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Storage Virtualization For Dummies
Storage Virtualization For Dummies
Virtualization
FOR
DUMmIES
‰
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Hubert Yoshida
Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
Hitachi Data Systems
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The good news is that this journey does not need to be walked
alone. A lot of experience has been developed over the five or so
years during which this technology has made its breakthrough
into storage. Many organizations have transitioned their
dysfunctional legacy storage environments into highly flexible
and agile infrastructures that more closely align and adapt
to their business needs. Vendors have the technology, best
practices, and skills to assist you, and resources such as this
book help put you on the right track to succeed.
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dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Storage Virtualization:
Getting Started
In This Chapter
✓ Understanding virtualization and how it applies to storage
✓ Identifying what makes an ideal system
✓ Familiarizing yourself with the evolution of storage virtualization
✓ Finding out what drives the need for storage virtualization
Defining Virtualization
If you look on the Internet, you’ll find any number of definitions
for virtualization as it relates to IT.
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Over the course of the next few decades, standard protocols (the
language used to communicate between devices) emerged, such
as the small computer system interface (SCSI), making it easy to
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These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any
dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any
dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any
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Reducing cost
As organizations deploy more and more applications into
their environment, with consequent growth of data (often
exponentially), many find they need to buy more storage more
frequently, putting a real strain on budgets. As more storage
is added, without effective storage management tools and
processes, more IT people are needed to keep it going, and
an unending cycle perpetuates. As more allocation requests
are met, more people are needed to monitor the health of the
infrastructure and protect the critical information by ensuring
it is replicated and can be recovered in the event of a failure,
requiring more storage.
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Going “green”
More than 20 years of research into carbon pollution now
strongly suggests that human activity is having a profound
impact on the Earth’s climate. The almost indisputable evidence
has now forced many governments to action by implementing
tangible strategies and policies that reduce carbon emissions.
As one of the many measures to tackle the problem, it calls for
countries to implement carbon emissions trading schemes to
steadily reduce pollution, but at a cost to businesses.
So what has all this got to do with storage? The net effect
of these new trading systems, coupled with the fact that
the world’s reserves of non-renewable resources are rapidly
depleting, means the cost of power is rising. In the past, the cost
of powering and cooling data centers was negligible and was
often not even factored into the IT budget. However, according
to an IDC article in 2008, recent surveys suggest that with
continued deployment of applications and data doubling every
18 months, power and cooling costs will grow eightfold by 2010!
In another survey, by Gartner Consulting, findings showed that
the power consumption required to run and cool data centers
accounts for almost a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions
from the information and communication technology sector.
And the StorageIO Group reports that storage itself accounts for
between 37 and 40 percent of total energy usage from hardware.
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Types of Storage
Virtualization
In This Chapter
✓ Examining storage virtualization throughout the infrastructure
✓ Knowing how to select appropriate storage solutions
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hard disks, spreading the data across all the spindles and
slicing them up in chunks called LUNs (logical unit numbers)
to deliver to servers. This method provides greater protection
against a physical drive failure, so if one were to stop working
for whatever reason, the system would not lose any valuable
data and continue to work. Similarly, storage network vendors
incorporate partitioning capabilities such as zones and virtual
storage area networks (VSANs) to separate workloads for
management and security purposes.
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In the server
Some of the earliest forms of storage virtualization came not
from the storage infrastructure, but from within the server, or,
more specifically, the server’s operating systems.
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Figure 2-2: Logical volume managers (LVMs) store information in file systems.
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Figure 2-4: In-band network storage virtualization is embedded in the I/O path.
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The same is true for storage. If the cost of the capacity were
the only factor to consider, then the answer would be simple:
Buy the disk from the guy who gave you the cheapest price per
terabyte!
In this chapter, we first look into these elements and just how
you can measure and evaluate them. Later in the chapter, we
explain Hitachi’s unique Storage Economics model, which
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Figure 3-1: This return on investment (ROI) over three years shows a break-
even point a little into the second year.
Figure 3-2: Total cost of ownership (TCO), comparing the status quo with an
alternative.
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Making Storage
Virtualization Real
In This Chapter
✓ Understanding key concepts
✓ Planning to virtualize your storage through objectives and analysis
✓ Implementing your virtualized storage solutions
✓ Migrating your data
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Here are some of the key ideas to get your head around:
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Implementing Storage
Virtualization
After you’ve identified the need for consolidation of your storage
environment and planned your storage virtualization, the
next step is to actually make the required logical and physical
changes to the storage environments.
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Figure 4-1: This example of a virtualized storage system uses two external
storage arrays.
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Figure 4-2: In this example, the streaming video is uninterrupted during data
migration.
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Creating a dynamic
provisioning pool
Dynamic provisioning is implemented using a concept called
a dynamic provisioning pool (DP pool). A large number of
drives can be part of a DP pool, and the storage controller
automatically stripes data across all available disk drives in the
pool. Implementing a pool over a large number of disk drives is
also known as wide striping.
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Space saving
Local and remote volume copy services that are “thin
provisioning-aware” consume less capacity. With traditional
provisioning, if you have a 2TB volume but only 100GB is actual
data, all of the 2TB will still be copied. In some cases, users
will create two or more local copies of their primary volumes.
With traditional provisioning this would consume lots of
capacity by copying empty blocks; thin or dynamic provisioning
eliminates this.
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After virtualizing the storage, the host may see two disks for
the same physical device, one for the virtualized device (target)
and the other for the original device (source). Understanding
the source device in the controller–target–device (such as
c1–t1–d1) combination and correlating it with the target device
(say, c2–t2–d2) is critical after the virtualization and volume
migration. This will help keep track of the actual storage model
and device, and keep the integrity of the data that resides on
the disk.
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✓ Make sure that the updating I/O rate is below 50 IOPS for
the source volume.
✓ Do not perform multiple migrations targeting the same
RAID (redundant array of independent disks) or array
group as this could adversely affect performance.
✓ Monitor the RAID group busy rates while selecting the
target LUNs for migrations.
✓ Do not perform migrations during the following operations:
• Backups or restores
• Application upgrades
• Month-end processing
• Quarter-end processing
• Year-end processing
• Payroll cycle
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Ask yourself:
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Always use the right software tools that can interface to and
are supported by the platform’s firmware, and that provide
enhanced levels of functionality to optimize and tune all drive
and RAID combinations.
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If the right metrics are put in place, with tools and processes to
help measure and manage them, then performance SLAs can be
established relatively easily.
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