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Open Sports CIO Ken Mark said he decided to build the online news and fantasy sport site's network on VMware Inc.'s virtualized server platform. Going with 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches would have been cost prohibitive for the type of redundancy and remote management he required. Using InfiniBand, Xsigo directors can connect to... More...

HP Monday night reported its storage revenue increased 13% since last year, with its midrange EVA array revenue up 16% and its high-end XPS system up 9%. HP's storage revenue for the quarter totaled $1.147 billion.

"We did very strong in the storage business," said HP CEO Mark Hurd on the earnings conference call with analysts.

Financial analyst Aaron Rakers of Wachovia Capital Markets pointed out that HP gained market share on EMC... More...

The project of digitizing paper records for Baja Fresh is still in its early stages, according to its human resources director John Waldo. The restaurant chain just signed a five-year contract with Casdex Inc., whose technicians are on site scanning in about 25,000 to 35,000 pages per day from stacks of document boxes that were taking up rented warehouse and office space.

When the scanning is... More...

In 2008, storage managers are still struggling with many of the same issues you've dealt with for years. But things have changed, and constantly fighting fires is no longer a viable plan. However, there are answers. Storage managers are applying "new" management concepts like data classification, data management, data protection and storage tiering with successful results. And the last wave of technology innovation -- VTLs, CDP, data deduplication, storage virtualization, archiving, data encryption and CAS -- are ready for prime time as the leading technology providers have either established a track... More...

This handbook takes an in-depth look at SAN expansion technology and offers advice on the many elements involved, such as integrating SAN and NAS, switch upgrades, disk array replacement and capacity planning tools.

Best Practice No. 2: Switch upgrades and replacements
Switches must provide a mix of performance, reliability and management versatility, while maintaining a reasonable cost per port. Here are eight best practices for switch upgrades and replacements.

Best Practice No. 3: Host bus adapter upgrades and replacements
Learn how to maintain control over HBA selection, eliminate bottlenecks, boost availability and how HBAs will interact with FCoE. Here are seven best practices for host bus adapter upgrades and replacements.

Best Practice No. 4: Selecting a storage capacity planning tool
To select a storage management and capacity planning tool, first calculate how much storage is available and how much of your total storage capacity is actually being used. Here are eight best practices for switch upgrades and replacements.

Best Practice No. 5: Integrating SAN and NAS
SAN and NAS platforms are often interconnected so their respective benefits can be pooled. However, storage administrators must take care when connecting SAN and NAS. Here are eight best practices for integrating SAN and NAS.

Best Practice No. 6: Integrating iSCSI and Fibre Channel, and make it work
Although companies of every size are embracing iSCSI SAN technology because of its lower cost and relative simplicity, there are situations where iSCSI and Fibre Channel coexistence makes sense. Here are eight best practices for integrating iSCSI and Fibre Channel technologies.

Best practices for SAN expansion include options for integrating SAN and NAS or iSCSI and Fibre Channel, evaluating capacity planning tools, as well as upgrading switches, disk arrays and HBAs.

Some of the decisions facing prospective SAN purchasers can mean the difference between deploying a storage system that opens up new opportunities or ending up with a very expensive anchor holding back the organization.

There are many elements in the SAN purchasing process. Let's look at the ones that can help you specify a system to meet your organization's goals.

Business goals, tech specs

The starting point in a SAN purchasing strategy is to determine the business' needs -- both present and future -- in terms of data management and storage. The first step is to hold assessment meetings with those areas of the business that use the SAN in order to create a picture of the organization's storage requirements for the next three to five years.

A key part of the process is to determine which SAN technical specifications are needed to meet the organization's goals. For example, if you will be running a database-centric system, you will need to determine the disk access speeds required to guarantee performance levels. At the same time you may want to specify advanced LUN masking features to optimise disk access times for those applications.

If disk cost and power consumption are issues, you may need to look for a SAN that allows intelligent disk tiering and data migration. You will also need to consider the backup options available to safeguard your data and how quickly the system can be restored in a disaster recovery situation.

If the SAN is intended to form the heart of new working practices for your organization -- for example, as a backbone for server virtualization – you will need to think about different requirements. These include the ability to boot virtual servers directly from the SAN itself and apply thin provisioning to grow virtual drives intelligently, such as is available from manufacturers such as Compellent Technologies and 3PAR.

Evaluating SAN vendors

Once you have determined the relevant business goals and the technical specs, you can begin the vendor evaluation process. Many SAN vendors and SAN resellers offer free educational seminars that showcase different systems and provide Q&A sessions with industry experts.

Attending these events allows you to build up a portfolio of system knowledge for later comparison and can provide a much broader view of the SAN marketplace. Unleashing the office techies to attend this type of event then letting them present their findings will yield a surprising return when it comes to seeing past the sales pitches and making sure any prospective system is fit for purpose when it is time to make a decision.

Many organizations that are already SAN users are willing to open their doors to prospective purchasers through reference site agreements with manufacturers and resellers. Visiting these sites can be worthwhile if you can talk directly with the storage administrators who have experience using the SAN ... preferably away from any sales representatives. Such discussions can illuminate any pitfalls that may be awaiting you post-purchase and show up any gaps in after-sales services offered.

Making sure your prospective SAN supplier has the resources to fully support the product throughout the lifecycle of the product is vital to your purchasing strategy. A minimal level of after-sales support must include comprehensive hardware replacement strategies and round-the-clock availability of technical support. My experience of "telephone tennis" with foreign call centres was a big influence on my choice of support services from potential suppliers. The ability to speak to knowledgeable staff with remote access to my SAN was a big factor in our eventual selection of a SAN from Compellent and its Co-Pilot service for the Royal Horticultural Society.

When the purchase is imminent, a full due diligence examination of the successful supplier is also advisable. A supplier in financial or legal difficulties is unlikely to provide the service levels required for this type of product and could fail to honor support contracts.

Staff skillsets

The requirements for administering the SAN are another important factor. If you have a dedicated and qualified SAN administrator, this is a moot point. However, if SAN administration is to become part of the job function of an existing member of staff, then a full assessment of the skills and training required to manage the technology should form a part of the purchasing process. The newest SAN products use a Web browser-style management GUI that allows existing staff with a solid knowledge of traditional server RAID array disk management concepts to adapt quickly to a SAN administration role.

To summarize, the main objective when purchasing a SAN is to ensure that it meets the needs of your business at the point of purchase and throughout its lifecycle as a useful component of your business. To attain this objective, you need to know the driving goals and processes of your organization and the technical specifications available from SAN products that can meet them.

At the Royal Horticultural Society we collated all this into a decision matrix which scored potential vendors' products against our need for storage with fast and reliable image search and retrieval through an SQL database to help us make that decision.

Martin Taylor is a converged network manager with the Royal Horticultural Society, which recently went through the process of buying and implementing a Compellent SAN as a repository for its library of 200,000 images. The Royal Horticultural Society's network manager Martin Taylor guides users through the process of evaluating and purchasing a SAN.

HPC raises two issues when it comes to backup and disaster recovery preparation: the volume of data and the volume of files.

The workload or data volume generated by HPC applications can be very large when dealing with files containing seismic or genomic information. "Those files can be incredibly large," says Gartner analyst David Russell. "Traditional backup approaches may not be adequate or may simply take too much time." For example, he notes, some HPC files can be in the petabyte range.

Some HPC applications also generate exceptionally large numbers of files – "literally millions," according to Russell. "The challenge of how you account for those files or the time it might take to go through an operating system and traverse the file system to see what files have changed is very much a 'heaving lifting' task." Getting that data on disk, or simply just getting it through the server and switch, might take too much time. In short, he says, applying traditional backup tools directly to HPC tasks can be a formula for disaster.

As an alternative to traditional backup tools, Russell says that an HPC administrator could combine technologies such as array-based snapshots and remote replication with data reduction techniques such as deduplication. However, says Russell, not all workloads today benefit from deduplication. For instance, an image that is already in a compressed state usually cannot be reduced further.

Still, vendors offering compression techniques, such Ocarina Networks, "have figured out how to reverse-engineer giant files and look for redundancies," says Russell, and there may be ways to further improve the process.

But the number of files in HPC environments is still a major challenge for backup administrators. "If you have a million I/O cycles for a million files, the effort of interrogating all those files, even with a nightly update, will take a long time," says Russell. ""I've heard of some HPC applications where it took 30 hours to do a full backup and 28 hours of that was just spent scanning to see what files had changed."

In a world with no resource constraints, a storage administrator would have the necessary disk, power and floor space to handle all these backup tasks, says Russell. But what makes it even more difficult is that HPC environments are usually oriented towards scale-out, with lots of servers crunching data. That implies the need for tightly coordinated backup, because, notes Russell, "You don't want different points in time on 25 different servers." Backup can be coordinated, he notes, through "brute force methods" that flush buffers and set a machine check point.

HPC can bear small amounts of downtime
David Hill, an analyst with storage analyst firm The Mesabi Group, points out that for many HPC applications, small amounts of downtime would not be noticeable to the user because many compute-intensive jobs are actually batch jobs. That means the user will not see the results until the job has run to completion. "For a 1-hour-plus job, would five minutes missing in the middle be noticeable?" asks Hill. "The answer is no."

According to Hill, "What these types of jobs really need is checkpoint/restart capabilities, where the state of the memory in the computing environment is written to disk periodically so that it can be restarted."

Depending on the value of timeliness and the value of the data, Hill says that businesses doing HPC might also be willing to consider an active-active failover strategy to a remote disaster recovery site for both operational recovery from a local problem as well as disaster recovery to recover. Another option, according to Hill, is performing continuous data protection (CDP) locally, combined with a virtual tape library (VTL) and a standard backup-restore packages.

About the author: Alan R. Earls is a Boston-area writer focusing on the intersection of technology and business.

For storage administrators, the increasing popularity of HPC servers translates into unique backup challenges.

This is a topic that continues to generate many debates based on terminology. Let's start with the simple answer, which a majority of people agreed upon for the longest time:

Differential Backup

A differential backup will backup all files that have changed since the last full backup. In other words, if a full backup was done on Monday, Tuesday's differential will backup all changed files since Monday's full. Wednesday's differential will backup all changed files since Monday's full including the files that have changed on Tuesday.

The big advantage to this method comes when performing a complete restore since only the full and latest differential backups need to be restored. The downside is that the size of the differential backup will grow throughout the week and become progressively larger until the next full. This can adversely affect backup windows.

Incremental Backup

An incremental backup will backup all files that have changed since the last backup, regardless whether it was a full or incremental backup. In other words, if a full backup was done on Monday, Tuesday's incremental will backup all changed files since Monday's backup. However, Wednesday's incremental will only backup files that have changed since Tuesday's incremental backup.

The main advantage to this method is that a lot fewer files are backed up daily between full backups allowing for shorter backup windows. The disadvantage is that when performing a complete restore, the latest full and all subsequent incremental backups must be restored, which can take significantly longer.

The simplified technical explanation could be summarized by stating that both full and incremental backups reset the archive bit on a file (indicating it has been backed up) and a differential backup does not.

To complicate matters however, some software vendors felt this terminology was not adequate and decided to take a different approach. To some, any backup that does not arbitrarily backup all files (like a full backup) is considered an incremental backup. There are then cumulative incremental backups (called differential backups by most people) and there are differential incremental backups (simply called incremental by most people).

Unfortunately, this introduces a contradictory use of the term differential, which is at the source of many discussions about what the proper terminology should be. That said, regardless of which terminology you prefer, what is important to understand is that a full backup will cover all files and subsequent backups between full backups can either reference the last full or the last partial backup.

When attempting to determine which of these technologies is best suited for a specific environment, the differences described above become secondary. With today's high performance hardware, data explosion and compliance issues, the focus has shifted to deciding between tape and disk backup or data replication rather than between full, differential and incremental backups.

For more information:

Planning a centralized backup system

The differences between incremental and differential backups continue to generate many debates and cause confusion. Read this tip to learn how incremental and differential backups differ, and the benefits, drawbacks and uses of each.

You want your storage problems solved, you want to save money, and you want to see storage solutions work as advertised. The vendor sales representative wants your business. If the number of sales calls my own CEO gets each day is any indication, there are certainly enough companies out there fighting for that business.

Many vendors of enterprise solutions (by vendors, I'm referring to resellers, direct manufacturers or consulting firms) often forget one obvious fact:. From the customer's point of view, solving their problems or needs is more important than the vendor getting a sale. This forgetfulness is more common when there are layers between the customer and the manufacturer , for instance, if your reseller is buying from a distributor, who then buys from the manufacturer.

When vendor Olympics take place (that fun game where you play the vendors against each other), the vendors get tunnel vision and focus on getting the price down to preserve that relationship against their competitor. They end up doing financial surgery on their own feature sets to win. Ultimately, unless you are very careful and fully understand what's being included, the proposed solution may fail to meet your requirements. Next thing you know, you're shopping around for another solution.

Finding a good company to partner with -- a company that won't forget the main reason for that business relationship -- is as critical as the technology itself. Your sales rep should be focused on the long term, not the short term. The old storage sales motto, "He who owns the disks, owns the data center," is still true for the most part.

In addition, companies are constantly growing and changing, so the potential will always exist for an ongoing profitable relationship with the vendor if you are willing to grow with them. You both win. But how do you establish that kind of good partnership? More importantly, how do you make sure that partnership is on your terms? There are two things you can do.

Don't underestimate the importance of the person who accompanies the salesperson: the sales engineer. Find out their background and their expertise with a particular vendor's products. Are they going to be a solutions architect with enterprise experience? Are they trained and certified on the enterprise storage manufacturer's products, if they don't work directly for the manufacturer?

Enterprise storage solutions can be extremely complex. It can't hurt to have the manufacturer involved in the planning. The presales technical team needs to have a greater understanding than you or the sales representative have of the capabilities of the enterprise storage products, as they apply to your particular environment. This individual will likely be architecting the initial solution.

Here's an anecdote that illustrates the difference between a sales rep, a sales engineer and a customer support engineer. A customer calls up his sales representative and asks whether the company's product can do something. The salesperson says, "Sure, no problem!" Next the customer calls the sales engineer and asks the same question. The sales engineer says, "Maybe, but you need to consider this or do this." The call to customer support gets this answer. "Nope, that doesn't work." And that's why you never see the customer support people on the sales calls.

All three of these folks can be right from their own point of view. The sales engineer is the one who's going to get you to that middle ground of practicality of the solution. Listen to what they have to say. Ask questions, then follow up. Always perform a sanity check on any solution by finding out who is using it and whether they're happy with it, as well as with the company that provided it.

There are two kinds of references, technical references and business relationship references, and they can go a long way to helping you identify the right enterprise storage partner. Beware of vendors that spend more time knocking the other guy (a tactic called FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) than focusing on the merits of their solution. If they have something bad to say, make them use the "prove it" rule.

Your list of requirements for your vendor usually starts off with must-haves, then nice-to-haves. You should also let the vendor know which items will at some point in the future turn into must-haves. You don't want to buy something that will ultimately stop short of your requirements a few months down the road. You'd then be facing a forklift upgrade.

Have the vendor document how the solution addresses your requirements now, how it will address requirements in the near future, and how much it will cost to turn on those features. Insist on line item quotes in your proposals with an explanation of what each item is. Will the vendor stand behind its product or solution if it fails to meet published specifications? Exactly how will they do that?

Talk to references about their experiences with support. Find out what maintenance will cost after year three, if it is even available after that time frame. You don't want to buy something that EOLs (end-of-lifes) within a year of your purchase. If the EOS (end-of-service) comes within a timeframe that you're not comfortable with, you need to find out before you purchase.

If all of the above are addressed to your satisfaction, then you're well on your way to a successful business relationship with that enterprise storage vendor.

About the author: Joel Lovell is senior storage consultant for Storage Engine Inc. His specialty is high-performance storage and storage consolidation. He is EMC-trained in business continuity solutions, enterprise storage infrastructure and enterprise storage management. He previously was a strategic storage specialist for the Americas for Silicon Graphics and a senior systems engineer for EMC. You want your storage problems solved, you want to save money, and you want to see storage solutions work as advertised. The vendor sales representative wants your business. So why are good business relationships in the storage arena so rare?