Storage Consolidation & Networking Expert Greg Schulz

As businesses in any industry grow, they often find themselves with both more data to mange and more costs to contain. Storage consolidation, networking and Green IT can all make for effective solutions if implemented in line with overall business needs and objectives.

Our Data Center Leaders Interview Series offers detailed advice on how companies can best keep synch needs and objectives with data center solutions, courtesy of Greg Schulz.  Schulz is founder of the independent IT analyst consultancy firm StorageIO Group and author of the books The Green and Virtual Data Center(1) and Resilient Storage Networks(2).

Below, we discuss with Greg how to begin development of a storage consolidation or networking plan, detail the benefits of Green IT and debunk the myth that business continuity and disaster recovery are only for the rich and famous:

Evolving Solutions:
In your book, Resilient Storage Networks, you speak of the growing need to store any piece of data and access it at any time.  At what point do businesses put themselves in danger of not being able to achieve this goal without a storage networking solution?

Greg Schulz:
The reality is that a networked storage, or, storage networking solution if you prefer, enables scaled connectivity either from a performance, accessibility, available or all of the above perspective beyond the limits of a dedicated direct attached connection.

Note that a direct attached connection could be a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Fibre Channel or iSCSI without a switch topology. Thus as more servers need to access shared storage than what can be provided by the native ports on a storage system, or, more storage is needed than what can be attached to the native ports on a server, a storage network becomes beneficial.

On the flip side to this, a storage network or networked storage solution can also exist in the form of a switch-less configuration, granted some of the storage networking police who prefer switches might not agree with the definition. For example, a large storage system with 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 or more Fibre Channel ports could be considered and are often marketed as a storage network solution.

The point is this, a benefit of a networked, or, storage network storage solution is the ability to scale performance, availability, capacity and connectivity beyond the limits of a smaller dedicated internal based storage solution.

Thus the emphasis should be on getting organizations to deploy shared storage that can grow with the business including attaching to larger switch based storage networks when and where needed.

Resilient Storage Networks by Greg Schulz

Evolving Solutions:
What do you recommend as a first step in the development of a storage consolidation or networking plan?

Greg Schulz:
Take a step back from the various technologies and tools. Have a clear understanding of business objectives and requirements to know how to make a linkage to the benefit of the solution and how the business is sustained or enhanced.

This helps to build a business case and then measure the ROI impact for future project enhancements particularly during tough economic times. Where this comes into play is being able to map to the business the technology that is needed to enable sustainability thus requires funding compared to those technologies or initiatives that would be nice to have or seen as discretionary and thus miss out on funding.

Also, keep a balanced approach to avoid tunnel vision on space capacity utilization. While there is a lot of rhetoric about the need to drive up storage or space utilization, don’t do it at the expense of degraded performance or introducing application instability or degraded quality of serve. Some systems have a low utilization to meet quality of service or other performance or service level requirements in which case the solution can be to move those applications onto faster performance storage in order to achieve affiance.

Keep in perspective what it is that you are looking to move or the problem being fixed. Thus, management insight tools are needed that can shed light not just on storage space capacity utilization, that also show performance and activity usage information. Find a balance between performance, availability, capacity and energy (PACE) o meet a given service level requirement and cost points.

These and others themes are discussed in more detail in my new book “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC) available at Amazon and other venues.

Evolving Solutions:
How do green IT strategies synch with storage networking?

Greg Schulz:
Green IT strategies which are really about addressing and enabling business sustainability and growth by optimizing IT and data infrastructures have a strong synergy with efficiency enabling technologies including networked storage or storage networking as well as virtualization among others.

Most organizations do not buy and deploy networked storage, regardless of if SAN, NAS, Fibre Channel, FCoE or iSCSI just for the sake of buying it, that is unless they have a really good sales rep.  Instead, most organizations deploy storage networks as a means of improving efficiency and optimizing how IT resources are managed and used. Likewise, most organizations don’t or can’t afford to go green just for the sake of meeting PR or other initiatives and many organizations see green as being all about carbon footprints.

The reality is that most organizations have a need to address their power, cooling, floor-space or footprint as well as other environmental issues to support and sustain business growth, these are the other aspect of being green.

Ironically it is these issues that most organizations have been tasked with addressing and in many cases not making the connection that these are in fact green it issues that by addressing them, they in fact are being green. This paradigm is known as the green gap, thus tools, technologies and techniques including storage networks can help to improve on affiance and optimization enabling enhanced IT infrastructure resource management (IRM).

The Green and Virtual Data Center by Greg Schulz

Evolving Solutions:
In your experience, are small businesses or major enterprises more aware of the need for storage networking solution?

Greg Schulz:
There is a common myth that business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) are issues and concerns only for the rich and famous meaning only for large enterprises or high profile financial organizations. The reality is that BC/DR along with general HA and data protection is affordable and the issues are applicable to organizations of all size.

Given the different size, scope and scale of these various sized organizations, there may or may not be the awareness of the benefits of specific technology including networked storage, thus there is an opportunity to show how data protection including BC/DR can be enabled and enhanced leveraging storage networks and other related technologies.

Likewise, there is an opportunity to leverage networked and shared storage for organizations of all sizes. At the high-end that can mean Fibre Channel and moving forward Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or iSCSI in mid-sized environments along with NAS, while smaller environments can leverage low cost Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS or even shared, multi-host SAS based storage systems for small Exchange, SQL and VMware based clusters.

Thus tiered access for storage networks enables the most applicable technology to be mapped to the business needs of different environments. For example, a small environment can attach and share a dual controller RAID array such as the equipped with SAS/SATA disk drives attached via shared SAS, or larger environments share the same array across more servers with native iSCSI attachment, or even larger environments use the same array configured with Fibre Channel for either high performance scenarios.

Those are great example of tiered access to a tiered storage device enabling a networked or storage networked device for organizations of different sizes.

Evolving Solutions:
Leaving the company anonymous, what is the largest data disaster you’ve witnessed that could have been avoided with resilient storage networking?

Greg Schulz:
Not all disasters make the headline news, in fact, every day there are countless mini-disasters that due to configuration, best practices and how technology is used combine to contain these from expanding and rolling into major disasters.

In one situation it was a scenario where resilient components were interconnected thereby negating the benefits of no single point of failure (SPOF) resulting in downtime. In another scenario, lack of change control and configuration management, in another, it was a focus on capturing data in as small time slice interval as possible, only to not have captured all of the data that was still in memory thus resulting in an inconsistent recovery.

Another scenario was an outage where the IT systems were available; however no one could access the data as the network links were down including those from a secondary carrier who just happened to use the same common back-bone carrier.

Let’s not forget about scenarios where RAID and replication without point in time based snapshots or backups were confused with being a replacement for backup.

In those scenarios, data was in one case replicated to another site however when deleted at the primary, it was deleted at the secondary. In a related scenario, RAID was assumed to be the backup, that is until the entire RAID storage system became un-available including the snapshots that were stored on the device.

Don’t confuse or assume RAID and replication alone are replacements for backup and data protection as they need to be combined with some type of time recovery point based technique for complete or comprehensive data protection.

The common theme in all of these is that it’s not how much hardware or software, how many 9’s availability, it’s the people, processes and procedures including how they are configured to avoid, isolate or eliminate faults from spreading into disasters.

Thus, look for single points of failure, avoid being a penny wise and pound foolish. For example in the quest to save a few hundred or perhaps thousand dollars by skipping a second HBA or adapter on a server that is going to be used for virtualization and consolidation only to expose it as a single point of failure where multiple servers no exist (e.g. multiple eggs in one basket).

The bottom line is this, if something can happen it will, all technology will or can fail regardless of vendor marketing spin, however what differentiates various vendors is how they have learned from these faults or issues to configure around them leveraging best practices and their experience.

(1)The Green and Virtual Data Center is published by Auerbach-CRC.
(2) Resilient Storage Networks is published by Elsevier.

Learn more at www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com or on twitter @storageio.