5 must ask questions

8/3/2019 5 Must Ask Questions

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INFOSTOR

Executive Brief

5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN

Storage Consolidation Success

a QuinStreet Excutive Brief. 2011


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2011, QuinStreet, Inc.

5 Must-Ask Questions or SAN Storage Consolidation SuccesINFOSTOR

As an IT administrator youre likely well

aware o the pressure to keep costs in

check even though the amount o data

you need to store keeps growing and

application service levels need to be

maintained or improved.

Youre probably already dealing with

these issues with regards to your

server inrastructure by exploring or

introducing scale-out virtualization to

consolidate your servers. Virtualization

increases server utilization rates and

helps control costs like power and

cooling.

Your storage inrastructure needs

the same attention. There are at

least three reasons IT departments

are exploring storage consolidation

projects today. The rst is the need

to reduce costs both capital

expenditures (CapEx) and operating

expenditures (OpEx). A consolidated

storage environment when its done

right helps reduce CapEx because

your IT department is buying ewer

storage resources. Instead o adding

storage or each application and using

only a raction o the capacity thats

available, todays consolidated storage

systems let you buy and use a central

pool o storage capacity that is shared

by your applications. OpEx is reduced

because you have ewer systems to

manage and ewer systems to power

and cool.

The second reason businesses explore

storage consolidation is the increased

capacity o todays disk storage. Its

simply easier to store the data rom

multiple applications in a shared pool

because theres sucient capacity

available at an aordable price to

make it work. That wasnt the case a

ew years ago.

Finally, as we touched on earlier,

server virtualization is driving a move

toward storage consolidation projects.

Once youve consolidated your server

inrastructure, you need to consolidate

your storage to reap the ull benets

o your virtualization investment. I

you virtualize your servers and leave

the storage inrastructure alone,

youre leaving in place bottlenecks

that can negatively aect application

perormance.

To reap the benets o storage

consolidation, you need to do the

job right, which means asking the

important questions that will help

you nd the right solution or your

business. Weve put together a list

o ve such questions you should

consider as you embark on a SAN

storage consolidation project. Were

also going to explore the eatures o

Oracles Pillar Axiom 600, an industry-

leading SAN storage system that helps

solve many o the problems you might

ace as you consolidate your storage

environment.

Lets get started.

1. Will Your Storage

Consolidation Project Support

Multi-Tenancy?

Chances are your data center and

the IT proessionals that manage its

resources are already amiliar with

multi-tenancy. I youre virtualizing

the servers in your data center, then

youve already consolidated your

applications rom the old model o

server computing where each

application had its own server

to the virtual model, where many

applications can reside on a single

piece o hardware.


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Storage is ollowing the same path.

Applications are no longer relying

on dedicated, direct-attached

storage resources. Storage is now

a shared resource that uses a high-

perormance storage area network

(SAN), or at times a Network Attached

Storage (NAS) architecture, to keep

management time and costs low while

increasing utilization rates.

The reason youre exploring storage

consolidation or your business is

because you want to buy less storage

capacity, use what you buy more

eciently and make the management

o your storage resources easier.

You might think multi-tenancy is the

easy part o a storage consolidation

project. Given the dramatic growth

in the capacity o modern disks, its

hardly a challenge to get the data

rom multiple applications on a single

storage resource. The problem with

multi-tenancy is that not all o your

business applications are equal.

Inter-application intererence is what

happens when multiple applications

are essentially ghting over the same

storage resources. I youre planning

to consolidate your storage and

take advantage o multi-tenancy, the

applications will essentially be lining

up or I/O perormance on a rst-in,

rst-out (FIFO) basis. A business-critical

application that processes orders and

contributes revenue to your business,

or example, could compete or

storage resources with a less-critical

human resources application, such

as the one that allows employees to

submit time o requests. Its important

that you support multi-tenancy with

the ability to align performance with

business value.

Most o todays storage controllers

were not built in a way that allows

Quality o Service (QoS) to be

controlled while under load. They

allocate storage resources such as

disk access, controller bandwidth,

controller CPU cycles and command

queuing priorities using simple FIFO

prioritization. They cannot dynamically

manage QoS to give business-critical

applications the appropriate level

o I/O perormance independent o

what other applications are doing

on the storage system. The only

way to control how applications

access storage resources is manual

intervention, i.e., moving data to

dierent drives or arrays. In the past,

many businesses dealt with the

issue o application intererence by

buying more storage capacity (over

provisioning), which helped solve the

problem but didnt help control costs

or increase utilization rates.

Your storage consolidation project

will deliver the most benet to the

organization i it includes a way

to prioritize workloads. The Pillar

Axiom 600 SAN storage system

uses its integrated, dynamic I/O

priority management to optimize

the business value o the application

environment. In short, it prioritizes

I/O requests based on the business

requirements or perormance and

the value o the application. It is

application-aware storage.

Because your workloads and business

priorities can and do change over

time, all QoS policies in the Pillar

Axiom 600 can be modied non-

disruptively at any time. Application

QoS can be increased or decreased

as appropriate so seasonal workloads,

such as quarter-end reporting or an

increase in transactions around the

holidays, can benet rom a temporary

increase in QoS settings.

The Pillar Axiom 600 SAN storage

system uses its integrated, dynamicI/O priority management to

optimize the business value of the

application environment.


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The Pillar Axiom also supports Storage

Domains that allow users to physically

isolate specic data to specic storage

resources to ensure that there is no

inter-application intererence.

Were going to discuss how the Pillar

Axiom 600 can help you get the most

out o your storage consolidation

project, as we examine more

questions you need to ask, but here

are the key takeaways or now:

Your storage consolidation project

needs to support multi-tenancy to

be successul

Multi-tenancy can lead to inter-

application intererence

You need to align application

perormance with business value

The Pillar Axiom 600 lets users

dynamically adjust its settings or

data prioritization


Consolidation Project Have Non-

Disruptive Scale?

I you wanted to nd one advantage in

the way data centers relied on direct-

attached storage to support each

application in the data center, it might

be that it was easy to scale. The IT sta

simply added more storage resources

when they were needed, which they

did, and eventually ound themselves

over-provisioned with low utilization

rates. It was easy, but it wasnt cost-

eective or ecient.

Today, thanks to scale-out

virtualization, making a change to one

application can impact the other 20

applications that reside on the same

server i youre not careul. As you plan

your storage consolidation project,

you need to ensure it includes non-

disruptive scale. That means creating

a consolidated storage environment

that can grow with your business

without requiring that applications

be taken ofine to add capacity and

avoiding rip-and-replace or orklit

upgrades that cost time, money and

productivity.

The Pillar Axiom 600 is a modular

storage platorm that can help you

consolidate your storage resources

and provide non-disruptive scale. It

includes three intelligent hardware

assemblies with their own Pillar-

specic nomenclature:

Pillar Axiom Slammers (storage

controllers)

Pillar Axiom Bricks (drive enclosures

Pillar Axiom Pilot (management

platorm)

The Pillar Axiom Slammer storage

controllers are completely redundant

with dual active/active control units,

ans, power and mirrored cache. The

Pillar Axiom Brick storage enclosure

can include a range o drive type

serial ATA (SATA), Fibre Channel (FC)

and solid-state drives (SSD) to

meet the budget and perormance

demands o your business.

The Pillar Axiom 600s RAID controllers

are not in the storage processor;

rather, they are moved to the Pillar

Axiom Brick to help eliminate

perormance bottlenecks. Each Pillar

Axiom Brick actually contains two

redundant RAID controllers. This makes


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it easy to scale the Pillar Axiom 600

system because as you expand capacity

by adding more storage enclosures,

the additional RAID controllers you

need will automatically be added.

One Pillar Axiom 600 system can

support as many as our Pillar Axiom

Slammers, which makes it easy to add

storage processing power without

purchasing another storage system.

In the past, trying to scale your

storage to keep up with business

demands meant some combination

o adding capacity, introducing

additional management points, paying

or extra sotware licenses or dealing

with downtime, as you rip and replace

an old system that no longer meets

demand. The Pillar Axiom 600 allows

legacy and modern technologies to

coexist in the same storage platorm.

It also allows you to easily and non-

disruptively move application data

o o older media to new media and

allows you to remove the old media

without disrupting applications.

Well be urther discussing the

architecture o the Pillar Axiom 600

as we address more questions about

storage consolidation. Heres what you

need to know about non-disruptive

scale:

Your business requirements and

your priorities will keep changing

and your consolidated storage

environment needs to change with

them

Rip-and-replace upgrades to

storage inrastructure are costly

in terms o time, budget and

application downtime

The Pillar Axiom 600 has the

ability to scale both capacity and

perormance in a non-disruptive

manner


Consolidation Project Meet

Compliance and Security

Requirements?

Even the least tech-savvy amongyour customers understands the

dangers o a data breach thanks to

the attention surrounding a number

o high-prole breaches in recent

years. Customer data needs to be

kept secure, regardless o the industry

where your company does business.

In an increasing number o industries,

government and industry regulations

add another layer o complexity to

your storage environment.

A business that keeps sensitive

inormation about its employees

in a PeopleSot application needs

to consider its storage security

requirements when it embarks on a

storage consolidation project. The same

goes or a retailer that keeps customer

credit card data in its database.

A business that cannot allow data rom

dierent applications to co-mingle

on the same server has compliance

concerns it must address in its plans

or consolidated storage. With the

old direct-attached storage model,

it was easy to keep data apart when

regulations required, but once

again it led to ineciency and over-

provisioning.

The Pillar Axiom 600 lets you create

multiple virtual storage systems

within the same storage pool. Any

combination o Pillar Axiom Bricks

(storage enclosures) can be grouped

into individual storage domains. These

One Pillar Axiom 600 system

can support as many as four Pillar

Axiom Slammers, which makes iteasy to add storage processing

power without purchasing another

storage system.


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storage domains can have assigned

LUNs and le systems that are isolated

rom the other storage domains in

the system. Having these domains

reside on a single physical Pillar

Axiom 600 storage system will help

you meet many o the goals o your

storage consolidation project, such

as reducing CapEx, power, cooling

and management expenses (OpEx). It

also helps improve your security and

compliance measures by isolating data

to dierent media and dierent host

I/O ports i desired.

The Pillar Axiom 600 also has

sotware solutions available to help

with your business security and

compliance needs. Pillar Axiom

Data Protection Manager provides

application-consistent snapshots

or business-critical applications like

Microsot Exchange and Microsot

SQL Server. It provides consistency

groups or recovering data spread

across multiple LUNs and creating

application snapshots using its

CloneLUN eature.

Pillar Axiom SecureWORMs

delivers cost-eective, scalable,

non-erasable, non-rewritable

storage or compliant archives

and the unalterable xed-content

environments that some regulations

require. Its industry-accepted write

once, read many (WORM) technology

enables archiving solutions with

auditing eatures to comply with

corporate governance requirements,

government and industry regulations

and compliance initiatives.

You need to take security and

compliance into consideration when

you create a consolidated storage

environment. Here are some acts to

keep in mind:

It was easy to isolate data or

security and compliance reasons

when data centers relied on

direct-attached storage or their

applications

The need to isolate storage

resources was a common cause o

over-provisioning and low utilization

rates in many data centers

The Pillar Axiom 600 allows users

to create multiple virtual storage

systems within the same storage

pool

The storage domains in the Pillar

Axiom 600 are isolated rom each

other in the same systems, allowing

business to maintain isolation or

compliance purposes and still

take advantage o the benets o

storage consolidation

4. Are you getting efciency and

perormance by consolidating

storage?

You downloaded this paper because

youre interested in consolidating the

storage environment at your business.

And the reason youre likely intrigued

by storage consolidation is because it

stands to increase your data centers

eciency in a number o ways.

Having ewer storage resources helps

you save on CapEx. Fewer resources

to manage, power and cool helps

you save on OpEx. Getting better

utilization rates or your storage

inrastructure means you dont have

to invest in new storage resources as

the amount o data you need to store

continues to increase.

While the advantages o consolidating

your storage are very attractive, many

storage administrators experience

a serious disadvantage as well:


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perormance degradation. Ater

storage administrators let the direct-

attached storage model behind, they

turned to FC SAN or IP-based NAS

storage architectures. SANs and NAS

seem to grow endlessly because o

the sheer amount o electronic data

businesses store and applications

create. With multiple applications

eeding into these consolidated

storage pools, bottlenecks were

inevitable and perormance suered.

The Pillar Axiom 600 storage system

guarantees that youll increase your

eciency by promising 80 percent

utilization rates. Gartner reports that

industry-average utilization rates are

in the 30 to 40 percent range. But the

Pillar Axiom 600 goes a step urther

than eciency, delivering eciency

with perormance.

The perormance gains begin with

the Pillar Axiom 600s innovative

architecture, which places RAID

controllers within storage enclosures

(Pillar Axiom Bricks). Moving the RAID

inrastructure into the Brick reduces

the overhead o RAID calculations

and improves drive rebuild times. This

helps perormance scale linearly with

increasing capacity.

This distributed RAID architecture

perorms much better than legacy

approaches to storage consolidation.

Those legacy approaches might have

as many as 1,000 drives assigned to

as ew as two RAID controllers. In the

Pillar Axiom, up to 128 individual RAID

controllers can all operate in parallel.

The second aspect o the Pillar Axiom

600 that helps maintain perormance

while increasing eciency is the

aorementioned Quality o Service

(QoS) capabilities. By allowing storage

administrators to dene the level o

service that an application requires,

QoS ensures that business-critical

applications are given priority when it

comes to storage resources even

when the applications are using the

same storage pool. Previous methods

o storage consolidation required

adding capacity or ripping out an old

system and replacing it with a new one

when perormance was suering.

The Pillar Axiom QoS manager is a

powerul system with ne-grain contro

over multiple aspects o the system to

ensure applications can perorm to the

level o their business requirements.

It maximizes the use o I/O priority,

the CPU, cache and capacity. It can

also automatically congure spindle

striping levels, mirroring, priority

queues, network bandwidth and

caching algorithms.

As you explore your options or

storage consolidation, make sure

youre not sacricing perormance

when you gain eciency. Here are a

ew points you need to remember:

Youre consolidating your storage

inrastructure to increase eciency,

but methods o consolidation

like FC SANs and NAS will

eventually suer rom perormance

degradation as they grow

The Pillar Axiom 600 storage system

guarantees an 80 percent utilization

rate compared to an industry

average o 30 to 40 percent

The distributed RAID architecture

o the Pillar Axiom 600 helps thesystem maintain perormance, while

it increases eciency

The QoS management in the Pillar

Axiom 600 ensures that business-

critical application can perorm up

to their requirements even when

they share the same storage pool as

other applications

The Pillar Axiom QoS manager is

a powerful system with fine-grain

control over multiple aspects of

the system to ensure applications

can perform to the level of their

business requirements.


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5. Will your storage

consolidation project help you

reduce costs?

Consolidating your storage

inrastructure is a good idea on

many levels, but just because youre

undertaking such a project doesnt

mean youll automatically reduce your

costs. Your storage consolidation

project needs to do a number o

things to ensure your business is

reducing costs. It needs to:

Simpliy the management o yourstorage resources

Deliver high utilization rates

Grow without adding additional

license ees

Scale up and scale out as your

storage needs evolve

Scale without needing to rip and

replace the entire system

Avoid orklit upgrades

The technology in the Pillar Axiom

600 storage system is designed to

deliver overall cost control, while

allowing users to consolidate their

storage environment and deliver the

perormance required by business-

critical applications.

Thanks to the Pillar Axiom Pilot policy

controller the intuitive management

user interace o the Pillar Axiom

600 administrators can easily deploy,

provision, manage and maintain the

system without special training. It

enables policy-based provisioning and

dynamic perormance prioritization,

ault management, capacity planning

and guided maintenance.

Users o the Pillar Axiom 600 storage

system are guaranteed 80 percent

utilization rates (as much as 50 percent

higher than the industry average),

which means they are able to use

the capacity they paid or instead

o over-provisioning and paying or

extra capacity. The Pillar Axiom 600

system is one o the most fexible

SAN storage systems available,

allowing you to consolidate multiple

applications onto a common storage

pool that can use solid-state drives

and/or Fibre Channel or SATA drives.

Theres no end in sight or the problem

o data growth, and when you combine

that with the ever-changing business

requirement that todays businesses

ace, its clear you need a storage system

that can scale with your business to help

keep costs in check. The Pillar Axiom

600s modular architecture provides

the fexibility to add capacity or

change application priorities without

disrupting applications or undertaking

dicult migrations.

Because one Pillar Axiom 600 can

support as many as our Pillar Axiom

Slammer controllers, users can add

storage processing power without

purchasing another entire system.

The system grows with your business,

and the modular inrastructure means

growth does not mean adding

management points, extra sotware

licenses or the costly downtime that

comes with ripping and replacing

existing systems.

There are a number o ways that your

storage consolidation project can

actually end up costing you money

instead o reducing costs. Keep in

mind the ollowing:


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Storage consolidation projects

that result in systems that are

complicated to manage or add

management points as they scale

can increase costs

I your storage consolidation project

doesnt lead to high utilization

rates, then youre not getting your

moneys worth rom your storage

investment

The Pillar Axiom 600 is a single

storage system that guarantees

80 percent utilization rates and

provides or dierent types o data

on dierent drives

The Pillar Axiom 600 has a modular

architecture that allows it to scale

up and scale out without ripping

and replacing, without causing

application downtime and without

adding sotware licensing ees

Conclusion

A successul storage consolidation

project can cut costs or your business

over the long term, but only i its

implemented in a way that gives your

organization the fexibility it needs to

deal with changing business conditions.

This fexibility should include:

The ability to not only provide

storage or a number o

applications, but to prioritize those

applications so business-critical

applications have the resources

they need

The ability to scale in a non-

disruptive manner so your storage

inrastructure can grow with your

business without costly downtime

or orklit upgrades

The ability to provide the security

and compliance your business

needs while still consolidating

storage on a single system

The ability to increase eciency

without sacricing perormance

The ability to help save costsby using intuitive management

interaces, ew management

points and increasing storage

utilization rates

Oracles Pillar Axiom 600 provides

application-aware unied storage

with storage domains that can isolate

data, a modular inrastructure that

scales with your business and industry-leading perormance and utilization

rates. I youre exploring storage

consolidation or your business,

you can learn more about the Pillar

Axiom 600 storage system at: http://

www.oracle.com/us/products/

servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-

axiom-600-488677.html
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-axiom-600-488677.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-axiom-600-488677.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-axiom-600-488677.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-axiom-600-488677.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-axiom-600-488677.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-axiom-600-488677.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-axiom-600-488677.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/san/pillar-axiom-600-488677.html

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