities Roundtable Podcast. If you found these online collaborations informative and entertaining then catch session TA8623. It's sure to be a brawl a blast. :)

As for the rest of the NetApp sessions, I'll publish an update once all of the NetApp related sessions are available online.

VMware Admins are Storage Admins - vStorage Integration Part 3

This is the final post in the 'VMware Admins are Storage Admins' series. In part 1 we discussed how VI admins are becoming storage admins through the virtualization of our data centers. We reviewed the traditional provisioning model, and introduced a new model designed to simplify, automate, and standardize storage operations by allowing storage admins to create resource pools that the VI admins can use at will via vCenter plug-ins.

In part 2 we drilled into the storage functionalities and technical details around the NetApp vCenter plug-ins. This feature list highlighted automating ESX/ESXi storage connectivity along joint best practices, storage array reporting and connectivity automation, automated datastore provisioning and management, and provisioning zero cost, pre-deduplicated, VMs for servers and desktops.

VMware Admins are Storage Admins - vStorage Integration Part 2

In yesterday's post we discussed how VI admins are becoming storage admins as an unexpected byproduct from the virtualization of our data centers. We looked at the storage provisioning process with emphasis on the number tasks that a VI admin must execute. At reviewing the traditional model we introduced the new model; one jointly created by NetApp and VMware engineering and designed to simplify, automate, and standardize storage operations in the cloud.

The last item we discussed was the how the new model allows storage admins to provision and secure 'raw' storage resource pool for use by the VI admin team. This model allows the storage team to focus on higher value functions such as resource utilization, quality of service, and data protection.

In today’s post our discussion shifts to the storage management integrations available to the VI admins thru the NetApp vCenter plug-ins.

VMware Admins are Storage Admins - vStorage Integration Part 1

Do you recall the post I published in September of 2009 titled "VMworld 2009 – Thoughts from the show"? If you read this post you may recall that many VI Admins shared a recurring theme that thru the virtualization of the data center they were becoming quasi-storage administrators.

Oh, there's no doubt about it. The task of bringing storage online is a multi-step process that requires the coordination of information and tasks between the storage admin and VI admin teams. Unfortunately for the VI admin there are considerably more tasks related to the basic processes, like the provisioning of storage, that they must complete as compared to the storage admin.

To illustrate this point I have created the following graphic depicting the storage provisioning process.

NetApp and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices Book Update

At VMworld 2009 attendees were able to purchase the first book ever published by NetApp in the VMworld bookstore. This book was NetApp and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices. Since then the book has been a huge success. I was very surprised today to learn that since the book's release on August 31st, it has sold nearly 5,000 copies.

To put the sales figures in perspective, we averaging nearly 1,000 copies sold each month!

The book’s current sales rank on lulu.com is 198.

For all interested in the book, I’m happy to announce that the second edition is now available. It’s packed full of net new content; however, I have to save the details as to what’s new as it ties into our February 18th announcement.

If you want a sneak peek you’ll have to head over to lulu.com

I’ve got more book news on the horizon and as soon as I can share the details, your RSS reader will be the first to know.

Cisco NetApp VMware Announce The Industry’s First Secure Multi-Tenancy Solution

Today Cisco, NetApp, and VMware announced a joint alliance, cooperative support, and professional services model along with the industry’s first end-to-end secure multi-tenancy solution, which we believe will transform IT silos into dynamic shared infrastructures.

If you didn’t get a chance to check out the announcement you can catch the "Imagine Virtually Anything" video on demand. This executive conversation features Tom Georgens, NetApp; Tony Bates, Cisco; and Paul Maritz, VMware.

Secure multi-tenancy (SMT), it is a joint solution provided by Cisco, NetApp, and VMware that provides secure isolation and QoS for applications running in a shared virtualized environment. Customers receive the efficiency and flexibility of a shared infrastructure with the security and control of a dedicated environment. SMT is the industry's first tested and Cisco Validated Design to provide such capabilities.

Creating a Restricted vCenter Role for SnapDrive

Historically NetApp has had a very different vision regarding the value storage array. One of the core values follows along the lines of: In order to be truly valuable, advanced storage features must be made available to the system and in many occasions the application administrative teams. In the absence of this goal, we believe storage is simply storage.

One of the challenges to delivering storage array functionality to the upper layers is to grant only the permissions required for the integration component to function. I covered how to provide this functionality in December with my post: Configuring Role Based Access with the Virtual Storage Console vCenter Plug-in.

In today's post I’d like to introduce those who only know NetApp from a VMware perspective to SnapDrive for Windows (SDW) and discuss the minimum rights required for SDW to function within a VM.

Actually, I had to work through this issue today with our engineers as Duncan and David for some help accomplishing this for a rather large customer installation.

2009 : A Blog in Review

I'm feverishly working to wrap up my edits on version 2.0 on TR-3749 - NetApp and VMware vSphere: Storage Best Practices, and unable to get to my blog queue (to those who I owe a post, I thank you for your patience). Blog posts often take a considerable amount of time with many finishing in the middle of the night. It is pretty easy to discern when my schedule is busy as my blogging frequency typically falls off. I'm currently facing this situation, so I need to keep this post brief.

It hit me today that while my blog was launched in 2008, I believe I hit my stride starting in the spring of 2009 and I thought I'd share some of my more popular posts from 2009. Consider it a year in review.

• vSphere Introduces the Plug-n-Play SAN
• I/O Efficiency and Alignment – the Cloud Demands Standards
• A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware
• VCE-101: What's Next with Deduplication?
• A Customer's Findings: VMware on NetApp vs EMC
• VCE-101: Deduplication: Storage Capacity and Array Cache
• EMC: The Storage Most Integrated with VMware? – The Conclusion
• VMworld 2009 – Storage Integration Sneak Peek
• Run Everything Virtualized and Deduplicated : aka Chuck Anti-FUD
• A “Multivendor Post” on using iSCSI with VMware vSphere
• VMware Communities Roundtable Presents a Multivendor iSCSI Podcast
• VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics
• VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond
• Now Available: The Virtual Storage Console vSphere Plug-in
• SPEC SFS2008 Verifies You Can Run Faster on Fewer Disks with PAM
• Preview: Rapid Cloning Utility 3.0 vCenter Plug-in

Some of my proudest moments were the posts where the community came together to discuss a particular technology and its associated nuances associated for the greater good of the community. I'd like to extend a special thank you to Chad Sakac for playing a key role in making these posts happen.

For those who follow my blog and find the content entertaining, informative, agreeable, or standoffish; I thank you for spending a small part of your day reading my scribes and diatribes. BTW - if you enjoy my posts, please vote for the virtual storage guy in vSphere-land's top bloggers poll.

In 2010 I plan to share with you a wealth of new data around performance and functionality, new product introductions and enhancements, product and integration technical details, and my contemplations and insights around designing storage architectures for green, virtual data centers.

One last thought, if you don't already please check out thoughts and data shared by a number of NetApp's top Virtual Solution Architects over at the Virtualization Effect.

SPEC SFS2008 Verifies You Can Run Faster on Fewer Disks with PAM

NetApp is the only storage vendor focused on reducing storage hardware footprints. Evidently discussions surrounding the use of storage saving technologies in a production environment must be upsetting to the traditional storage array manufactures as anytime I discuss the technologies that enable such environments the comments sections of my posts inevitably end up reading (and smelling) like the zoo after the monkey cage has endured a pooh-flinging outburst.

It is my premise that the attempts of the traditional legacy storage array vendors to dissuade customers from considering and implementing storage savings technologies is a self-serving and not a community driven interest. Maybe my statement is a bit inflammatory but just consider the following statements regarding the use of data deduplication from a well-known traditional storage manufacture VP...

”Typically, when storage admins run into I/O density problems, they have two fundamental approaches: more disks, or faster disks.”

“By spreading the load on more spindles, I/O density can be reduced. However, you now require more storage, power, cooling, etc. -- which kind of tends to defeat the whole premise of data deduplication to begin with.”

“The other approach is to use faster disks -- either disks that spin faster, or perhaps enterprise flash drives. Invariably, these cost more as well -- again tending to defeat the whole premise of attempting to save money through data deduplication.”

Statements like this are clearly meant to caution customers against the use of ‘risky’ new concepts (reduction of storage footprints) and the primary enabling technology (data deduplication). So is the information shared in this warning accurate?

VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond

This is the second installment of a two-part post focusing on the thin provisioning capabilities native to vSphere. If you haven’t read Part I - The Basics, I’d suggest you do so before proceeding. We've covered a lot of content which you really should have a solid grasp of before proceeding.

In part I, I covered the basics of thin provisioning and how it operates with any storage platform. In part II we are going to expand upon a number of the points introduced in part I with a focus on how the storage virtualization functionality in Data ONTAP enhances VMware's thin provisioning and the over arching goal to reduce both the CapEX and OpEx associated with storage in the virtualization space.

Anatomy of a Virtual Disk

Let’s begin where we started in part I, by reviewing different disk formats. This time let’s consider them with the virtual disks operating at 70% storage capacity.

- The Thick Virtual Disk

Again this is the traditional virtual disk format which we all know rather well. From this image you will notice do not receive any storage savings in the datastore, yet we do receive 30% savings on the storage array.

If you're asking, "how can a thick VMDK consume less storage on the array?"
You'll need to go back and read Part I

- The Thin Virtual Disk

In this image we have the thin provisioned virtual disk and as you can see we are receiving a 30% storage savings in both the datastore and on the array.

- The Eager Zeroed Thick Virtual Disk

In this last image we have an eager zeroed thick virtual disk which provides us no savings at either the datastore or on the array.

VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics

This week’s VMware Communities Roundtable featured one of my favorite people at VMware, Paul Manning who spoke on thin provisioning. This topic is the inspiration for today’s VCE post. Reducing storage costs is top of mind and it's gonna take some time covering thin provisioning so let’s begin!

Virtualizing a Datacenter

I am not exaggerating when I share with you that every customer I meet with has elaborate plans to virtualize most, if not all, of the Intel based servers within their data center, yet deploying this new architecture is challenged to move from a portion to a majority of the footprint due to storage costs (both CapEx and OpEx). I'd like to summarize the message from these meetings for you, which goes something like this…

“We love server virtualization! With VMware we’ve reduced our server footprint and are targeting more systems to virtualize.”

“We love converged Ethernet! With Cisco we’ve reduced our port counts and are targeting to have a single platform for voice, data, and user access.”

“Storage costs are out of control, can you help? Prior to virtualization we roughly ran 20%-30% of our servers on shared storage arrays. Virtualization is forcing every VM onto shared storage. What do we do?”

Now Available: The Virtual Storage Console vSphere Plug-in

Since VMworld 2009 one of the recurring questions posted to me on Twitter has been. “When will NetApp release the VSC?” – Wait no longer, the VSC is available for download via NOW.

For those of you unfamiliar with the VSC, it is a vCenter 4.0 plug-in that simplifies the configuration and management of NetApp, IBM, and Virtualized 3rd party arrays. The VSC supports ESX/ESX 4.0 along with monitoring and reporting only capabilities with ESX/ESXi 3.5.

The Virtual Storage Console is the next generation of the NetApp ESX Host Utilities Kit. Gone are the days on installing the EHU into the service console of ESX or cursing NetApp for the lack of support with ESXi. The VSC adds a NetApp tab into vCenter that enables one to:

• Manage ESX/ESXi storage connectivity

• Report ESX/ESXi storage details

• Accelerate resolving storage connectivity related support cases

• Optimize VM storage options for performance and availability

My I introduce you to the Virtual Storage Console version 1.0…

Mike Laverick on vStorage Plug-in Integration

This morning began with catching up on my VMware related reading. Like many of you I have a list of ‘must reads.’ Over at RTFM Education Mike has shared his PowerPoint presentation on vStorage integration, which he delivered at the 1st Scottish VMware User Group Meeting.

Mike thanks for sharing! This slide deck provides a great overview of the current state of the union and what customers can deploy today (or in the very near future) from NetApp & EMC.

I'd suggest that you check out the PPT and just in case you were afflicted by temporary insanity and have yet to subscribe to RTFM, do so now!

A Follow-up on HP TechDay 2009 with an Invitation for You!

This week HP demonstrated several of their technology offerings to the storage community, and as a part of this event HP provided a hands on lab where attendees to 'kick the tires' of their storage technology offerings. As a part for this lab attendees were able to complete the same tasks with storage arrays and management tools from EMC and NetApp.

These types of educational experiences can really benefit the community by showcasing one’s enhancements and differentiation. I fully endorse these types of labs, sharing information empowers the user community and raises the bar in terms of what we must develop in order to remain an industry leader… except this isn’t what happened.

According to multiple tweets attendees were stating that tests designed to demonstrate storage integration with Windows systems and VMware were the command line interface and Filerview. This caught my attention as these aren't the tools NetApp recommends for our install base. A quick glance at a few of the sites covering the event confirmed the use of these legacy tools.

In fairness I need to highlight that HP did follow the steps provided in our storage best practices documents for VMware TR-3428 (VI3) and TR-3749 (vSphere). I would like to share with you that we are in the process of updating these documents with a goal of reducing their sizes by approximately 40%.

We hear the VMware community loud and clear - simplicity equates to scaling an environment.

Attention CEOs: Pay $75 per Virtual Desktop for Storage

Recently both NetApp and EMC published VDI whitepapers with our mutual partners VMware and Cisco. Both papers are very solid and should result in robust infrastructures; however, the solutions are far from equal and I’d like to take 5 minutes of your time to share with you some interesting points of comparison.

Sure the EMC paper focuses on UCS platform while the NetApp paper focuses on a Nexus infrastrucutre, but that’s not what I want to discuss. Yes, the EMC architecture running on Fibre Channel over Ethernet and the NetApp solution is leveraging NFS, but that’s not what I’d like you to consider either.

The level of differentiation I want to highlight is the cost per desktop in both of these solutions. Why cost? Simple, it is the number one hindrance to virtual desktop adoption.

EMC: The Storage Most Integrated with VMware? – The Conclusion

We here at NetApp have been burning the proverbial midnight oil getting ready for VMworld, and in doing so I have put off posting a number of blog entries.

I trust you will be very impressed with our VMworld line up. If you can’t make the show make sure to hit our Virtualization YouTube Channel, as all demos will be posted there when the show opens.

A week and a half ago I posted the first half of a discussion that started with some recent customer meetings and the claims by a storage vendor that they were the most integrated storage with VMware. This post received a fair amount of discussion and comments for which I am grateful. You may note I closed that original post asking for feedback and fact checking of the data shared.

Mike & Scott - Thanks

I’d like to take a minute to personally thank Mike Laverick and Scott Lowe for participating in our preview of the Rapid Cloning Utility 2.1 and the Virtual Storage Console. These technoilogies and more will be on display in the NetApp booth at VMworld.

Neither Mike nor Scott require introductions. Both are respected leaders in the virtualization market and both were kind enough to share their thoughts in online reviews.

VMworld 2009 – Storage Integration Sneak Peek

I trust you are as excited as I am with VMworld just around the corner. In case you missed it, we have a lot going on in San Francisco. Brian Gracely has a published number of posts covering the details of our Breakout Sessions and the sessions featuring either NetApp Partners or Customers over at the Virtualization Effect.

For more details click here, here, and here.

If you’d like some insight as to Dave’s plans to present during our Keynote presentation check out this post in the NetApp Communities.

The Storage Most Integrated with VMware

In yesterday’s post I made an effort to clarify the level of integration between VMware and a storage vendor claiming to have the greatest level of integration. While I craft the follow up to that post I’d like to offer you a preview of one of the integration technologies that will be made available and on display at VMworld.

EMC: The Storage Most Integrated with VMware?

My apologies for being away from the blog for a bit. I’ve been heads down either meeting with customers or working with my team as we wrap up the final details for our VMworld presentations and demos. Today I’d like to share a true story from these recent customer visits. In a number of these meetings, multiple customers shared a similar story of their EMC sales teams stating that EMC was the storage most integrated with VMware.

I guess if I didn’t work in the storage industry, I’d suspect this claim would seem very plausible. Why wouldn’t it be true? EMC is parent company of VMware and as such they probably have tighter engineering relationship that result in solutions exclusive to EMC… Right?

VCE-101: What's Next with Deduplication?

Welcome to the latest post in our series entitled ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’

In our last post we discussed the CapEx savings provided by data deduplication of both production storage capacity and storage array cache. Deduplication is fundamentally changing the data center and it appears that there’s more on the horizon. I’d like to share with you what I call ‘Data Center Ethernet Acceleration’.

Overview

“"Some call it a software mainframe others call it cloud, it depends on when you were born" – Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware

When discussing multiple applications on a single hardware platform I prefer the term ‘software mainframe’. I think this is due more to my time working with VMware products rather than my age. I still recall my introduction to this concept back in 2001.

The Epiphany - I Had One, You Want One?

Recently I was visiting customers and prospects in the North East and during one of our meetings the customer stated, “…what NetApp is doing, in terms of storage virtualization, make us feel like NetApp is much more aligned with the goals of VMware than their parent company…”

This praise was shared while the customer told us how EMC is working to earn back their VMware (storage) business. Apparently the EMC team stating something to the effect that more companies run VMware on EMC than on any other storage platform and that the numbers from these surveys validated this claim.

The customer shared with us that what was very interesting in this data set was that NetApp's gains in market share was much more impressive than EMC's legacy market share.

VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast #48

Yesterday Chris Gebhardt and I had the privilege of being guests of John Troyer on episode 48 of the VMware Communities Podcast. On the podcast we discussed numerous topics regarding storage with VMware including Multipathing, performance, storage virtualization, DR, and backup and recovery.

vSphere Introduces the Plug-n-Play SAN

With today’s release of vSphere, VMware has introduced numerous new features and technologies all designed to advance the virtual evolution of our data centers. With this release VMware and their storage alliance partners have delivered Plug-n-Play SAN storage connectivity. As you begin downloading the final bits, refreshing your labs and planning your upgrade path to vSphere I’d like to dig into the considerations of and how one can deploy a robust, reliable, and greatly simplified P-n-P SAN architecture with vSphere and NetApp.

A New Era for Virtual Desktops

We are entering into an interesting time in the industry witnessed by the release of VMware View. View Manager, View Composer, Thin App, and Offline Desktop are well positioned to accelerate the adoption of virtual desktops in datacenters and to remote access devices.

Today I’d like to share some thoughts specific to reducing storage costs with VDI or View.  A major component in VMware View Composer is Linked Clones, which provides the ability to deploy hundreds of virtual desktops from a single desktop image.  In addition to storage savings, customers will be able to update deployed desktops deployed with View Composer by patching the master desktop image.

Recently I have received a number of inquiries as to how View Composer and Linked Clones integrate with NetApp’s storage saving Dedupe and zero cost provisioning FlexClone technologies.  I’d like to take this time to discuss this topic and how VMware and NetApp are engineering the best of breed virtual desktop solutions.

I will caution you in advance, this post is a bit lengthy because we have much to share and discuss.