Items Tagged: Fibre+Channel

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Cisco MDS

We’ve seen a rapid evolution in SAN fabric switching technologies in the past 18 months. The entire switching category is exploding with more intelligent, flexible, and scalable fabric architectures. Enterprises are very keen to get their hands on real-time fabric management tools, virtual abstraction capabilities, and multi-protocol support, to name just a few advances. Why? Because these technologies are central to establishing significant SAN ROI.

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Fibre Channel: The Proven and Reliable Workhorse for Enterprise Storage Networks

Mission-critical assets such as virtualized and database applications demand a proven enterprise storage protocol to meet their performance and reliability needs. Fibre Channel has long filled that need for most customers, and for good reason. Unlike competing protocols, Fibre Channel was specifically designed for storage networking, and engineered to deliver high levels of reliability and availability as well as consistent and predictable performance for enterprise applications. As a result, Fibre Channel has been the most widely used enterprise protocol for many years.

But with the widespread deployment of 10GbE technology, some customers have explored the use of other block protocols, such as iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), or file protocols such as NAS. Others have looked to Infiniband, which is now being touted as a storage networking solution. In marketing the strengths of these protocols, vendors often promote feeds and speeds, such as raw line rates, as a key advantage for storage networking. However, as we’ll see, there is much more to storage networking than raw speed.

It turns out that on an enterprise buyer’s scorecard, raw speed doesn’t even make the cut as an evaluation criteria. Instead, decision makers focus on factors such as a solution’s demonstrated reliability, latency, and track record in supporting Tier 1 applications. When it comes to these requirements, no other protocol can measure up to the inherent strengths of Fibre Channel in enterprise storage environments.

Despite its long, successful track record, Fibre Channel does not always get the attention and visibility that other protocols receive. While it may not be winning the media wars, Fibre Channel offers customers a clear and compelling value proposition as a storage networking solution. Looking ahead, Fibre Channel also presents an enticing technology roadmap, even as it continues to meet the storage needs of today’s most critical business applications.

In this paper, we’ll begin by looking at the key requirements customers should look for in a commercial storage protocol. We’ll then examine the technology capabilities and advantages of Fibre Channel relative to other protocols, and discuss how those translate to business benefits. Since not all vendor implementations are created equal, we’ll call out the solution set of one vendor – QLogic – as we discuss each of the requirements, highlighting it as an example of a Fibre Channel offering that goes well beyond the norm.

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Software-defined Storage and VMware's Virtual SAN Redefining Storage Operations

The massive trend to virtualize servers has brought great benefits to IT data centers everywhere, but other domains of IT infrastructure have been challenged to likewise evolve. In particular, enterprise storage has remained expensively tied to a traditional hardware infrastructure based on antiquated logical constructs that are not well aligned with virtual workloads – ultimately impairing both IT efficiency and organizational agility.

Software-Defined Storage provides a new approach to making better use of storage resources in the virtual environment. Some software-defined solutions are even enabling storage provisioning and management on an object, database or per-VM level instead of struggling with block storage LUN’s or file volumes. In particular, VM-centricity, especially when combined with an automatic policy-based approach to management, enables virtual admins to deal with storage in the same mindset and in the same flow as other virtual admin tasks.

In this paper, we will look at VMware’s Virtual SAN product and its impact on operations. Virtual SAN brings both virtualized storage infrastructure and VM-centric storage together into one solution that significantly reduces cost compared to a traditional SAN. While this kind of software-defined storage alters the acquisition cost of storage in several big ways (avoiding proprietary storage hardware, dedicated storage adapters and fabrics, et.al.) here at Taneja Group what we find more significant is the opportunity for solutions like VMware’s Virtual SAN to fundamentally alter the on-going operational (or OPEX) costs of storage.

In this report, we will look at how Software-Defined Storage stands to transform the long term OPEX for storage by examining VMware’s Virtual SAN product. We’ll do this by examining a representative handful of key operational tasks associated with enterprise storage and the virtual infrastructure in our validation lab. We’ll examine the key data points recorded from our comparative hands-on examination, estimating the overall time and effort required for common OPEX tasks on both VMware Virtual SAN and traditional enterprise storage.