Tiering is Dead, Long Live Tiering « Demand-Driven Storage Blog

Tiering is Dead, Long Live Tiering « Demand-Driven Storage Blog: "Tiering is Dead, Long Live Tiering"

NavigateStorage, a ten year old company specializing in Storage, Backup, Data Replication and Malware. We pass this article on as a precursor to talk nor about Avere Systems. We think this company has great promise, having decoded "Dynamic Tiering" and is worth a close look. Why not stay up to date and let us set up a webex and answer you questions.

The term Dynamic Tiering has really been abused in the network storage industry lately. Everyone talks about tiering in one form or another. Vendors that do not have currently shipping products talk about futures and those vendors that have shipping products do not actually disclose how their tiering works, which applications benefit, nor by how much. Unfortunately, one of the giants in the industry has even further muddied the waters. According to a TechTarget article last week regarding NetApp’s earnings call, NetApp’s CEO said that “the whole concept of tiered storage is going to go away.” Presumably, this refers to EMC’s Fast technology, since one industry Goliath always needs to beat up on another Goliath. The unfortunate thing for NetApp, is that on the same call, they completely reversed their position on tiering when they touted the success of their form of tiering, which includes their SSD-based performance accelerator. Tiering is dead, long live tiering!

The simple truth is that no single technology has ever proven to be the panacea of data storage. SATA drives have the lowest cost per bit and are great for archival storage. FC or SAS drives offer a compromise of performance and capacity, excelling at large block accesses like those found in large sequentially read files. Solid State Devices, based on Flash, offer unsurpassed performance for random reads and small block sizes.
More importantly, the differences from one technology to another are measured by orders of magnitude, not by mere percentage improvements. Because of this, a solution that can leverage the strengths of all the technologies is guaranteed to out-perform and cost less than a solution that only uses one or two.
Rather than predicting which storage tiers will win and the capacity of those tiers in a solution, the important information needed to judge a tiering solution is how the tiers are used. Most vendors are completely silent on this. Here are three examples of the more egregious mis-steps in dynamic tiering.

The first mis-step is tiering at too large a level of granularity. Consider a solution that tiers at the volume level. If a few files in a volume become active, the entire volume will need to be promoted to a more expensive tier to get the performance needed for the few files. This results in cost inefficiency as extra data is promoted to the expensive storage and performance inefficiency as the entire volume consumes read/write bandwidth of both tiers that are involved in the promotion of the volume.

The second mis-step is not tiering frequently enough. Several vendors have proposed tiering schedules that are measured in terms of days. This is crazy. Consider the file that I am editing for this blog. I might work on this file for a few days and then rarely, if ever, look at the source file again once the blog is posted. If activity is measure across days, by the time this source file is promoted, it should be archived.
The third mis-step is not using the correct media. Most vendors actually completely avoid this question and require the administrator to set policies. In those instances where the vendor does decide, frequently wrong media is chosen.

An example of this third mis-step is to examine the two stage architecture promoted on NTAP’s earnings call – SSD & SATA. In their architecture the SSD-based performance accelerator is apparently only used for read data. All write data is sent to SATA storage. This is terribly inefficient and is even proven in their SPECsfs®08 posting. To achieve the same performance in a NTAP 3160 with the accelerator module, they required almost twice the number of SATA disks than when they run the same benchmark using FC disks (96 SATA disks versus 56 FC disks). Since the SATA disks have over 3x the capacity of the FC disks, they deployed over 6x as much capacity to store the same amount of data. This over-provisioning is a result of not tiering the media properly and is extremely inefficient in terms of space, power and equipment costs.
What is clear from all of the press on “Dynamic Tiering”, is that the term is both extremely overused and misunderstood. Because of the orders of magnitude differences in storage media costs and performance, data storage solutions can clearly benefit from tiering if executed properly.

This entry was written by Ron Bianchini, posted on February 22, 2010 at 11:08 am, filed under Tiered NAS and tagged dynamic tiering, Flash, NetApp, SSD. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

iQstor Networks

iQstor Networks, Inc. , a leading developer of intelligent and integrated Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions, announced today that it has qualified the Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147 series of 4GFC disk drives for use with its iQ2880 4GFC to FC Storage Platform and J2880 4GFC Switched JBOD (SBOD) disk expansion enclosure.

"We're pleased to qualify Hitachi's line of 36GB, 73GB and 147GB 4GFC disk drives for use with our new iQ2880 and J2880 for the enterprise data center and high performance video applications," said Jason Lo, president and CEO of iQstor Networks. "Hitachi's high-performing Ultrastar drive technology is the perfect complement for our iQ2880 and J2880 for mission-critical enterprise computing environments like online transaction processing and data analysis, while addressing the evolving high resolution content creation and post production workflows requiring storage systems that can sustain throughputs for real-time HD network collaboration and 2K digital intermediate applications.

Contact NavigateStorage for more info

Red Condor Archive – Affordable, Reliable and Secure Hosted Email Archiving Service

NavigateStorage offers an Affordable, Reliable and Secure Hosted Email Archiving Service

Red Condor Archive provides an affordable, reliable and secure hosted Email Archiving Service to customers of all sizes to help you meet your compliance, litigation support, storage management or best practice requirements. Red Condor Archive leverages a global cloud computer and storage infrastructure to provide your organization with an extremely scalable, 100% software-free service, at a cost effective price. Red Condor Archive’s data collection technology supports all messaging systems (Microsoft, Novell, IBM, Zimbra, Scalix, IMail Server, Mailtrust, Keiro and many more) making the solution truly future-proof.

Automatic Back-Up of Messages & Attachments: With Red Condor Archive, you’ll capture all inbound and outbound messages and maintain a secure and tamper-proof copy of all business correspondence. Plus, you can completely set-up and configure your archive in just minutes with a few simple clicks.

Lifetime Retention with Unlimited Storage: With Red Condor Archive, there are never any hidden fees and all our subscription plans include unlimited storage.

Remove the strain on your email servers without expensive hardware. Allow users to delete email with the knowledge that any items can be retrieved from the archive if needed later.

Powerful Search & Retrieval At All Times: Red Condor Archive keeps all data online and immediately accessible for searches. Other hosted archive vendors migrate your older data to offline or near-line storage systems, dramatically increasing the amount of time required to search. You’ll be able to search, retrieve and export messages.

These are just a few of the features. Write or call 1-978-318-9000 or visit our website and request "More Info"

Kaspersky

Corporate customers check out the best, then let NavigateStorage provide a competitive quote or a free 30 day trial.

NavigateStorage or call 978-318-9000

NEC: D-Series SAN Storage Arrays

NEC: D-Series SAN Storage Arrays:

NEC's D-Series SAN Storage arrays provide highly available and easily scalable storage for your SAN without sacrificing performance and flexibility. They include high-end features you won't find on other mid-range arrays, but at a lower cost than other systems.

There are four models –

D1 Small to Medium Fibre Channel (up to 72TB FC)

D3i IPSAN (up to 144TB, iSCI attach SAS, SATA, and SASD/SATA intermix)

D3 Large Fibre Channel (up to 144TB, Fibre attach SAS, SATA, and SASD/SATA intermix)

D8 Data Center (up to 1.5 PetaBytes, 4-64 ports, 3-1,536 HDDs}

NavigateStorage specializes in storage of all types from many vendors. Check us out.

Global Relay Hosted Email Full Compliance

Global Relay Hosted Email Full Compliance from Navigatestorage

Global Relay's Message Archiver provides secure, off-site email archiving and long-term storage with online access.

An authentic copy of all incoming, internal and outgoing hosted Exchange or in-house email & attachments, IM, Bloomberg, Reuters, BlackBerry, e-fax and any PST files and imported legacy email, is captured, replicated and unified in the Message Archiver for rapid web-based search, retrieval & monitoring.

NavigateStorage has specialized in Email since 2001. Click on "More Info' on our website.

Mimosa Systems NavigateStorage

NavigateStorage has been delivering Compliant Email, SharePoint and File Archiving since 2001 starting with Educomm (before acquired by ZANTAZ then by Autonomy). We sell both on-site and Hosted. For on-site our vote goes to Mimosa. Let us tell you more.

Mimosa Systems NavigateStorage:

Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange has incorporated an innovative data capture approach called Continuous Application Shadowing™ where Exchange log files are captured the instant they are committed to disk and stores them “off-host” on NearPoint. Continuous Application Shadowing is an application-intelligent process that blocks corruption from the backup copy. All email content extracted from the log files is indexed and stored with single-instance storage. Continuous Application Shadowing also captures the complete Exchange mailbox information, including contacts, calendars, personal folders, as well as email stored offline in PST files and all email content found in public folders — a major advantage for eDiscovery and Exchange recovery."

StoneFly's iSCSI.com : Products : Voyager IP SAN

StoneFly's iSCSI.com : Products : Voyager IP SAN:

StoneFly's new Voyager IP SANs were designed to offer active/active controllers, improved redundancy, high-availability and fast performance - at a lower price point.

Using high-performance storage interconnects, the Voyager product family is designed for enterprise environments looking for a versatile SAN for primary and secondary storage applications. With support for SAS, SATA, and SSD drives for online transaction processing, database, email, disk based archives, disk to disk backup, virtual servers and other core applications. The cornerstone of the Voyager is our storage virtualization engine, which offers quad-core processing power, dedicated iSCSI Cache, and our StoneFusion storage management operating system.

NavigateStorage a long term partner would like you to know more about the Voyager and their OptiSAN IP SAN.

NAS Accelerator

NavigaterStorage recommends before you buy that next NAS box to accelerate CIFS or NFS read this link.

NAS Accelerator:

FXT Series hardware platforms provide the high-performance storage media that enables Avere tiered NAS appliances to accelerate the performance and reduce the cost of NAS environments. FXT Series hardware platforms are highly reliable and offered in multiple configuration options. Or better yet call Jim at 978-318-9000

Windows Management Sooftware

NavigateStorage announced a new partner offering. You must see this software product to believe it. Click on a link and sign up for a 30 min demo then lets talk turkey. We offer demo. pricing and maybe even free trials.

Windows Management Software:

With AutoVirt’s global namespace registering all changes to data location, it is possible to automate many storage management tasks – including those that affect data location. The AutoVirt policy engine is responsible for automating data measurement, copying, migration, replication, and archiving.

AutoVirt’s namespace and policy engine interact with both clients and networked file servers using the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol

NAS Performance

Challenge

The performance of current generation network attached storage (NAS) is limited by the quantity and performance of
the attached disk drives. For even modest application performance requirements, this limitation results in costly
over-provisioning of storage capacity, inefficient use of limited data center space, and wasted power consumption.

NavigateStorages Solution

The Avere FXT Series of tiered NAS appliances separates data delivery from data retention and more efficiently
delivers both. Active client data is stored and accessed on a cluster of FXT appliances optimized for performance.
Inactive data is stored on traditional NAS systems (in Avere terms, mass storage systems) optimized for storage
capacity and retention. System performance scales by adding appliances to the FXT cluster and capacity scales by
adding disk storage to the mass storage systems.

NavigateStorage specializes in Storage, Backup, Email Archiving and Anti-Virus?Malware.

Let us understand your challenges and then work for you and find the right solution. Call Jim at 978-318-9000 or Email.

Email Archiving Options

Today technology has progressed offering many new functions and ways to deliver. Initially it was primarily an in-house capability. A customer first had to train two-three IT staff, then provide the necessary hardware at the archiving site and then for the DR site. Next came the professional services to set up the system and hands-on train their staff to this new environment.

Budgets were then established for the installation then, of course, annual Maintenance charges (usually 20% of the initial sale). Of course software upgrades due to Microsoft or the vendor also needed to be considered. True, tried and tested ZANTAZ now owned by Autonomy and their Idol search engine who has had its challenges integrating it into EAS in place of Alta vista and Mimosa (now owned by Iron Mountain).

Then along came "hosted or cloud solutions." This solution did not require any of the above but a monthly per user charge. Global Relay the leader in this field at about $10/user month and Red Condor a recent start up delivering a mature archiving solution at only $4/user/month. Hosted solutions are making good progress securing the customers email as the email is kept on the providers location not the customers. Acceptance is slow coming but as new things usually do.

Both have their benefits depending on the situation.

NavigateStorage invites you to discuss your challenges with Email, files, Instant Messaging. Give us a call 978-318-9000 or write.

AutoVirt - NavigateStorage finds a jewel

Consolidation projects mean moving data from many to fewer devices. This means that you must schedule maintenance windows, migrate the data manually, and reapply client shortcuts after migration. This can take weeks! Get up and running with AutoVirt and schedule your consolidation project to run in less than one day - without maintenance windows.

Read about how A&W in Canada meet Success with File Virtualization.

Then contact us 1-978-318-9000 or ask for more info on the webpage NavigateStorage

NavigateStorage offers Assureon from Nexsan

Why would anyone store dozens or even hundreds of copies of the exact
same file? They wouldn’t. And yet that is exactly what many businesses
are doing.

NavigateStorage says Assureon is a better way - a way that greatly reduces management headaches and minimizes storage consumption.

Assureon from Nexsan gives organizations the ability to keep only one copy of each file stored, regardless of how many users write that file to storage. Assureon uses single instance store technology, a function of Content Addressed Storage, to identify duplicate files and store only a single copy of a file. This deduplication process is performed automatically with Assureon and is transparent to the user. By intelligently transferring and storing a single instance of any archived file, Assureon dramatically reduces storage consumption, network bandwidth and overall cost.

Assureon is designed around the Content Addressed Storage (CAS) object storage model. CAS technology produces a unique digital identifier or fingerprint for all objects, based on their content. This object storage model stores files, images, recordings, email, and so on, as objects with a unique universal identifier. This fingerprint provides the unique CAS address that is used to store, retrieve and verify the integrity of the archived file. In an object model, the archived physical object is completely separate from the logical location or application. This approach simplifies management and allows greater scalability over traditional file system models. Administrators can now be relieved of performing typical storage housekeeping tasks, such as formatting file systems, creating volumes and binding LUNs (logical unit numbers).

Please call us at 978-318-9000, visit our website or write.

AutoMAID™ Energy Saving Technology

Nexsan's evolutionary AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) energy saving technology transparently places disk drives into an idle state to vastly reduce power and cooling costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-effecdtive benefits of MAID 2.0 without the limitations of slow access times and special host software.

AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and offers multiple levels of energy savings. AutoMAID is user selectable enabling users to determine the right level of response time performance to energy savings. AutoMAID is the first MAID 2.0 architecture that supports VTL, full file format D2D and standard high performance RAID implementations.

LISTEN to this brief summary from NEXSAN. Contact NavigateStorage to see how competitively price this solution can be.

Email Archiving and Nexsan Assureon

Solutions for Email Archiving Businesses large and small are facing numerous challenges today in managing their growing repositories of email, including:

* Email required to be preserved and proven unalterable for many years based on new compliance regulations
* Exploding volume of email to archive Troublesome retrieval of email from traditional tape or optical archives when required for legal discovery or compliance
* Limited available storage space means that users must periodically either delete email or archive it offline
* Nexsan's Assureon storage appliances provide safe, cost-effective means to archive the growing volumes of email, yet keep them online and rapidly retrievable.

Businesses can now keep a complete archive of all their employees' email messages without requiring them to regularly clean out their email inbox and decide which messages to keep in order to free up space. At the same time, Assureon appliances dramatically reduce the time required to backup current, active email by offloading archived email into a separate repository. Other benefits include:

* Ensuring email contents are unalterable by permanently saving the messages into a WORM Compliant disk archive
* Immediately access, search, and retrieve the complete email archive
* Reduce email server license costs by offloading email to a separate archive sooner

NavigateStorage, a NEXSAN Partner believes that depending on what email archive application you use, the Assureon storage appliance can be set up and in use within one hour. Preloaded software features simple browser-based management and built-in "drag-and-drop" file management.

For pricing and details contact Jim at NavigateStorage and click on "More Info" on the NEXSAN webpage.

Nexsan Assureon

To insure that your archived data - email, files, even Sharepoint are compliant - tamper-proof then NavigateStorage recommends you let them tell you about Nexan's Assureon.

Assureon is a Secure Online Disk Archive
* Compliant-level privacy, integrity and longevity
* Self-auditing, self-healing file management technology
* Enterprise class manageability, scalability and energy efficiency
* Affordable: enterprise class archive to meet your needs at a price to meet your budget

Privacy – Integrity – Longevity

Most storage systems provide you "hope" - hope about your data privacy, integrity and longevity. But there is some data that demands guarantees.

Can you guarantee a file. . . has not been tampered with? is safe from prying eyes? is not corrupted over time?

What you need is a storage system that is as secure as a safe deposit box and as easy to access as your wallet. Nexsan’s Assureon online disk storage archive provides the privacy, integrity and longevity of a digital safe deposit box with the high speed access of disk drive technology.
Assureon assures Privacy Assureon ensures the privacy of data with innovative security features:
* Data Separation and SecurityEvery user or department can have their files in their own virtual safe deposit box. Within Assureon, your data is logically and physically separate from the rest of the data ensuring privacy and security.
* Access Audit TrailAssureon establishes an unalterable audit trail for the life of an archived file. Every time a file is accessed, a record is kept of who accessed it and when it was accessed.
Assureon assures IntegrityAssureon ensures the integrity of data with next generation self-auditing and self-healing technology
* Fingerprint & IntegrityWhen data is archived, it is assigned its own unique fingerprint that stays with the file through its life cycle. If a single byte ever changes, the fingerprint will change. Revolutionary safeguards have been put into place to ensure that a file will retain its exact fingerprint through its life cycle.
* Self-Auditing and Self-HealingAssureon continually monitors files for fingerprint discrepancies protecting against tampering, viruses, corruption, accidental or deliberate deletion and theft. If discrepancies are discovered, Assureon notifies you and automatically self-heals the file.

Let's discuss your needs. And if you also need an archiving solution we have them too. Mimosa,
Zantaz, Global Relay and Red Condor.

NEC Storage

SAN, NAS, disaster recovery, non-disruptive backup, and more

Accelerating deployment of broadband Internet and IT in business has been rapidly driving corporations toward global business collaboration with partners all over the world. Needless to say, the amount of accumulated data in a company is exploding. In this day and age, for corporations to strengthen their competitiveness, they have to find out how to strategically leverage the growing data.

NEC Storage provides the answer for your new storage strategy with a wide array of products, including NEC Storage D series of storage products for storage area networks and NEC Storage NAS Series for network-attached storage.

Visit NavigateStorage - We sell a wide variety of vendors and solutions including Data De-Dup, SAN's, NAS, DR, and more

Stonefly's StoneFusion from NavigateStorage

The award-winning StoneFusion® Intelligent Network Storage Platform (NSP), StoneFly's patent-pending baseline storage networking architecture, reduces the total cost of ownership by lowering management costs and increasing storage utilization.

By adding block level storage intelligence to the IP networking core, StoneFusion powered Storage Concentrators deliver all the benefits of managed SANs, including increased storage utilization through resource consolidation, storage provisioning, access control, volume management, and feature-rich managed storage supporting advanced storage services including clustering, mirroring, and snapshotting.

At the core of StoneFusion is a robust storage virtualization engine that enables provisioning of physical storage resources in to virtual storage volumes. These logical volumes are presented to the host as normal SCSI disks, using industry standard hardware and software iSCSI initiators. With StoneFusion the power of IP SAN centralization is at your fingertips.

Why not let NavigateStorage tell you more and learn your challenges. Then offer a solution. Call Jim at 978-315-9000

Nexsan Technologies - SATABeast Xi

Nexsan Technologies - SATABeast Xi: "SATABeast Xi with AutoMAID™ Energy Saving Technology

SATABeast Xi is a high performance, high capacity RAID storage system with the energy saving benefits of MAID 2.0 (Massive Array of Idle Disks). SATABeast Xi employs Nexsan's revolutionary AutoMAID energy saving technology to transparently place disk drives into an idle state vastly reducing power and cooling costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-effecdtive benefits of MAID 2.0 without the limitations of slow access times and special host software.

AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and offers multiple levels of energy savings. AutoMAID is user selectable enabling users to determine the right level of response time performance to energy savings. AutoMAID is the first MAID 2.0 architecture that supports VTL, full file format D2D and standard high performance RAID implementations."

Connect NavigateStorage for more information. 978-318-9000.

Nexsan released DeDupe Speed witn Green

Nexsan, a leading storage system provider, today announced that it has released the DeDupe SG® ("Speed with Green") 2.0 solution. Nexsan's next generation of energy-efficient file storage systems are designed for data protection and disaster recovery applications that require high-performance deduplication. Integrating the latest version of the FalconStor File-Interface Deduplication System (FDS), the Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 is the first LAN-based deduplication system to offer high availability. As part of the most recent enhancements, Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 features support for Symantec's OpenStorage (OST) protocol, which accelerates data ingestion speeds for the increased performance and efficiency that today's mid-sized enterprises need.

The Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 offers redundant appliances to provide continuous data access and automatic backup application failover, raising the bar for data deduplication solutions. To dramatically increase backup speeds and reduce the complexity of recovery during a disaster, the redundant appliances offer backup server connections of up to 5.4 terabytes per hour and support for Symantec OST.

"Data deduplication technology addresses the issue of burgeoning data growth, which is a key challenge for storage administrators," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Adoption rates for data deduplication technology are growing because it delivers greater storage efficiency and improves the economics of disk-based backup. This technology should be at the heart of any data management strategy."
The Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 improves operational efficiency by leveraging the green capabilities inherent in Nexsan's industry-leading AutoMAID® technology. This energy-saving technology transparently places disk drives into their most energy-efficient state without affecting backup performance, making DeDupe SG 2.0 systems extremely power efficient.
"Nexsan has a unique capability and one that we believe is a first in the industry: power-managed deduplication," said George Crump, senior analyst at Storage Switzerland. "In the past, because of the deployment strategies of other solutions, all the drives needed to remain active for the deduplication process to work effectively. The Nexsan solution is designed so that the backup can be completed, deduplication cleanup processes performed, and the system be ready to be spun down soon after the backup completes."New features of the Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 include:
* Redundant appliances for high availability
* Automatic backup application failover
* Symantec OST support for additional efficiency and performance
* Support for industry-leading backup software solutions, including NetBackup
* Replication support for up to 150 remote sites
* Further automation of storage management processes
* Optional 10-Gigabit Ethernet connections

NavigateStorage is in it's 10th year and specializes in Storage, Backup, EMail Archiving and Anti- Virus/Malware.

"SSD vs. HDD when fixing performance problems

NavigateStorage recently read George's article regarding high performance problems and HDD vs. SSD, I found it quite informative and wanted to share it with you.

George Crump, Contributor
02.16.2010

As SearchStorage.com's recent Storage Priorities survey shows, data storage managers are making moves toward solid-state storage and solid-state drives (SSDs), with 14% of 360 survey respondents planning to implement them this year and nearly 40% planning to evaluate them this year (in addition to the 7% who already have them in place). Those numbers mean that right now, many of your customers could use help in comparing SSD vs. HDD and determining what value they'd get from implementing SSD to fix performance problems. This is a role that's tailor-made for an integrator and represents an excellent value-add opportunity for you.
While SSD represents a premium in storage capacity, it's well worth it if it improves storage response time to users and critical applications. According to Jim Handy, SSD analyst at Los Gatos, Calif.-based market research firm Objective Analysis, who was interviewed for a story on SearchStorage.com, SSD is 20 times more costly than hard disk drives (HDDs) on a cost-per-gigabyte basis.

But, the same story points out, comparing SSD vs. HDD in terms of cost per input/output operations per second (IOPS), the equation looks decidedly different. According to Mark Teter, chief technology officer (CTO) at Advanced Systems Group, "flash is almost 140 times faster than the fastest HDD." For companies whose revenue is tied to a high I/O on important applications, not implementing SSD could actually cost them money in a clearly measurable way. Beyond that, SSD vendors have plenty of examples of how their technologies have helped with customer retention and increased productivity.
That said, don't assume that SSD is a bullet-proof answer. When a customer comes to you with a performance concern, resist the urge to sell them a whole new storage system -- and, instead, put on your trusted advisor hat. As we discuss in our Visualizing SSD Readiness guide, there are specific steps you can take to determine whether your customer can benefit from the addition of SSD.
The first and probably simplest step, when checking application performance issues, is to test the CPU utilization of the HDD that the application is running on. If the CPU utilization is on average greater than 50%, more than likely the application is CPU-bound rather than storage I/O-bound. But if the CPU utilization rate is below 50%, the CPU is most likely waiting on something. (The lower the rate is, the more likely this is true.) Oftentimes, that's an indication of a storage performance bottleneck.

If your customer's CPU utilization rate is below 50%, the next step is to determine where the performance problems are coming from. In this situation, a utility like PerfMon or third-party tools can help you figure this out.
Using one of these tools, the first parameter to look at is something called queue depth. The queue, as it relates to storage, is essentially the number of pending I/O requests to the storage system. The queue depth is affected by the number of drives in a RAID configuration; the more drives there are in the RAID configuration, the more I/O requests can be handled at the same time. If a RAID configuration consistently shows a queue depth, you can reduce that depth by approximately a unit of one with each drive that you add. As long as there is queue depth, adding drives should improve performance.
But, adding drives to reduce queue depth can lead to a few problems. The first is that the drive count can become quite high and, of course, quite expensive. If adding a few extra drives to the RAID group can return performance to an acceptable level, then this can be a cost-effective way to solve the performance problem. However, if it takes 50 or 100 additional drives to reduce queue depth to an acceptable level, it could break your customer's budget.
Secondly, there is also a concern around capacity waste. In most cases, the application does not need all these drives to store the data. It needs them to generate performance. As a result, terabytes of capacity may go unused, further reducing the ROI of a disk-based solution. (Comparatively, in most cases, one SSD can outperform even a high number of disks, do so less expensively and without wasting terabytes of capacity.)
The third problem with adding HDDs to reduce queue depth is that it might not solve the storage bottleneck problem. If queue depth is zero but storage is still the bottleneck, then you have a latency issue. In that case, the only option is a faster drive.

Utilities like PerfMon and others will help you identify problems with disk latency, which refers to the time it takes for a drive to find the requested data and send that data back out the I/O channel. When measuring response time, to identify problems, look for anything that is averaging consistently above 5 to 10 milliseconds per second.
On mechanical HDDs with disk latency problems, there are two options. The first is to offer your customers faster drives, but for the last 10-plus years we have been stuck at 15,000-rpm drives, so while your customer may see an improvement with this approach they likely have already tried that as a solution. The alternative to a faster drive is to make the response time of the drive faster by making sure the data is on the outer edge of the disk's platter, a technique called short stroking. This essentially means formatting only the outer part of the drive. While this does increase performance, it also wastes a lot of disk capacity -- as much as two-thirds of the total capacity of the drive.
If your customer doesn't yet have 15,000-rpm HDDs, buying them and then short-stroking them is going to be an expensive option. With SSD, on the other hand, response time is often all but eliminated and done so at a significantly lower cost.

The challenge with SSD is to know what to look for. The simple test is to know what processor utilization is on the servers that are hosting the application of file servers that are serving the data. If it is low, it's time to break out utilities to look at the queue depth and response time parameters. If queue depth or response time is high, more than likely SSD will make a dramatic improvement to the customer's environment.

About the author

George Crump is president and founder of Storage Switzerland, an IT analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization segments. With 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the United States, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland, George was chief technology officer at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection. Find Storage Switzerland's disclosure statement here.


NavigateStorage offers a full line of storage from many vendors. Contact us at 978-318-9000 or write us. You can read the full article here.

Global Relay and IMAP

User of Lotus for email can benefit from the advantages of Global Relay if they use IMAP.

Let us till you more. Contact NavigateStorage via our "request info" on our website. Or call 978-318-9000 or write.

Windows Management Sooftware

Windows Management Software:

Migrating Windows Data usually means IT works the weekend.

AutoVirt's Management software for Windows storage makes that a thing if the pastby allowing you to migrate while your users do their work.

AutoVirt is a software platform for Windows that provides storage management control from a web-based console. Use AutoVirt to automate and expedite:

* Data Measurement
* Copying
* Migration
* Replication
* Archiving

AutoVirt provides:

* A solution for managing unstructured Windows file data
* A way to extend the native functionality of inexpensive, commodity Windows hardware
* Integration with mainframe NAS devices, including NetApp and EMC Celerra
* Out-of-band runtime operations, with no client agents
* An intelligent client referral service with perpetual support for client UNC names and embedded links

Installing a global namespace.

Many organizations have hesitated to insert a global namespace because the conversion is often a laborious, manual process. Most global namespaces, including Microsoft DFS, require UNC names to be changed upon implementation, one at a time. The AutoVirt global namespace model is different. AutoVirt provides automated namespace creation and support of pre-existing UNC names. During installation, AutoVirt automatically inventories the file server environment to create a complete map. Administrators use this map to designate which file servers will receive client referrals through the global namespace. When a file server is selected for AutoVirt management, the map of its contents – from root to leaf-level folders – is automatically stored in the namespace. The automated file server inventory makes it possible for AutoVirt to support indefinitely the pre-existing UNC names – even after the file servers they once referenced have crumbled to dust.

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