The Key Called Innovation

Data storage has taken the center stage in today's business

environment, as information has become the most important asset for

organizations. This is because access to the right information at the right time

assumes utmost importance to remain competitive. The data center infrastructure

is central to the IT architecture. Proper planning of the data center

infrastructure design is critical, and performance, resiliency, and scalability

need to be carefully considered. Designing a flexible architecture that has the

ability to support new applications in a short timeframe can result in a

significant competitive advantage. Some prominent factors that are driving new

green field data center setups are re-centralization of IT setups, increasing

deployment of centralized applications, need for business continuity, and

disaster recovery.

What's Up Now?



As organizations grow and scale up their businesses into global business,
they outgrow their existing data center setups and go for new ones. However, a

recent analysis has revealed that availability of quality data center space and

power facilities is decreasing. On the other hand storage infrastructure is

growing at 40-70% CAGR.

To address issues like real estate space, growing demand for

availability, storage backups, the storage sector has witnessed a lot of

innovations in the last few years. Data storage has evolved significantly over

the years, from the erstwhile direct attached storage (DAS) to storage area

network (SAN). Organizations have benefited greatly from SAN, as it allows them

to utilize capacity optimally and also enables disparate storage systems to be

viewed as a single storage system to users. However, even though SAN systems

have increased capacity utilization by simplifying connectivity, they have also

introduced another layer of management for the switches, host bus adopters and

fiber channel-enabled storage ports. Besides, lack of SAN standards and

differences in operating platforms and storage devices have created problems of

manageability and interoperability. Storage management costs typically are six

to eight times higher than the acquisition cost of the storage itself. Hence,

the industry is very excited about the promise that the virtualization

technology holds.

"Consolidation, virtualization and automation are some of

the key innovations that enable efficient utilization of data center space,

power, cooling, IT resources as well help in better alignment of IT resources

with business objectives," says Sumit Mukhija, business development

manager, Cisco India & SAARC. "Other technologies options like IPSAN,

ISCSI are also being used by the industry at a rapid pace," he adds.

Consolidation: There is a very strong trend among IT

organizations toward consolidation and standardization, as an initial step in

addressing the challenges mentioned above. Consolidated data centers not only

operate more efficiently, but also lay groundwork for standardization, better

utilization, and efficiencies in management that results in lower TCO and

improved resilience. This consolidation often results in a major shift in the

way that infrastructure is deployed. Instead of the application driving the

deployment of an infrastructure silo, the IT organization provisions server and

storage resources to the applications on requirement basis.

From a data storage perspective, Cisco enables large-scale

consolidation of storage networks through highly scalable SAN directors that

scale all the way up to 528 ports in a single chassis. Technologies like Virtual

SANs (VSANs) allow consolidation of first generation SAN islands into single

consolidated physical SAN, which uses hardware isolated environments or VSANs.

Built-in multi-protocol support in Cisco SAN switches allows services like FCIP

routing for SAN extension, iSCSI gateway services and virtualization

intelligence to reside in a single multi-protocol SAN switch. These features

would have otherwise required external appliances that consume more power as

well occupy precious rack space in the data center.

This concept of add-on services residing inside the network is

not restricted to storage networks alone. Services like firewall, intrusion

prevention, load balancing, SSL offloads, VPN termination etc can now reside in

robust Ethernet switching platforms like Catalyst 6500, thereby resulting in

tremendous savings in data center rack space, power costs as well as management

and provisioning costs.

Newer technologies like inter-VSAN routing (IVR) allow multiple

virtual SAN fabrics to share common pool of storage resources like storage

arrays and tape libraries. This eliminates the need for having dedicated

resources for each SAN fabric and hence saves power and space as well.

Virtualization: Networked storage systems create the

challenge of efficiently managing a large number of disks that are grouped

together in a single system. The pertinent question here is how to most

efficiently manage storage to maximize utilization and reduce effective cost per

GB? Improvements in this area are being enabled by disk-level virtualization

that allows large numbers of disks to be managed as if they were one (very

large) disk, enabling storage to be allocated as needed, without having to

specify which disk data is actually on, because provisioning is more efficient,

fewer disks are required and less storage needs to be purchased to meet the

given needs of users.

ISCSI: For SMEs, iSCSI offers an excellent value

proposition. For larger enterprises that have already implemented FC SANs in

their data centers, it can co-exist with the FC SANs and complement them. For

example, a bank may choose to run its core banking applications on FC SAN and

run all mid-sized and smaller databases on iSCSI. Almost all organizations will

see value in iSCSI SAN, as it helps achieve good RoI. Implementation of FC-SAN

is costly, confining it to data centers.

iSCSI attempts to solve many of these problems. It leverages on

two standard protocols, SCSI and IP to create another standards-based protocol.

The iSCSI protocol has been ratified by the IETF as a standard and therefore it

attempts to eliminate all compatibility issues.

IPSAN: IP-based storage has attained increased prominence at

the enterprise level because of the cost factor. It helps in total network

storage consolidation at a lower cost and centralizes the storage architecture.

It also helps in leveraging existing investments in fiber channel SAN. With

network storage business growing at 50%, IDC predicts that IPSAN will garner

more than 25% of the global storage market by 2007 end.

In case of NAS, it extends NAS consolidation capabilities to

include traditional block applications. The top few upcoming trends in IPSAN

would include large chunk of FCSAN migrating to IPSAN, major OSM would come out

with IP storage system and low cost FC to IP bridge would be available.

SAN-NAS Consolidation: A strong trend in the storage market

is that customers are moving toward an environment where both NAS and SAN

co-exist. While one would not want to replace a SAN on which mission critical

applications like ERP, CRM run, one would like to add NAS-like flexibility to

the SAN. NAS gateways are an answer to this need. Having either NAS or SAN or

both as an information management infrastructure enables companies to deploy

their own business continuity solution with little effort, because networked

data can be more easily be shared across the enterprise, even between remote

sites used to replicate and back up data.

Scaled-out Storage: Scaled-out storage systems represent the

next generational leap in storage system technology. Scaled-out storage system

architecture breaks the system boundary by incorporating multiple storage

systems into a common pool of storage that can be managed and accessed as if it

were a single system. Current efforts in this area focus on supporting large,

compute-intensive environments (eg digital animation, computer aided

engineering, analytics, biotech, defense R&D, etc) that would overwhelm the

throughput of any single machine. Here again, virtualization technology helps by

enabling administrators to manage separate storage systems as if they were one

large system.

To add some fizz to the technology options already available in

the market, Cisco recently launched VFrame data center (VFrame DC), an

orchestration platform that leverages network intelligence to provision

resources together as virtualized services. With VFrame DC, customers can now

link their computer, networking, and storage infrastructures together as a set

of virtualized services. This services approach provides a simple yet powerful

way to quickly view all the services configured at the application level to

improve troubleshooting and change management. VFrame DC offers a policy engine

for automating resource changes in response to infrastructure outages and

performance changes. Additionally, these changes can be controlled by external

monitoring systems via integration with the VFrame DC Web services

application-programming interface (API).

"VFrame DC offers unprecedented orchestration within the

data center network, for dynamically re-programming server, storage, and network

resources into agile application services," said Jayshree Ullal, senior VP,

Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group, Cisco. "This agility

addresses the need for greater time to market for complex ecommerce application

deployments by customers," she added.

Gyana Ranjan Swain





gyanas@cybermedia.co.in