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From: www.itworld.com
Best Practice: Consolidating storage into a storage area network
January 12, 2005 —
 Strategy in Practice |
| Rules for success |
| Things to avoid |
| Best practices |
| Questions you must ask |
| Are you a candidate? |
| Last words |
This Best Practices is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.
Company:
Mesirow Financial
One of the largest diversified financial services firms in Chicago. Mesirow reported fiscal 2003 revenues of more than $209 million. It manages more than $5 billion in financial assets for its clients, and employs more than 800 people in 11 offices nationwide.
Challenge:
Mesirow Financial outgrew its data storage environment after a period of rapid growth and the acquisition of another company. The company needed to move to a more efficient storage architecture that would scale in storage capacity and performance, and reduce IT processes on storage provisioning and management.
Solution:
Mesirow opted to consolidate all of its direct attached storage (DAS) and network attached storage (NAS) into a storage area network (SAN) that could be managed and protected as a single pool of storage. The SAN had to be capable of supporting an IT infrastructure featuring more than 100 Compaq, Sun, and Novell servers distributed across the company's 11 nationwide offices. Some of the key applications included Sybase relational databases, file servers and e-mail utilizing Microsoft's Exchange technology.
Mesirow chose an EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI-based SAN solution that offers fully redundant and hot-swappable components, and management features that included storage virtualization, snapshots and remote replication. Mesirow first consolidated all of its direct attached storage on two EqualLogic PS100E arrays at its headquarters in downtown Chicago. Afterwards, it installed additional arrays at two of its suburban offices for local storage and remote data replication from headquarters.
The significant challenge was the high price to move to, operate, and upgrade existing SAN technologies. Mesirow determined that EqualLogic's array, virtualization, snapshot, and replication capabilities met its long-term storage needs. The PS array's virtualization capability allows multiple arrays to act as one single pool of storage that can be centrally managed, dynamically allocated, and efficiently backed up to disk and to tape. In addition, when new arrays are added, the PS array's load-balancing technology automatically redistributes data across arrays to achieve maximum performance and efficiency.
Mesirow is addressing its backup and recovery issues with the PS array's Auto-Replication feature and Auto-Snapshot Manager for Windows feature (which works with Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003 Volume Shadow Copy Service) to automate the many tedious tasks required to set up and maintain a regular backup process and help recover failed data instantly. PS arrays at headquarters copy data to the arrays installed at remote locations over standard Ethernet connections provided by its telecommunications provider. And since all PS arrays work together as peers, the arrays in the suburban offices can backup data for headquarters while the main office arrays back up data for the remote offices.
- Deploy a SAN with complete storage management features: storage virtualization, automatic load balancing, automatic RAID configuration, volume management, volume cloning, snapshots, snapshot management (with support for VSS) and remote replication.
- Deploy a SAN solution with enterprise redundancy: dual controllers, power supplies, fans, and network connections, hot-swappable disk drives and components.
- Select a SAN that can start small and grow; that can ensure easy and cost-effective growth; and offer upgrades that do not require downtime.
- Deploy high-performance, multi-path host access.
- Update data protection and backup operations to an efficient backup procedure using snapshots.
- Solutions that require you to be an integrator or for you to pay for an integrator.
- Deployments that are missing critical capabilities for reliable operations, such as redundant configurations and hot-swappable components.
- Over purchase or under purchase: Buying very large infrastructure that may not be more than 50% utilized for years. Or, under-buying which results in very expensive upgrades in less than 18 months that completely replace the initial purchase.
- Hidden scaling costs: These include administrator overhead, host licenses and increased support fees.
- Not deploying the key storage management capabilities that result in the desired improvements in storage service and management. Once you consolidate storage into a SAN you will need to manage and protect it, and you will need sophisticated software designed for this purpose.
- Solutions that do not automate routine storage management processes - in particular, find a solution that automates RAID configuration, load balancing, snapshot management, and other daily management tasks.
- Deploying proprietary technologies when your requirements called for open technologies.
- Not clearly understanding when a product provides a capability and when the administrator must provide the capability - "It does" vs. "You can".
- Solutions that don't scale or can't be expanded on the fly - You need a single pool of storage that can be expanded as needed without requiring downtime.
- Consolidate storage: The migration of data to a SAN is the cornerstone of all storage best practices. Storage consolidation provides the infrastructure for centralizing enterprise storage management and protection.
- Deploy enterprise features: Dramatic operational improvements in efficiency, reliability, and data protection have been developed in the form of enterprise features such as snapshots, data replication, RAID, redundant hot-swappable hardware, and storage virtualization. These features are quickly becoming more and more affordable and accessible to the broader market.
- Automate: Features such as storage virtualization and RAID are extremely complex, and by themselves can create more problems than they solve in the form of administrator toil and overhead. Automation not only makes these technologies practical, it provides the intelligence to optimize their use.
- Have clear goals: Know what you want to accomplish and regularly evaluate the proposed solutions against these goals.
- Look for improvements in backup operations: Simple, space-efficient and reliable backup operations are as critical as storage provisioning and management.
- Does your SAN solution offer enterprise reliability with RAID; redundant controllers, power supplies, fans, network connections and hot-swappable components?
- Does your SAN solution include all of the enterprise storage management capabilities I will need to manage and protect my data?
- Can I add capacity without downtime for any of my applications?
- What are the upgrade paths if my needs double or triple over the next three years?
Are you a candidate?
You are if your...
- Servers have proliferated to the point that managing individual storage for each server becomes unmanageable and expensive
- Storage needs exceed 1T-byteerabyte
- Data protection becomes a priority, and backup and disaster recovery procedures need improvement
- Data storage is growing more than 500G-bytes each year
Last words:
A storage SAN solution should offer the following capabilities:
- Scalable, highly-available pool of storage
- Storage allocation and resizing on demand
- Centralized management with easy-to-use interfaces and remote access
- Security that protects logical volumes from unauthorized access
- Automatic load balancing for performance optimization
- Snapshot and replication functionality
- Host platform independence
- High-performance, multi-path host access
Using an iSCSI SAN can be an effective method for implementing such a storage strategy, but not all storage devices with iSCSI connectivity are created equal. Evaluating the SAN's methods of consolidation and virtualization is critical to finding a solution that delivers superior management capabilities to truly lower the total cost of ownership, increase storage utilization, and make system administration more efficient and cost-effective.
This Strategy in Practice was provided by EqualLogic.
EqualLogic
http://www.equallogic.com
(888) 579-9762
The ideas expressed in this article are solely those of the vendor and its client, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of ITworld.com.
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