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.
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