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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

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SNAPSHOT 1

Cloud storage widely deployed but not just for backup

EDITOR’S NOTE / CASTAGNA

Shopping for storage? Prepare to be confused

DR MONITORING

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

STORAGE REVOLUTION / TOIGO

Beware of vendors repackaging old ideas

STORAGE

AUGUST 2014, VOL. 13, NO. 6

SNAPSHOT 2

Use of cloud storage services poised to accelerate

HOT SPOTS / BUFFINGTON

Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

DATA MIGRATION

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

READ-WRITE / TANEJA

They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

MANAGING THE INFORMATION THAT DRIVES THE ENTERPRISE

Moving target: Mobile backup

Smartphones, tablets and phablets are being used more and more to create new data

or modify existing files—without backup, that data could be lost.

www.storagedecisions.com

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 3

“CONFUSION NOW HATH MADE HIS MASTERPIECE.”

I’m willing to bet Shakespeare’s Macduff probably wasn’t describing the current storage scene when he deliv-ered that line to Macbeth. And yet, it does seem apropos.

There was a time when data storage technologies de-veloped slowly and took their time evolving into actual, useful products. That’s still happening in some pockets of the storage world, but for the most part, unfortunately, chaos reigns.

Consider solid-state storage. That technology seemed destined to play out in a predictable fashion, with sol-id-state drives taking over spinning disk, yet there have been surprises along the way.

Solid-state’s impact has been profound and, as a result,

hard disk sales are sputtering. A recent IDC report re-vealed that revenues from sales of external disk storage systems dipped by 5.2% year over year for the first quar-ter of 2014. Toss in internal storage and the picture was even bleaker: a 6.9% drop for all disk storage systems. IDC noted these disappointing numbers (at least to the few hard drive makers left on the planet) represented the biggest nosedive since 2009—and everyone remembers that 2009 was not a very good year at all.

But the downturn in the hard disk market isn’t nec-essarily reflected by a similarly dramatic upswing in sol-id-state storage sales. Here’s the twist: those revenues, unit sales and capacity sales are all climbing, but seemingly not at a rate that can compensate for the hard disk falloff. Solid-state helped usher in a mini-revolution of storage efficiency consciousness, with techs such as deduplica-tion, compression, caching and tiering helping to offset the big-ticket price tags of solid-state, but it did little (or nothing) to ease the capacity crunch most data centers struggle with. So if we’re buying relatively low capacity solid-state instead of 2 TB, 4 TB or even 6 TB hard disks, where’s all that data going?

It’s probably not going to tape. Year after year, our pur-chasing surveys have shown a steady drop in interest—and planned purchases—in tape gear. On our most recent survey, fielded last spring, only 11% of respondents said they would increase their use of tape in 2014. If you’re

EDITOR’S LETTER RICH CASTAGNA

Storage shopping not getting any simplerYou may feel like a mouse in a maze if you’re shopping for storage these days.

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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

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STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 4

a member of the “tape-is-dead” camp, you might be sur-prised to learn that anyone planned to increase their use of the technology. But the 11% figure was the lowest we’ve ever seen—and we’re talking about 12 years’ worth of sur-veys. Even considering the high capacities of modern tape media, with tape’s dwindling use it’s not likely to pick up all that much of the capacity slack.

So, it might seem logical that all of the data that used to live on disk has now taken up residence in the cloud. While logical, perhaps, it’s not a reality … yet. The same surveys that helped us track the downward spiral of tape are leading us on the upward path of cloud storage. But it’s a very, very gradual upward path. Over a five-year period, the number of companies using cloud storage has grown from approximately 14% to 30%—a decent, if not breathtaking, ascent. But the degree to which those companies are using cloud storage, based on the volume of their cloud-based data, indicates there’s probably a fair amount of piloting, testing, dabbling and proof-of- concepting going on.

Some observers might point to the new storage para-digms that have done a good job of occupying the con-sciousness of storage managers, if not their data centers. New approaches like software-defined storage (or storage virtualization) and object storage aren’t likely to affect the hard disk/solid-state equation just by their very nature, but interest in these technologies might be a contributing factor to the slowdown in the purchase of traditional stor-age arrays. There may be enough interest and anticipation about which of these technologies will eventually emerge to slow all storage purchasing down a bit as IT takes a

wait-and-see approach.So the state of storage is pretty confusing right now.

On one hand, there are a number of startups that have carved out small but impressive niches in the last few years. Companies like Nimble, Nutanix and SimpliVity, among others, have brought a bunch of fresh ideas and new architectures to the storage table and are seeing suc-cess in convincing users that it isn’t so perilous to stray off the path of only buying storage gear from big, big vendors.

What might be most interesting about this latest crop of startups is that most of them haven’t been gobbled up by those big, big vendors and, in many case, aren’t looking for that kind of exit. Still, there are enough transactions going down that you may still need a scorecard to keep track. Stars can rise and fall quickly. Witness Fusion-io; once the poster child for solid-state storage, it’s now been scarfed up by SanDisk, a company that not too long ago didn’t have much of a presence in enterprise storage.

For the most part, the big, big vendors don’t seem to be doing all that much innovating, but rather they lumber on, still relying on traditional storage fare for the bulk of their revenues. But it’s tempting to look for little signs that

NEW STORAGE PARADIGMS HAVE DONE A GOOD JOB OF OCCUPYING THE CONSCIOUS-NESS OF STORAGE MANAGERS, IF NOT THEIR DATA CENTERS.

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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 5

Home

Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

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the big guys aren’t asleep at the wheel and new ideas and new products are on the way. Take IBM, for instance. The company recently broke off its relationship with NetApp in which it resold NetApp boxes as IBM N Series NAS systems. Sure, N Series didn’t account for a big slice of IBM’s or NetApp’s pie, but now it looks like IBM will focus on developing and selling its own NAS and multiprotocol storage systems instead. When you consider the seeming distaste IBM has for hardware these days, its focus on

storage development might be very significant. It seems to suggest storage hasn’t yet become just a commodity with the only innovation coming on the software side.

Sorting all this out will be tough. That’s the bad part. But the good part is that there are so many technology and vendor alternatives available today.

“Lay on, Macduff!” n

RICH CASTAGNA is TechTarget’s VP of Editorial/Storage Media Group.

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 6

MAYBE IT’S A sign of the times: the earnings reports of leading storage array vendors are in the tank, product announcements tend to be humdrum “incremental re-leases,” and unemployed smart guys are contacting me to ask if I know of any job opportunities. Makes you wonder if the Great Recession is really over.

A short time ago, an article in the San Jose Mercury News reported an uptick in plastic surgeries in Northern Califor-nia. What distinguished this particular rise, the reporter noted, was that the folks in the doctors’ waiting rooms are now predominantly men seeking procedures that will “de-age” them so they can find work among Silicon Valley startups. Turns out, if you’re over 30 (and look it), it’s as-sumed you don’t have any fresh or innovative technology

ideas left in your kit.A lot of my friends are pushing 60 and can remember

when it was their generation that declared anyone over 30 as untrustworthy—so I guess it’s a case of what goes around comes around. But a lot of these underemployed “old-timers” know exactly what the score is in storage technology and in IT generally. They have experience using technologies as well as experience developing new technologies, and they know how to evangelize and mar-ket technologies. It’s a combination that affords a wise perspective about the way things are.

Perhaps what separates the old-timers from the newbies is a sense of realism. Having learned and re-learned the old saw about being able to “fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but never all of the people all of the time,” they question the indus-try’s ability to boil the tech ocean with some half-baked notion of future computing. For every innovator who gets lucky, there are thousands of wannabes in the Valley who are there just to spend venture capitalist (VC) money. For every lionized startup CEO with a rags-to-riches success story, there are a lot of serial entrepreneurs who simply change T-shirt logos every couple of years and live off the kindness of greedy hedge fund managers in search of the Next Big Thing.

Technology, in the best of circumstances, evolves. Poor technology revolves—like the insanity Einstein described

STORAGE REVOLUTION JON TOIGO

Low expectations yield disappoint-ing technologiesWarmed-over or half-baked technologies might produce profits, but they won’t solve storage puzzles.

Home

Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 7

of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm among older IT practitioners regarding software-defined storage, cloud and virtualization is that they recognize them as “revolutionary” in the actual sense of the word: Some-thing we’ve seen over and over again in our careers, which is a recurring pattern supported by the VC community’s desire for another tech bubble that will fill up their coffers until it bursts (leaving clueless IT executives and dead start-ups in its wake).

Here’s an excerpt from an email I received from a friend of many years, who also happens to be a recently down-sized corporate executive with a big software company.

Frankly I got off the virtualization believer list when I realized that we were creating massive complexity (managing in virtual vs. real space) to save money as server costs plummet. I concluded that the increase in management complexity needed to make a virtual world look real was not worth it. Most customers aren’t running near as efficient[ly] as virtual promised, and the cost of virtualization software makes you wonder about sub-optimization vs. just buying more stuff or mov[ing] to the cloud. I am not convinced that most IT shops can afford to manage their stuff efficiently, that is why I think they will all be in the cloud in spite of the challenges of security, etc. I have yet to see an enter-prise shop with elastic computing that worked or was worth the complexity.

The fellow makes me want to start up a new software

company, one that eschews the current memes of the moment in technology and goes straight to the heart of the problem in IT: a lack of management of the infra-structure and the data that resides on it. Frankly, all the virtualization, cloud and software-defined stories I’ve

been reading about lately strike me as half-baked efforts to solve the woes of utilization inefficiency—in storage, servers and networks—not by addressing the core issues of infrastructure and data management, but by using the plastic surgeon’s techniques of virtualization to mask them from view.

If you listen to propaganda from VMware and even Microsoft around software-defined storage, you’d think de-evolving back to server-attached storage will magically solve the problems of storage scalability and provision-ing. The wise old guys in the industry offer their “Yeah … buts”—“Yeah, you can keep fielding direct-attached storage, but what’s all that array-to-array replication going to do to your LAN bandwidth and end-user experience?” Or they might say, “Yeah, you can hide poor storage

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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

IT MAY SOUND LIKE US OLD- TIMERS ARE JUST THROWING COLD WATER ON FRESH IDEAS, BUT IT’S ONLY BECAUSE THE IDEAS AREN’T REALLY NEW OR FRESH.

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 8

management by playing a shell game and replicating VMDKs and VHDs all over hell and half of Georgia, but what does that do to your storage budget besides grow capacity demand by 300% per year?”

It may sound like us old-timers are just throwing cold water on fresh ideas, but it’s only because the ideas aren’t really new or fresh. By and large, these “revolutionary” technologies reflect the soft bigotry of low expectations. VCs don’t really expect startups to fix problems. They only care about spinning the innovation story enough to enable them to sell the startup at a huge profit to a big-name company.

I fear this is happening even in some of the smaller storage shops I’ve long admired for their obstinate dedi-cation to fixing the problems customers know (but won’t admit) they have and that the industry ignores because consumers demonstrate little interest in paying extra to solve them. Another email from an engineer friend, who is an expert at adding hardware-agnostic RESTful man-agement APIs to storage products and was recently shown the door by his employer, expresses a sincere desire to do

some good in the IT world “by extending RESTful Web services to connect the compute, network and storage domains together … laying the foundation for all of the cool capabilities” that the cloud folks can only talk about.

But early conversations with VCs have him worried the endeavor won’t come to fruition because potential inves-tors question whether a business model exists that will support the success of an infrastructure management play. It’s so much easier to outsource problems to the cloud.

Meanwhile, companies like CommVault, SolarWinds, Tarmin and a few others slog on, often being forced to bend and twist an otherwise good narrative around data and services management into a kluge of marketing rheto-ric that has enough money behind it to rate “search engine optimized” keyword status. From where we old-timers are standing, this has got to change or we will eventually have an IT apocalypse. n

JON WILLIAM TOIGO is a 30-year IT veteran, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International, and chairman of the Data Management Institute.

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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 9

HISTORICALLY, BACKUP PROTECTED a company from the risk of losing data due to infrastructure failure or human error. If a system went down or someone deleted a file by mistake, a backup was there to save the day.

Employees are becoming more mobile, using smart-phones and tablets to access and modify files. As a result, there is a growing interest in protecting data on mobile devices, not just servers, desktops and laptop computers.

Companies need to have comprehensive endpoint data protection that includes mobile device backup, but most smartphones and tablets are largely inaccessible to third-party applications. Endpoint backup solutions typically use an agent installed on the device to access and back up data continuously to a central location or cloud. How-ever, mobile device manufacturers don’t really allow this approach. For the most part, a mobile device app can only access data created by that specific app.

In addition, smartphones and tablets don’t always store most of the files that users view and work on locally. Users typically download files from a cloud file-sharing service and either run them on a mobile app for that file type or access an application running in the cloud.

Many of these cloud-based file storage services also enable file sharing within groups of employees and even people outside the company, creating a new cloud storage

MOBILE BACKUP

Protecting data on mobile

devicesThere’s a growing awareness of the need

for mobile device data protection, but there are still plenty of challenges.

BY ERIC SLACK

HOMEDIC LIEW/THINKSTOCK

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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 10

category: enterprise file sync-and-share (EFSS) solutions.Does this mean a company’s backup solution doesn’t

need to support mobile devices? No, but it does mean its endpoint backup process must include the EFSS solution used by its employees. The good news is that many end-point backup applications now have an EFSS option.

FILE SYNC AND SHARE

EFSS is part of the IT landscape in most companies as a way to facilitate remote file access, empower a mobile workforce and to share appropriate files with partners, customers and suppliers.

On a desktop or laptop, these services typically synchro-nize a dedicated folder with a folder in the cloud and then share it with other users who can access and make changes to the files on a mobile device. When the file is saved, it’s resynchronized with the shared copy in the cloud. While this creates a secondary copy of a file in an alternate loca-tion, file sync and share is not the same as backup.

WHY EFSS ISN’T BACKUP

With a typical file sync-and-share solution IT isn’t storing the data, it’s somewhere in the cloud, outside the com-pany’s firewall. Effective backup is comprehensive and automated—a set-and-forget process—whereas EFSS is a manual process that only protects files that are saved to the sync folder.

Backup software typically offers versioning so users can roll back to an earlier version when a file is accidentally

deleted, changed or corrupted. With most sync-and-share solutions, versioning is variable, if it’s available at all. EFSS also uses continuous updating, which can be a problem with regard to data protection since corrupted data can overwrite good data and you wouldn’t know it. By creating a dedicated copy, backup can eliminate this risk and satisfy regulatory compliance in the process.

While file sync-and-share solutions are here to stay with mobile workers and their mobile devices, they don’t provide effective data protection by themselves. The best way around this is to find an endpoint backup solution that supports mobile devices and incorporates file sync and share. Fortunately, there are several products on the market that do.

DRUVA INSYNC AND INSYNC SHARE

inSync can be run in Druva’s cloud infrastructure using Amazon Web Services (AWS) or deployed on premises in a scalable architecture that’s compatible with object storage platforms from AWS, OpenStack and EMC Atmos. inSync actually backs up iOS, Android and Windows devices di-rectly, the only solution of the four we list here that does. It also offers cross-platform restore capabilities that can be user or IT initiated.

To help increase efficiency, the product has global de-duplication, WAN optimization, bandwidth throttling and auto-resume to handle interruptions, plus multi-thread-ing. inSync offers automated installation, centralized IT administration and monitoring, remote wipe, geo-loca-tion and device encryption.

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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 11

inSync Share is Druva’s file-sharing module that allows access to any files or folders backed up on any device, with the ability to save favorites locally on that device for offline access. Users can also leverage snapshots to provide access to previous file versions.

CODE42 CRASHPLAN AND SHAREPLAN

Code42’s CrashPlan can be implemented on-site, as a pri-vate cloud, as a public cloud or both. CrashPlan continu-ously backs up computers in the background and supports direct access of those backed up files on iOS, Android, Windows phone and Kindle devices. It leverages dedu-plication, compression and load balancing for network efficiency and offers data security features such as end-to-end encryption, remote device wipe and two-factor authentication.

SharePlan, Code42’s EFSS solution, was developed internally and uses the same CrashPlan engine, which allows it to be more tightly integrated into the compa-ny’s endpoint backup product and improves efficiency. If a device is lost, SharePlan can initiate a selective kill, meaning specific folders are removed without wiping the entire device.

EMC MOZYENTERPRISE AND MOZYSYNC

EMC’s MozyEnterprise is a cloud-only endpoint backup solution that backs up desktops and laptops, but not mobile devices. Instead, like most of these products, it provides access to backed-up files from iOS and Android devices. Mozy uses block-level, incremental backups and bandwidth throttling to improve network efficiency, but not deduplication or other data reduction technologies. MozyEnterprise provides encryption, simplified admin-istration and support for Active Directory.

MozySync is a sync-and-share app that creates a sync folder on the user’s computer and keeps it updated with

VDI platforms and mobile device supportMany virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) appli-

cations now include some form of mobile device

support. In theory, this lets employees use their

smartphones and tablets to run these virtual

desktop applications. It should also provide data

protection since those files are resident on the VDI

server, not the mobile device. But there are some

challenges with mobile VDI applications.

Not all VDI platforms support mobile devices.

Porting an application to a small screen that

doesn’t have a keyboard or mouse isn’t trivial, and

many VDI applications do a poor job of it. This can

frustrate employees used to sophisticated apps

designed for mobile devices to such an extent

that they download their own apps to complete

their work. n

Home

Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 12

their folder in the cloud. The mobile device app for Mozy-Sync provides access to the Sync folder from smartphones and tablets, and allows email attachments and documents from other apps to be uploaded to the Sync folder.

COMMVAULT EDGE

CommVault Edge is a module for the company’s Simpana enterprise backup solution that supports laptops and computers and allows users to access their backed-up files from iOS, Android and Windows devices. It uses global, source-side deduplication, bandwidth throttling and policy-based automation to maximize efficiency.

In 2013, CommVault added file sync-and-share func-tionality called Edge Sync and Edge Access that synchro-nizes files between desktops and laptops and creates a “personal data cloud” that’s accessible to users on mobile devices.

SECURITY vs. BACKUP

While most of the data that needs to be protected isn’t stored locally on a mobile device, there are still some risks an endpoint backup solution won’t address. Email mes-sages, texts and social media communications can all con-tain sensitive company information. Ensuring these aren’t available to anyone who steals or simply looks at a smart-phone while the device is unattended is important. Also, smartphones and tablets can, to a certain extent, represent

an intrusion risk to the company’s IT infrastructure.For these reasons, data loss prevention (DLP) and mo-

bile device management (MDM) applications need to be considered. DLP typically routes Internet traffic through a corporate DLP server and then monitors devices while in use, blocking transmissions to and from them when a potential breach is detected. MDM ensures OS and appli-cation software is updated and that data protection and security programs are working.

CONCLUSION

Now that employees work on their mobile devices, simply backing up smartphones and tablets isn’t enough to ensure an organization’s data is safe. For one thing, most backup solutions that directly back up mobile devices are cloud-only consumer services, not enterprise-grade backup solu-tions that also support laptops and desktop computers. In addition, most of the data a company needs to protect isn’t stored on mobile devices but in cloud file-sharing services.

But assuming data is safe because it’s in the cloud is naïve. Sync-and-share services don’t provide the level of data protection that a bona fide backup solution does.

Comprehensive endpoint data protection is needed, but it must include a sync-and-share capability employees will use. n

ERIC SLACK is an analyst at Storage Switzerland, an IT analyst firm focused on storage and virtualization.

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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 13

D What percentage of your company’s total data storage capacity is currently

stored in a cloud storage service?

Snapshot 1Nearly half of companies use cloud storage—and not just for backup

Less than 10%

10% to

30%

31% to

50%

51% to

70%

71% to

90%

91% to

100%

13.8TBAverage amount of non-backup data

kept in cloud storage services

33%36%

10%7%

5%

9%

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Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

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D What kinds of data are you backing up to a cloud backup service?*

* MULTIPLE SELECTIONS PERMITTED

End-user data (files)

Data used by mission-critical applications

Data used by secondary applications

Remote office data

Other

74%

54%

39%

31%

13%

The average amount of data stored in cloud

backup services: 11.5 TB

Why monitoring DR readiness is

like herding catsEnsuring your disaster recovery plan will

actually work if needed may require multiple monitoring tools.

BY JON TOIGO

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 14

AS MUCH AS the server hypervisor and software-defined data center evangelists would like to argue that high-avail-ability (HA) clustering with failover has replaced tra-ditional data protection and business continuity (BC) techniques, the truth is quite a bit more complex. HA has always been part of a spectrum of techniques available for building data protection policy and application recovery strategies, but not every application requires the “always on” method of recovery or merits the high costs associated with HA.

DATA DETERMINES THE PROPER PROTECTION

Done properly, data protection requires the assignment of the right set of protection services to the right data. The “right” service in this context is defined as the most appro-priate, given the criticality of the application or business process being protected and its associated recovery time requirements. The “right” data refers to data that fits in a particular class. Data has no value except for what it inherits—like so much DNA—from the business process it serves, and since not all business processes are equally critical to an organization, it stands to reason that data is

DR MONITORING

HOMEPHOTODISC/THINKSTOCK

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 15

not all of the same class. So, planners probably don’t need to spend the money or effort delivering HA services to non-critical workloads that don’t need to be restored for days—or even weeks—following an interruption event.

The bottom line is that there’s no “one size fits most” data protection strategy. For most shops, a data protec-tion strategy should combine different technologies to deliver various recovery times deemed appropriate to a given workload. Often, a data protection policy evolves over time, with different tools and utility software being brought to bear to provide layer over layer of data protec-tion, usually in response to perceived levels of threat.

BEYOND REPLICATION

With some data, organizations go to great pains to protect and validate data at the time it’s first created, as a hedge against errors in interfaces and protocols that might cor-rupt bits or to protect against faulty media. Above the level of media I/O, other techniques may be applied to replicate data as a way to circumvent application errors (continu-ous data protection), equipment failures (mirroring) or facility issues (backups with offsite storage or synchro-nous replication across metropolitan area networks). And with 100-year disasters (severe weather events, floods and so on) now seemingly occurring every year, remote asynchronous replication to a backup facility at least 80 kilometers distant is considered the gold standard for protection against big geography events.

Truth be told, a mix of data protection processes is prob-ably being used for most workloads today. Some processes

are initiated and controlled by the app software itself, the database undergirding the app, or by the operating system or hypervisor software if you’re running a virtual server. Add in third-party utility software (e.g., backup software from ARCserve [formerly from CA Technologies], IBM Tivoli, Symantec and so on) that’s been purchased to perform backups or take snapshots, or data protection services provided at a data management layer (e.g., CommVault or Tarmin) or at a storage virtualization layer (e.g., DataCore), and managing a multi-layer “defense in-depth” strategy can quickly become complicated.

And that’s not all. If you add in hardware-based data protection services—including on-array mirroring, rep-lication and snapshots performed using value-added software “joined at the hip” to proprietary array control-lers—the data protection service mix mutates into some-thing approximating a herd of cats that is increasingly difficult to monitor and manage.

CUTTING THROUGH THE COMPLEXITY

Therein lies the appeal of the myth of a single “HA strategy for everything” strategy, enabled by server virtualization. While it would be nice to simplify data protection with clustered failover, the facts on the ground don’t support that approach.

For one thing, even if the most optimistic projections of hypervisor deployment hold true, 2016 will still see approximately 21% of mission-critical x86 workloads (revenue producing high-performance transaction-pro-cessing apps) running on 75% of server hardware without

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a hypervisor. So, separate strategies will be required for virtualized and non-virtualized servers.

Within the virtualized x86 workloads, some virtual machines (VMs) and their data “disks” (VMDK and VHD files) are simply less important than others. As with pre-virtualized environments, there are many virtual apps, but not all are mission-critical. And like traditional environments, some apps/VMs are used a lot and others not so much, a fact that impacts the frequency with which data needs to be backed up or copied.

If anything, server virtualization has added to the complexity of data protection. Consider that the leading hypervisor software vendor now encourages its users to break up their SANs and deploy direct-attached storage (DAS) behind each virtual host system instead. Once this is done, the vendor recommends the use of on-array mirroring services to replicate data from one “server-side” DAS array to any other connected to a server that might possibly host a given guest machine in the future. The re-sulting proliferation of replication processes and related

traffic can strain local-area networks and exacerbate an already knotty problem with mirroring: Most mirrors go unchecked owing to the dicey process involved in checking mirror consistency. (Checking a mirror typically requires you to quiesce the application, flush the cache to disk one, replicate to disk two, shut down replication, compare the contents of disk one and two for consistency, cross your fingers, restart the mirror, restart the app and pray that everything synchronizes. And then you need to repeat the process for each mirror.)

MONITORING A COLLECTION OF DR PROCESSES

In the final analysis, the current reality is that numerous hardware and software processes are typically brought to bear in the hopes of protecting data from a broad range of threats. Each process has a different price tag and offers a different time-to-data value, and thus must be fitted appropriately to available budget and recovery time ob-jectives/recovery point objectives. The processes must also be coordinated and scheduled to avoid having any delete-rious effects on application/VM performance or network throughput. Ideally, the processes should be transparent to users but capable of full monitoring and ad-hoc testing by administrators to confirm that the expected protection is being applied to the expected data targets, and that the result is a redundant data set capable of being recovered within a specified timeframe.

The ability to monitor the data protection service is vital to verifying that it’s being applied correctly. The ability to test the results of the data protection service

READ MORE

Disaster recovery/ business continuity

n Tech tip: Tools to assess your DR readiness

n Expert Q&A: Best practices for DR testing

n Testing tips: Advice on DR testing scenarios

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on an ad-hoc basis is key to reducing the burden placed on formal plan testing, the “long-tail cost” of continuity planning. If you can confirm continuously that the right data is being backed up and can be restored when and if necessary, there’s no need to test data recovery in a formal test event. That will cut down the testing work and reduce associated costs.

The challenge to monitoring and validating data pro-tection service processes and outcomes is a lack of any comprehensive technology that will capture information about the processes and feed them back in a coherent sin-gle pane-of-glass dashboard. The world of data protection service monitoring remains bifurcated.

Excellent products, such as ARCserve Unified Data Pro-tection (UDP), provide a combined set of software-based services including tape backup, disk-to-disk replication and mirroring, and replication with clustered failover that can be deployed readily and monitored coherently using

the product’s own dashboard application. Similar capabil-ities can be gleaned from other “geo-clustering” products, such as Neverfail Group’s Neverfail product line (which is used under the covers in many VMware HA solutions to provide distance failover) and Vision Solutions’ Dou-ble-Take software.

TWO DASHBOARDS MAY BE BETTER THAN ONE

Unfortunately, these products don’t capture or report status information on data protection services created and managed using different software or hardware-based initiators. Perhaps the best hardware-centric monitor is Continuity Software’s AvailabilityGuard suite. The com-pany addresses the key challenges confronting business continuity and data protection: configuration drift, syn-chronicity gaps in mirrors or replicas, and the inefficacy of using formal disaster recovery (DR) tests to validate data restorability. Arguably, they are furthest along with tech-nology to resolve these issues by providing near real-time information on process status—for the processes they monitor, that is. In contrast to products such as ARCserve UDP and others, Continuity Software products tend to focus on hardware-based data protection services and not software-based services.

In the best of possible worlds, it may be necessary to have at least two consoles to monitor a defense-in-depth data protection strategy encompassing both hardware and software services. However, the industry’s attention to (and consumer interest in) unified data protection (a term first coined by Unitrends, but coopted today by

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WATCH MORE

Watch these videos to learn more about DR/BC

n Jon Toigo on the goals of a DR/BC program

n Are you capturing your company’s critical data?

n The role of data in a recovery effort

n Issues to consider in your organization’s

protection plan

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 18

numerous vendors) bodes well for future prospects of unifying data protection service monitoring and manage-ment functions.

Recently, EMC has been touting its Data Protection Advisor as a unified data protection management solu-tion, referring to the product’s capability to automate and

centralize the collection and analysis of data protection services. Unfortunately, according to its datasheet, Data Protection Advisor supports EMC’s storage hardware pro-cesses exclusively, but it enables the integration of status information from third-party backup software products, database platforms and VMware-controlled replication processes. Not quite a true Swiss Army knife, but getting a bit closer.

What’s really needed is a distributed systems equiva-lent of 21st Century Software’s mainframe-oriented DR/VFI. The company was an early innovator in providing

transparency in mirroring so that mirrored volumes could be compared for consistency without taking down the ap-plication. Now, it’s making great strides in bringing visibil-ity to active-active clustering and synchronous replication processes. This is technology with tremendous application to IT in all of its topologies.

Also on a wish list for the future is the RESTful enable-ment of data protection services. Given that the core of data protection is basic data copy, using simple RESTful protocols for moving data copies between targets—whether two disks, two arrays or two data centers—would seem to provide a standardized, expedient approach that could truly “universalize” the delivery of data protection services.

For now, unified data protection service management is a lot like the term integrated network management of a de-cade ago. The term has several hundred meanings ranging from “all products are listed on the same brochure and are therefore integrated” to “all processes share a common da-tabase architecture.” For now, read all spec sheets carefully before you select a product for deployment. Better yet, use the free trial copies available for most of these products to determine which one(s) deliver the capabilities you need to herd your data protection cats. n

JON WILLIAM TOIGO is a 30-year IT veteran, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International, and chairman of the Data Management Institute.

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READ ALL SPEC SHEETS CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU SELECT A PRODUCT FOR DEPLOYMENT. BETTER YET, USE THE FREE TRIAL COPIES AVAILABLE FOR MOST OF THESE PRODUCTS.

D For which of these applications do you expect your company will start

using a cloud storage service in the next 12 months?*

Snapshot 2

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 19

Cloud storage adoption poised to pick up steam over the next 12 months

73 * MULTIPLE SELECTIONS PERMITTED

Backup

End-user data

Data used by secondary apps

Remote office data

Data for mission-critical apps

None

45%

40%

29%

24%

19%

28%

Percent of respondents who are “very satisfied” or “satisfied”

with their current cloud storage services

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D Do you plan to expand your use of cloud storage services

in the next 12 months?

39% YES; definite plans to expand use of cloud storage

39% MAYBE; considering storing more data in the cloud

12% NO; don’t plan to expand use of cloud storage

10% DON’T KNOW

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 20

WHETHER YOU CALL it data gravity or data inertia, moving data from one piece of storage infrastructure to another can be a painful process. At least that’s how it used to be. These days with the right tools and infrastructure, many of the pain points and headaches associated with a tra-ditional data migration process can be eliminated. All it takes is a little forward planning and the right technology.

WHY DATA MIGRATION WAS SUCH A PROBLEM

A recent Hitachi Data Systems report details research from IDC and The 451 Group. The data presented shows migrations represent 60% of large enterprise IT projects and that nearly half of all IT budgets are devoted to opera-tional costs—a convincing indication that migrations can consume a significant portion of an IT budget. With an estimated cost of $15,000 per terabyte of migrated data, it’s not surprising that migrations are seen as a daunting prospect for many IT departments. And there are plenty of reasons why data migrations have become such an issue.

Typical causes of migration headaches include:

n Complexity. Today’s monolithic storage arrays are

DATA MIGRATION

HOMEGEORGE DOYLE/THINKSTOCK

Painless data migration

Moving data from array to array has always been a difficult process, but new techs

and techniques make it easier than ever.BY CHRIS EVANS

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 21

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complicated beasts, supporting many thousands of LUNs or volumes connected to hundreds of hosts across Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI and FC over Ethernet networks. Deployments include local replication (snapshots, clones) and remote replication (both synchronous and asynchro-nous) with inter-system application dependencies that need to be taken into consideration. Modern arrays are implemented with many tiers of storage, and use perfor-mance management features such as dynamic tiering to deliver optimum I/O response time.

n Technical dependencies. Systems with many hosts will have been deployed over many years, so hardware and software devices, firmware and device drivers may vary widely. All of these components may need upgrading or refreshing prior to a migration occurring. In some cases, devices may not be supported, representing a risk point or the need to spend money to replace hardware.

n Operational dependencies. Most enterprise IT envi-ronments operate on a 24/7 basis, making it difficult or nearly impossible to create an outage for a planned mi-gration. This situation is especially true where complex server dependencies exist and business continuity/disas-ter recovery (BC/DR) service-level objectives need to be maintained. A huge amount of time can be spent simply planning and re-planning migrations and negotiating with change teams.

n Scale. Storage arrays are capable of storing vast amounts of data. The latest monolithic arrays from EMC and

Hitachi scale to more than 4 PB of capacity. The velocity at which data can be moved between physical locations means petabyte volumes of data will take a long time to transfer, during which time you must ensure there’s little or no performance impact on production applications.

n Cost. Data migrations take serious planning and need many resources to be executed effectively, from project managers to storage architects and application owners who need to be on hand to validate that the migration has been completed successfully. There’s also the cost of maintaining two sets of equipment during the migration process, so the longer migrations take, the higher the run rate is for maintaining additional duplicate hardware.

Of course, these issues only reflect the problems of device-to-device migrations. The considerations are dif-ferent if an application or data is moved into the public cloud. And if a company has built and manages large-scale pools of data based on new technologies such as Hadoop, there are other concerns. Clearly, across the enterprise,

MOST ENTERPRISE IT ENVIRONMENTS OPERATE ON A 24/7 BASIS, MAKING IT DIFFICULT OR NEARLY IMPOS-SIBLE TO CREATE AN OUTAGE FOR A PLANNED MIGRATION.

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 22

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data mobility is an issue.Ultimately, the aim of any migration strategy is improv-

ing data mobility. For each of the broad categories already discussed, we’ll look at some of the migration techniques and architecture designs that can help mitigate some common migration issues.

ARRAY-TO-ARRAY MIGRATIONS

One of the most common requirements in data migration is to move data between storage arrays or appliances. If we consider block-based protocol data for a moment, typical approaches include:

n Host based. Data is migrated at the host level, through data copying volume to volume, with both the old and new volume presented to the host. The copy process can be quite basic (e.g., tools such as Robocopy) or more so-phisticated (using logical volume managers). Host-based migrations offer an opportunity to once again lay out data across physically presented volumes.

n Array based. Data is moved between arrays using ar-ray-level migration tools. For homogeneous transfers (where the source and target devices are from the same manufacturer and are like models), this can be achieved with native replication tools, albeit with some restrictions. Heterogeneous migrations are more complex, although tools such as EMC’s Open Migrator or HP 3PAR Online Import will allow data to be moved from third-party stor-age arrays.

n Hypervisor based. One of the benefits of server virtu-alization is the ability to live migrate virtual machines (VMs) through features such as VMware’s vSphere Stor-age vMotion and Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration. Both of those tools enable a VM to be moved between storage on disparate arrays, with the added benefit of being able to move cross-protocol, for example from block to NFS in the case of vSphere. Using the hypervisor to perform data migrations incurs licensing costs, but it does significantly reduce the operational issues of data migration.

n Virtualization appliance based. One highly effective way to perform data migrations is to abstract the storage from the host through means of an appliance, such as IBM’s SAN Volume Controller or EMC’s VPLEX. These products virtualize the underlying storage arrays and offer migration tools to move data between physical locations while keeping the logical data available and with no im-pact to the host. An outage may be required to install the appliance into the data path; in many cases this is achieved with minimal interruption compared to the time required to move data. Many IT departments choose to run with a virtualization appliance permanently in place, providing the capability to seamlessly manage future migrations or perform data rebalancing for capacity and performance needs.

n Virtual array based. The latest version of Hitachi’s Vir-tual Storage Platform, the G1000, provides the facility to virtualize external storage and seamlessly move data be-tween arrays. This takes the virtual appliance features one

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 23

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step further by allowing data to be moved into the array and between homogeneous arrays without an outage. The G1000 (HP’s OEM version is the XP7) is unique in being able to migrate data between monolithic arrays without downtime and, if the data already resides on the G1000, without any outage at all.

FILE-TO-FILE MIGRATIONS

With file-based protocols, data migrations can be equally complicated. In most cases, the main issue for data mi-gration isn’t the transfer of the data, but making that data available to the user during and after the migration process with no change of logical location. File shares are typically mapped by server name or universal naming convention address, which can change as data is moved to a new filer. Here the solution is to abstract the data location as part of or before the migration process. This can be achieved using technology such as Microsoft’s Dis-tributed File System, a software solution integrated into Active Directory, or Avere System’s FXT filer appliance (a hardware solution). In both instances, abstracting the file share name and using a global namespace allows future seamless data migrations to take place.

MIGRATING OBJECT STORES

Object storage is gaining in popularity as data repositories for archive information and binary large objects (BLOBs) such as media and medical imaging. Data is migrated in and out of data stores using application programming

interfaces that are REST based and, in most cases, the application tracks the storage of items added to the object store. This means that if data is moved between object stores, the application needs to know about it. Products such as Cleversafe’s object store use data dispersal meth-ods (such as erasure coding) to store objects across multi-ple hardware components. One benefit of erasure coding is the ability to reconstruct data across physical nodes over distance, allowing components of the object store to be replaced or physically relocated without data interruption.

MIGRATING DATA TO THE PUBLIC CLOUD

The use of public storage clouds is increasing and that proliferation brings with it the need to provide facilities to move data into cloud provider environments. There are a number of ways this may be achieved, including moving entire VMs into the cloud or moving data at the block or file level.

VM import is provided as a feature by many cloud pro-viders. For example, Amazon Web Services’ VM Import feature allows VM images to be imported from existing vSphere, Hyper-V and Citrix hypervisors. Unfortunately, there are many restrictions on the types of VMs that may be imported; as a result, it may be more practical to con-sider simply importing the data into a fresh VM.

Zerto’s suite of BC/DR replication products allows entire VMs to be migrated into cloud environments. This feature could be used to move entire VMs as a migration task, rather than simply for backup.

File-based data can be migrated into cloud providers

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 24

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using gateway appliances such as those from Nasuni and Avere Systems. Both platforms abstract the presentation of file data, allowing the back-end storage to be managed by the appliance. With Nasuni, the gateway appliance can be a physical server or VM, both of which can take the identity of a virtual file appliance, providing resilience and the ability to restore access to data with minimum disruption. Avere Systems’ appliance allows data to be both moved and replicated between local storage and a cloud provider, enabling mirroring and data mobility functionality.

Microsoft’s StorSimple platform allows block-based data to be moved to its Azure cloud storage platform, expanding the capacity of local storage resources. Nasuni provides similar functionality, as does AWS with its Stor-age Gateway. However, only Amazon provides the ability to access that data as block devices within its Cloud Com-puting platform.

SCALE-OUT STORAGE AND BIG DATA

Cloud and traditional storage aren’t the only data storage platforms these days. We’re seeing the emergence of scale-out storage solutions and data repositories (sometimes known as data lakes) for storing large quantities of data.

Open source platforms such as Ceph and Gluster pro-vide scale-out file and block capabilities and are maturing

to a level where data migration will be relatively easy to achieve. Scale-out storage solutions from the likes of SolidFire and Nimble Storage enable clusters to grow and shrink on demand.

Hadoop is one of the most well-known and popular big data platforms. It has a built-in tool called DistCp that can be used to copy data between Hadoop clusters. Of course, Hadoop wasn’t really built with data mobility in mind, so moving data in and out of a Hadoop cluster isn’t a case of simply presenting a file system or a LUN to the user.

NEW ARCHITECTURES CAN EQUAL

NEW MIGRATION ISSUES

As Facebook’s experience shows, large data lakes can grow to a size where physical data center space is an issue, and moving clusters requires a serious amount of planning and effort. In some respects this takes us back full circle to our original discussion on data mobility and migration of traditional block storage. The issues of data migration have been well described, and solutions are available to do it simply and to reduce costs. However, new storage technologies are still immature relative to managing data mobility, and that will be a significant area of focus as those technologies become more popular.

CHRIS EVANS is an independent consultant with Langton Blue.

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 25

EACH YEAR, Enterprise Strategy Group publishes its annual IT Spending Intentions Survey, and for the past three years, “improving data backup and recovery” and “increased use of server virtualization” have been among the top three stated IT priorities. While their positions bounce around within the top echelon, they are always adjacent in the overall and midsize organization lists.

The reason for this is that you have to modernize your protection capabilities at the same time you modernize your production infrastructure. Some IT architects un-derstand that from the start. Others begin to modernize their production infrastructure only to come to the reali-zation that their legacy protection capabilities are insuffi-cient and can hinder the performance of the production

platforms. Said another way:

n If you’re 20% virtualized, you can probably use any legacy approach to backup without much issue.

n If you are 40% virtualized, you’ll likely realize your legacy solution is inconvenient and inefficient, creat-ing additional Opex and Capex costs.

n By the time you’re 60% virtualized or more, you’ll discover your legacy backup solution isn’t keeping pace and is actually impacting the performance of your production hosts, virtual machines (VMs) and the underlying storage/networking infrastructure.

From a purely technical perspective, older methods of backup presume significantly more free resources on production servers (because so many physical servers are underutilized), but those methods don’t work in highly virtualized environments. When less-than-efficient backup mechanisms are applied to VMs, particularly in dense blades or converged infrastructure solutions, the CPU and I/O burden is felt not only on that VM, but on the underlying host, all of the adjacent VMs, and even the supporting storage and networking stacks.

In addition, older solutions typically don’t support I/O saving benefits such as VMware’s Changed Block Tracking

HOT SPOTS JASON BUFFINGTON

Don’t forget to modernize data protection tooVirtualizing production servers requires a fresh approach to backup to minimize its impact on performance.

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and/or client-side deduplication mechanisms designed for highly virtualized environments. Also, back-end integra-tions to deduplicated storage typically don’t run well with legacy approaches to VM backup. All of this results in additional I/O consumption, hindered performance, and larger Capex investments for the additional disk storage and network bandwidth.

From an operational perspective, legacy backup mech-anisms usually require more daily management and ongoing configuration changes, two things modern virtu-alization-optimized solutions don’t need. The result is not only less management (manpower), but better protection through automation, orchestration, and integration with the hypervisor and private cloud management stacks.

Putting this all together, a modern data protection solu-tion should do the following:

n Protect Hyper-V and VMware-hosted VMs, using hypervisor-based backup application programming interfaces

n Coordinate control of backups, snapshots from pri-

mary storage and replication to tertiary storage

n Enable deduplication, including source/production, backup server and storage array options

n Integrate with the private cloud or software-defined data center management toolkits, as well as the hy-pervisor management user interfaces

If you’re already headed full-speed toward a modern and highly virtualized data center, and your data protection solution doesn’t have the above-listed capabilities, your production infrastructure is modernizing faster than your protection solution. That’s like having a car that has its left tires spinning faster than its right tires. And, just like the car, you’ll find yourself going in circles at some point—and perhaps sooner than you think. n

JASON BUFFINGTON is a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. He focuses primarily on data protection, as well as Windows Server infrastructure, management and virtualization. He blogs at CentralizedBackup.com and tweets as @Jbuff.

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ALL-FLASH STORAGE arrays are hot. Suddenly, there are dozens of available systems from startups and established vendors alike. And a lot of them claim they can deliver all-flash arrays at prices lower than high-end 15K rpm hard disk drive (HDD)-based arrays. Not to be outdone, at least one “hybrid” array supplier claims it can deliver all-flash array-like performance at well below high-end HDD array prices. All of this makes selecting the right system for your environment that much more complicated.

Purchase criteria for all-flash arrays must begin with performance, and there are three important factors to con-sider: IOPS, latency and throughput. Depending on your application, either IOPS or throughput will come into play. IOPS will reign supreme for small-block I/O-bound applications, while throughput is key for large-block I/O-bound applications. Latency is important in all cases.

You’ll quickly discover that existing HDD-based designs that have been modified to become all-flash arrays don’t deliver sizzling performance. Flash is very different from hard drive media; it performs differently, fails differently and is managed differently. Modifying existing controllers only goes so far. To extract every bit of performance from flash requires new thinking that generally comes from starting the design from scratch. I have seen one excep-tion: the Hewlett-Packard 3PAR StoreServ 7450 all-flash array performs like a specially designed all-flash array because of the custom ASIC inside the 3PAR system.

Despite the “software-defined everything” mantra so prevalent nowadays, all-flash arrays are hardware-defined today. They’re proprietary and come in complete pack-ages from each vendor. Most offerings are built around solid-state drives (SSDs) as the basic element, but some start with flash chips. SSD-based systems rely on a lot of functionality coming from the SSD itself, like garbage col-lection and wear leveling. You get whatever comes from the SSD vendor. However, designs based on flash chips can perform such functions at the array level rather than at SSD level, which often results in added performance, resiliency, better density and lower power requirements. Those benefits are reflected in the price of the system. IBM, Skyera and Violin fall into this category.

Inline data deduplication and compression remain con-troversial topics in the all-flash storage array world. With

READ/WRITE ARUN TANEJA

Not all flash arrays are alikeAll-flash arrays share one common trait—they’re fast—but get past the speed and there’s a lot to consider.

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Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

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some arrays, those functions are built in and you can’t disable them. Equally important, the pricing reflects the assumption of a 4:1, 5:1 or 6:1 reduction factor to arrive at the magical “equal to HDD prices” value proposition. Other arrays lack these features entirely. There are two things to note here. First, deduplication is awesome if it applies to your application. Virtual desktop infrastruc-ture and virtual servers are at the top of that list, but it doesn’t do much for databases or video streams, among other applications. The applications you’ll run on an all-flash array will tell you if the $/GB touted by the vendor is applicable. Second, deduplication and compression are excellent features if they don’t sap performance, which is the reason you’re buying an all-flash array in the first place. So you need to view these features within the context of performance. Basically, this means the vendor must counterbalance performance-sapping functions with added hardware that neutralizes the impact. Ideally, you should be able to engage or disengage these functions at a LUN level.

The next consideration is performance consistency. A well-designed system must perform consistently, with its latency staying within a narrow band. You’ll likely expect an all-flash array to support a multitude of applications, using a variety of block sizes, all requiring excellent performance. Ask the vendor to show you how the array performs at each block size, rather than just the average of all these block sizes.

Data protection is a different animal when applied to flash. We’re so used to using RAID as the data protection mechanism in the HDD world that our first tendency is to

bring it over, blindly, to the flash world. Flash is a random media, with no seek times or rotational latency issues to worry about, while RAID was designed with those issues in mind. RAID concepts can be brought over to flash, but you’ll have to rethink data protection from scratch. For instance, there’s no need to gang up only five or six drives

in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 set as much longer stripes can be used. The rebuilds can be done differently since flash typi-cally fails differently. Check out how data is protected and what happens when a flash unit fails. Expect much better data protection than you get with HDDs.

Any all-flash array will also offer considerable advan-tages over HDD-based arrays in terms of power, cooling and density. But you should compare all-flash arrays with each other, as these systems can differ greatly in those dimensions. Power and cooling requirements generally follow density. The industry is still learning how to get the maximum bang for its buck in all-flash arrays, and some vendors do a much better job than others.

Any discussion of all-flash arrays would be incomplete without mentioning scalability. There are a variety of

Home

Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

CHECK OUT HOW DATA IS PROTECTED AND WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A FLASH UNIT FAILS. EXPECT MUCH BETTER DATA PROTECTION THAN YOU GET WITH HDDs.

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 29

products that are scale-out while others are scale-up. As you evaluate all-flash arrays, make sure the starting point gives you sufficient performance and capacity for today, with enough room to scale over time in both dimensions.

A few years ago it was OK to buy an all-flash array that came without all the enterprise-caliber storage applica-tions and services, such as thin provisioning, snapshots, replication and cloning. Today, I wouldn’t touch an all-flash array without a full complement of those features. And the same applies to ease of use and manageability.

Not every all-flash array is alike, and what you purchase depends on the type of applications you want to deploy with them. Any all-flash array will give you better perfor-mance than an HDD-based array, but that would be like buying a Porsche without checking out a Lamborghini and a Maserati first. n

ARUN TANEJA is founder and president at Taneja Group, an analyst and consulting group focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies.

Home

Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us

STORAGE • AUGUST 2014 30

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Home

Castagna: Shopping for storage? Pre-pare to be confused

Toigo: Beware of vendors repackag-ing old ideas

Moving target: mobile backup

Cloud storage wide-ly deployed and not just for backup

Keeping track of DR readiness is like herding cats

Use of cloud stor-age services poised to accelerate

Data migration without blood, sweat and tears

Buffington: Modern infrastruc-tures need modern data protection

Taneja: They may all be fast, but not every all-flash array is alike

About us