Storage @ Work

I spoke to a customer earlier this week who had a small problem with an online capacity upgrade. He told me that while their new system and capacity were being integrated into their existing storage resources, performance dropped approximately 20%. I brought this up at the Atlanta Customer Advisory Board meeting today to see if the customers that were there had seen anything similar or had any comments. As it turned out, our local SE Wade O'Harrow had been there and gave us an overview. He said the customer's network was designed where the EqualLogic storage systems are connected to multiple edge switches in an core-edge network with relatively thin ISL uplinks between the edge and core switches. These links were not able to keep up with the combination of the customer's normal high-throughput I/O load and the additional load incurred when a new system is added to an existing group and the load is balanced among systems.

The comments from our customers on the advisory board were interesting. They said that core-edge topologies are part of commonly accepted best practices for Ethernet/TCP/IP networks, but that the assumptions used in forming those best practices did not necessarily apply to SANs - especially heavily loaded iSCSI SANs. Storage systems involve much higher traffic levels and I/O loads than most other end nodes connected to edge switches. Instead they offered that best practices for iSCSI SANs would connect storage at the core of the network as a centralized resource or that a different, beefed up edge design including fatter pipes were needed. They thought people would get a lot of value from better documentation of best practices for iSCSI SANs.

I agree. So, I'll try to revisit this topic regularly in this blog and let you know what I find out what's working for other customers.

Solimar Systems is one of EqualLogic's longest standing customers, having purchased their first iSCSI storage system from the company over 3 years ago. I was down in San Diego yesterday and Leo Kameya, our sales manager there took me in to visit Tom Lytle at Solimar on our way to consume mass quantities of sushi together. Solimar provides large scale electronic printing services for companies who need to have PDF versions of traditional print output, such as financial statements, available on demand for their customers. If you have accessed a PDF statement for your bank or credit card, there is a good chace that this data was produced by Solimar.

Tom is a great guy, easygoing and very likable. He showed us around his data center and I took some footage of EqualLogic products at work in Solimar's data center. Maybe I'll put up some of that video, but are few things as dull as watching lights blinking on storage arrays.

What IS interesting, however, is the way that Tom upgraded his first EqualLogic storage system by refreshing (or replacing) its original 250 GB drives with new, high capacity 750GB drives. Usually EqualLogic customers are told that they can add new systems to an existing EqualLogic SAN and that the existing system's data will be spread (load balanced) across the combined volume spaces of the existing and new systems in the group. Tom explained to me how they tweaked this process by creating a two-system group, and then removing the original system from the group. This forced all the data to be migrated over to the new EqualLogic system. After that process completed, the original system was taken offline and the original disk drives were removed and replaced with new drives. With three times its original capacity, the original system was added back to the group and an inverse process was run to restore (remigrate) the data completely back to the original EqualLogic system. Essentially, this is an automated way to perform dump-and-fill storage operations between an existing disk system and its temporary replacement. The kicker in all this according to Tom was that there was never any downtime. The data was online and available the entire time.

Its really quite a cool thing, but it does make it difficult to set meaningful expectations for the lifespan of the product. What is it? - 6 years, 7 years, 8 years, 9 years or more? I really don't know and I suppose its going to be one of those "it depends" things. We're just going to have to wait to find out.

There is a post on the VMWare forum today where an administrator is having problems getting VMotion to work with their iSCSI SAN.

Further down the thread is a post from an EqualLogic customer who has had a much better and more positive experience.

Thanks to VMWare forum member, acr, who posted his comment on this thread in the VMWare forum. Please look at his expertise level on this forum. (Virtuoso, with over 2600 posts). He says iSCSI is "quickest and easiest when we use VMotion."

EqualLogic's frameless, virtual storage architecture works very well with VMWare. Similar to the way the VMotion feature provides complete transparency for systems, EqualLogic storage systems provide transparency for storage where volumes can be transparently spanned and migrated across storage systems.

I was in Los Angeles today talking to customers here, asking them about their storage applications. One of the themes that came up repeatedly was the use of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for file services connected to EqualLogic Storage Systems.

Our customers tend to appreciate administrative efficiency and low cost of ownership. Not surprisingly, they also know they can wring a huge amount of functionality out of plain, vanilla Windows file servers. Similar to the way iSCSI helps them leverage their organization's networking skills, Windows file servers help them leverage their entire organization's Windows admin skills, including system and network management, not to mention the licensing agreements they have with Microsoft. For most of them, setting up a Windows file server is a snap and takes almost no time whatsoever. Microsoft has made the iSCSI SAN components very easy to deal with and setup with an EqualLogic storage system is amazingly simple as most of our customers will testify. In most cases, setting up a Windows File server with EqualLogic storage takes less time and effort than installing an industry leading NAS system.

Some in the industry are trying to make a big deal out of the concept of unified storage. The idea of unified storage is that specialized multi-protocol, multi-network NAS/SAN systems will connect to virtually any type of client system using virtually any network or protocol they might want to use. The extension is that if you have a single technology to work with, it is more efficient own. Hmmm. Sounds a bit like a vendor trap to me.

Even if you don't believe that unified storage is another in a long line of storage vendor traps, the weakness with any one-size-fits-all product is the impossibility of fitting all the requirements equally well. Some functions tend to work well, while others tend to be stuck in perpetual mediocrity.

We have customers that believe unified storage is an unnecessary luxury and waste of their resources. Instead, they have made the shrewd observation that all the standards they need already exist and that their best practices begin by enforcing conformity with those standards. For many, Ethernet, TCP/IP and Windows servers are their core infrastructure standards. They have also come to the realization that EqualLogic iSCSI SANs are an extremely good fit for these standards.

Dave Hitz at Netapp posted an interesting blog last week where he discussed the confusion that exists regarding storage networks and protocols. At the end, he punted and basically decided that a "customer is the expert" approach is best and that if a customer wants to analyze things a certain way, then it was best just to go along with them. Why bother explaining the fine points between file and block I/O when you can just agree with something that goes against your sensibilities, right? Heaven forbid, why screw up a sales opportunity trying to explain to someone who wants to buy a lot of your equipment that everything they just said was goofy? Yes, I get it, and I have to admit it, I've been there. But Dave, don't you think its a bit of a cop out to say 'I've given up, I'll let them believe what they want to believe' in a blog. Whether we like it or not, there are people who hope to catch valuable insights from guys like us - or at least the occasional entertainment of disagreement. So, in the spirit of both, I'm giving you the WAGGING FINGER OF SHAME.

At any rate, I don't think this SAN/NAS protocol/network stuff is actually all that difficult if you forget the protocol junk and focus on the applications. The first thing is to understand that the network used for storage is just a network that can carry both kinds of traffic, just like a cable TV network can carry video, Internet and voice traffic. It does not matter if the network is Fibre Channel or Ethernet (or carrier pigeons), the network is simply a way to transmit information for a storage application.

Rather than talking about protocols, which can turn an otherwise alert human into Rip Van Winkle, it helps to focus on the two primary applications in storage networks: storing and filing. Think of them as being analogous to video and voice applications running on a cable network.

Storing was historically developed to transmit information between computer systems and relatively unintelligent storage devices such as disk drives and tape drives. This is roughly similar to a TV network where the device receiving the information is an idiot box (television). Initially, storing was done over a bus, whereas television was transmitted wirelessly. As the technologies matured, both were adapted for use over networks. Storing over a network is referred to as a SAN, whereas transmitting video signals over the cable network is called highway robbery. In SANs, the storage device performs the storing function without an awareness of what the information is. Likewise a television has no awareness of what is coming out of its picture tube and speakers. Both simply do what they are told to do (its more like a master/slave thing than a client/server relationship). Where storing is concerned, a system program controls the sequence of operations that determines what information is stored, and what address spaces in the device are used to store it. This system program is usually a file system, a database system or a backup system and it has all the responsibility of knowing how to access the information stored in the device.

Filing applications (or services) were historically developed to transmit data files between intelligent systems, analogous to the way a person can tell a story to another person over the phone. Both file services and the telephone system were developed for network environments connecting multiple intelligent entities. The system that provides the file storing service is called a NAS system, whereas the person listening to the story on the phone is simply called by their name or pronoun such as "yo" or "mom". Both enti COMMENT: AUTHOR: Paula Long DATE: 04/25/2007 12:06:56 EMAIL: plong@equallogic.com URL: Marc, as always, you have given a very thoughtful answer and a clear explanation of the difference between file access and block access to data. Believe it or not, I have talked to smart people who get confused by the difference between NAS and iSCSI SAN. It had nothing to do with the wire and everything to do with how customers' applications access their data. The applications they run access the data using file semantics. On Windows there are very few applications that talk to physical disks (raw devices in UNIX-speak); in UNIX there are fewer that talk to the raw device now than when I did DB work, but still more than zero. The fact that administrators create a physical device then put a file system on it immediately is what muddies the water. With a good SAN implementation, the administrator never views the LUN/disks again. They see their drive letter or a UNIX mount point. So when someone says their applications talk to files, people tell them they must want NAS. It’s historical more than anything else. If you ask a more specific question—for example, do you want to have your database or mail server talk to your storage using NFS or CIFS?—they look at you like you’ve grown a second head. It’s difficult for them to comprehend why you would add that additional unnecessary layer between the storage and the application. Not everyone hears/reads NAS and automatically understands this to mean NFS, CIFS or some other distributed file system protocol. NAS is an overused term that can confuse people. It means Network Attached Storage. When some folks hear “network” they think “Ethernet.” You say “iSCSI,” they hear “Ethernet.” Hence the confusion; our language is precise if you understand the history of the term NAS, and don’t confuse the term “NAS standards” with Network Attached Storage. We should make sure we don’t argue with customers. At the same time, we should make sure we clearly understand what they are telling or asking us. Our definitions and theirs aren’t always the same. So I guess I agree with David that the terms can confuse people. I am not sure that saying “There’s no difference” is the answer, though, since you’ll have one disappointed DBA if she finds her database talking NFS or CIFS to access storage. Paula

Nigel at the RupturedMonkey blog site wrote a post titled "Grrrrr big beefy manly SANs". He talks about a number of things that I think belong as part of a SAN best practices. The post has an interesting confessional tone where he discusses a certain fascination with large and complex networks - something that I think is common in our line of work. One of the things he discusses is limiting the number of ISLs in SANs as a way to reduce problems: I quote one of his paragraphs below:

"One thing that had a real influence on me was some work that I did for a telco company who have a policy of no ISLs in their SAN environments. A lot of people initially sniggle at the idea, and to be honest, I too raised an eyebrow when I first heard this. But I have to say that in their SAN environments problems were noticeably fewer and farther between, and when they did occur they were so much more limited in their scope and so much easier to troubleshoot."

A common mistake people make when thinking about SANs (especially iSCSI SANs) is assuming the same design principals and best practices apply to both LANs and SANs. A simple examination of the requirements indicates profound differences: For instance, with LANs, systems communicate frequently with other systems with the potential for any one system to communicate with every other system, but with SANs, systems usually don't have any reason to communicate with many other systems and storage. In fact, most SANs implement technology and processes to restrict potentially harmful communications. Put another way, LANs assume any-to-any communications whereas SANs assume a need-to-communicate-only operating model.

An excellent strategy for providing a need-to-communicate-only environment is to reduce the number of potential connections. In general, it is difficult to err in the pursuit of restricting SAN communications and this should be a design goal that is carried through the initial implementation and all subsequent changes to the SAN. Pursue policies that limit the number of ports in a SAN.

The use of ISLs should be limited as a way to prevent "connection creep" in the SAN. Core-edge designs with ISLs should not be blindly assumed as the best way to add nodes in the SAN. Instead think about using a single layer of switches that operate in parallel providing a single-hop environment. Stackable switches such as the Cisco 3750 for iSCSI or the QLogic 5200 for Fibre Channel have valuable scalability benefits.

Core-edge designs should be implemented with a goal of limiting the number of hops. The best core edge designs would have two hops between systems and storage. One way to do this is to connect storage ports to core switches and servers at the edge.

Consider using different SANs for disk I/O and backup. For instance, primary disk I/O might require dual paths with independent switches in those paths, whereas backup might only require a single path between servers and backup devices/systems. This limits the impact that backup and restore operations have on production disk I/O operations and solves many of the problems originating from the conflicting connectivity models for primary disk I/O and backup (the connectivity requirements for backup tend to be much broader than the connectivity requirements for disk access). For example, a dual-port HBA/NIC could be used to connect to the disk SAN while a single port HBA/NIC could be used to connect to the backup SAN.

Tony Asaro at ESG and I are in almost total agreement on thin provisioning. I suppose I should defer to him on the topic because he was talking about it before I was thinking about it, so he has first mover rights. We've been blogging back and forth about the benefits of storage provisioning. It's kind of funny, his list is slightly longer than mine - and I work for a vendor. Go figure. Anyway, there is this analogy of credit that we've been using and we both agree that its not perfect, but its not too bad.

In his last post Tony explains that it isn't like a normal debt because you might never have to pay it back. Of course he's right about that. However, the problem is that you really don't know for certain if your debt is forgiven - at some point a sleepy thinly provisioned volume could get busy and require management. And that's one of the reasons EqualLogic's implementation gives administrators the ability to convert a thinly provisioned volume into a normal one, which is effectively the same as retiring the debt on a thinly provisioned volume.

So when would it make sense to convert from thin to normal? When the application stabilizes and capacity growth slows to something small and predictable. Or when you decide that you don't want to use thin provisioning anymore. Or any other reason - we don't want to tell people they have to use it or that they are stuck using it. Its up to them.

Storage-zilla has a post where he points to an EMC White Paper that explains how Netapp Filers make their SAN (block I/O) storage work through their WAFL-based filers.

The same argument the Zilla man lays out here works for EqualLogic of course too. If you are looking for iSCSI performance, make sure you check out EqualLogic iSCSI SAN solutions as well as those EMC and Netapp boxes.

Microsoft just released a document written by Dennis Martin of Demartek showing a variety of iSCSI storage configurations. Here is a link to the PDF from Microsoft's web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? FamilyID=da150335-2d76-4cc7-9e3b-a95ed688fd2a&DisplayLang=en

Here is a link to a page on Demartek's website where you can download it as a Word file or as a PDF:
http://www.demartek.com/Demarte k_Deploying_iSCSI_Storage_Solutions_2007-06.html

An EqualLogic solution is featured in this document along with solutions from other vendors. I may have some comments about this document in the days to come after I get a chance to look it over.

I'm extremely happy to see Microsoft getting behind all of us, helping to grow the entire iSCSI industry.

Thanks Claude, SW, Suzanne, and all the rest of you in Redmond that are supporting iSCSI!

Anne Silverthorn wrote a pretty decent article in InfoStor about how SMBs can benefit from installing SANs to replace DAS storage. Lots of vendors are mentioned

In this podcast Farley talks about the problem of managing changes to storage infrastructures.

This posting showed up last week on Cisco's Data Center Network blog site - discussing ways to reduce power consumption in the data center. The third item on their list was to use diskless systems and boot from a SAN. From a power usage perspective, booting from a SAN is about the same as using server virtualization, although there are many more power efficiencies to be gained just disk drive power considerations.

I just peaked over at the Lone Sys Admin's site today and saw his blog posting about System Administrators Appreciation Day.

So, all of our customers have system administrators that I want to send out a happy greeting to and I want to say that I hope we are making your hellish workloads easier to manage!

But I also want to send a BIG THANK YOU to our own system admins here at EqualLogic - most of whom I probably don't even know (egad!) Randy and Ian and the rest of you - thanks for putting in all the horrendous work you do supporting us.

Earlier today Chuck Hollis from EMC wrote on his blog about the advantage of using service providers for things like storage. While I agree with him about a number of things such as taxes, I tend to think that outsourcing your own job is a bit of a career limiter.

In the video below, I ask IT professionals why they would abdicate storage management when it is relatively easy to get the satisfaction and accolades of having done it themselves. Like any type of work, the tools employed for storage management make a huge difference. iSCSI SAN storage tools from EqualLogic are true storage power tools.

Click To Play

Craig Randall wrote yesterday about an experience he had at a Starbucks recently and made a point of how controlling your destiny is such a valuable thing. The topic is aligned with a video I made yesterday and I like what he says:

" when you “outsource your experience” to someone else (e.g. to grocery stores such as Safeway or Albertsons), you run the risk of damaging your brand. The people running the Starbucks kiosk are employees of the grocery chain, not Starbucks. They don’t buy into the brand from an experience stand point, and apparently are not encouraged (e.g. via incentives) to do so by their employer (or indirectly by Starbucks)."

Managing storage products is a core competency that most IT aministrators should have. There are definite risks similar to those Craig mentioned above when you turn the "storage keys" over to somebody else. It's a no-brainer to buy technologies and products that allow you to control your own destiny.

Of course, that's why iSCSI is taking off the way it is - because people feel they can understand and control the networks better than they can with Fibre Channel. It's also the design goal of all our products at EqualLogic - making administration easier and faster so that IT professionals can take charge of their own storage infrastructures and move onto other tasks.

Jerome Wendt is a pretty sharp guy and an amazing writer. The guy can crank like there is no tomorrow and keeps the quality up. Here is an article he wrote for Compterworld today that mentions EqualLogic. The point of the article is simple - the cost of business continutity is going down all the time - sometimes in big leaps and bounds due to increased integration of advanced software features such as snapshot and replication and through integration with Microsoft-enabled data protection services.

A week ago I wrote two posts about infrastructure problems for power distribution.

When Infrastructure Fails

Thought On Power In IT And Storage

I grew up and worked in the Minneapolis for many years and have been outraged and saddened by the bridge collapse on Wednesday night. FWIW, the Lonesysadmin seems to be following this and is posting interesting information on his blog. It certainly seems like there were warnings about this bridge from the people responsible for inspecting it, but I'm not so sure if blame can be assigned to them because its not clear to me what their charter or authority is in such matters. There is little doubt in my mind that bureaucratic overhead made a contribution here.

I think the bridge collapsing is symptomatic of a larger problem - that there is a cultural bias against maintaining infrastructures. We become accustomed to using them for free (or little cost) and we tend to take them for granted until something goes wrong. As I mentioned previously, there is little excitement in our culture surrounding infrastructure maintenance. It must be far more interesting to work on new bridge designs and construction than it is to inspect and maintain thousands of old, mundane, rusting bridges. I believe the people working for government and construction and forensic companies involved with this work can be energetic and passionate about their work, but until something like this occurs, the rest of us don't want to think about it very much. That lack of interest has to have a subtle effect on the whole process.

Chris Sims from the Clayton County Water Authority in Georgia was a panelist at VMworld today and he talks about their DR setup, VMware implementation and their EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. Like I always say, we have the best customers and it is a joy to work with customers like Chris.

Click To Play

I led a webcast last Tuesday at VMworld about using VMware and EqualLogic storage in SMB environments. Ben Matheson from VMware and Arell Chapman - a customer from United Bank and Trust joined me. I had suggested that VMware and EqualLogic were like peaches and cream, but then Ben said he thought it was more like a hamburger with fries. Either way, I'll take it. The best part of all was Arell's discussion of his implementation. People will want to listen to what he has to say. Click this link to view and listen to the webinar recording. (requires Real Player)

Then on Wednesday our director of product management Eric Schott and Vivek Chhabria from VMware presented on DR technologies and techniques on a webcast that has relevance to just about everybody. Click here to view the webinar.

Here is a little tech highlight from the Birds of a Feather session at VMworld. In this video, Eric Schott, our director of Product Management discusses how remote replication works using EqualLogic iSCSI storage arrays.

Click To Play

Carmine Iannace is the IT director at the Brattle Group , an economics consulting firm in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was an early implementer of VMware technology at Welch's before bringing his virtualization vision to the Brattle Group, where he has almost completely converted their IT infrastructure to virtual systems and storage. I interviewed Carmine last week when I was in Boston and he spoke about his use of virtualization and the role that EqualLogic iSCSI storage has in it, including its deployment in their European lights-out data centers and its DR role, performing remote data replication.

Click To Play

I've been out and about for a couple weeks and am back now.

I want to say thanks to Lori Widmer for giving us a mention at On-Storage.com on October 2nd. She picked up on the Eric Schott video where he gives an overview of EqualLogic replication.

Justin (of cmsJustin) writes about his company's purchase of an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array. He's been documenting his evaluation process on his blog and we're very happy to have Justin as a customer. Thanks Justin for spelling things out on your blog and you made a good move with the 400 GB drives.

Read to the bottom of his blog entry: he's looking for help with dynamic VLAN configuration linked to MAC addresses. If anyone reading this has any insights for him, please jump on his site and let him know.

EqualLogic announced its support for Microsoft's DPM 2007 today.

DPM 2007 appears to have excellent data recovery capabilities for Microsoft servers, using VSS writers to ensure data integrity during data protection operations.

Here's a link to a video presentation on Microsoft's site that explains the basics of DPM 2007.

EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage arrays integrate seamlessly with DPM to store express full backups as well as VSS snapshots. Of course, the integrated (zero cost) replication software of the EqualLogic system allows customers to extend this recovery data to a remote site.

I talk to a fair number of customers and have difficulties sometimes remembering who's who. It tends to make every day an adventure. Anyway, I checked out the latest case study to appear on our corporate site and sure enough, it was Chris Formes - a customer I've communicated with via email and the telephone a few times. I knew we were going to publish this case study with Brookfield Homes, but I didn't put 2 and 2 together and think - Hey That's Going to be Chris!

The other thing that gave me a small surprise was that Chris was also using Mimosa's Nearpoint product for Microsoft Exchange archiving. Its great to see the Mimosa part of the story too. Years before joining EqualLogic, I set up meetings between EqualLogic and Mimosa to initiate a solution-relationship because there is a terrific synergy there. I'm always happy to hear when a customer is using both of our products.

Chris is doing a number of smart things to get the most out of Brookfield's storage budget. First, he's using Mimosa's software to reduce the amount of Exchange data on his iSCSI SAN. Second, he's using thin provisioning on our systems so he can pay as he grows and not over commit on storage resources that he doesn't need yet. Smart. We probably didn't sell Chris as much storage capacity as we would have a year ago, but its smarter storage than it was a year ago and that makes us all smile.

Our channel partner working with us at Brookfield is VL Systems in Irvine, CA. I'm looking forward to meeting Lee Green from VL Systems in the next couple weeks so I can get a complete picture of how the solution came together. Thanks Lee for your help in making all this come together!

In this interview, Mark Solyst, Network Administrator at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital and avid snowmobiler in the high country of Montana talks about the applications they are using with their EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage systems: Our PS series arrays are storing data for their:

File servers
SQL servers
Exchange servers
Backup
Snapshot
Remote replication

They have two EqualLogic systems on their campus and are replicating data between the two for disaster protection.

Another key DR product that Mark mentions is the Veritas Continuous Protection Service. Its worth noting that because there are lots of ways our products work alongside other products that people use for data protection.

Click To Play

I've been spending a lot of time with customers lately and the subject of networking naturally comes up in many of those discussions. There are a couple take aways from these discussions:

While there are many switches to choose from, the Cisco 3750 switches get the highest marks for compatibility, performance and lack of problems. FWIW, we use them in our own development labs at EqualLogic.

The iSCSI industry lacks the sort of interoperability testing that FC customers are familiar with. There are a number of reasons for this, but the fact remains that iSCSI customers don't get the same kind of help selecting their switching equipment as Fibre Channel customers do. Sometimes customers have to change out the switches in their iSCSI networks in order to overcome performance issues. That can suck. Its also one of the reasons iSCSI sometimes gets a bad performance rap. iSCSI is not the problem - the problem is the overall SAN (storage + network) design. An iSCSI SAN is only as good as the switches that are used.

We tell customers that iSCSI SAN switches need to support jumbo frames and flow control. Another consideration is buffer memory; the more buffer memory a switch has, the better. ISL links also matter If iSCSI traffic is going to traverse multiple switches, you probably want to have high speed ISL capabilities. That's one of the reasons we like the 3750s so much. The next generation 3750 (the E model, I believe) have an interconnect that bypasses the switch's backplane for traffic that is destined to egress the stack through another switch.

There are a lot of switches that work very well. Try to stay away from cheap switches, that's where most of the problems are.

After attending several User Group meetings in the last few weeks it has become obvious to me that we haven't done a very good job telling our customers about our AutoSnapshot Manager for SQL Server software.

One problem is our no-charge software model. Once you own an EqualLogic product you get all software updates through free downloads, even if the software updates are something people are used to spending lots of money for. There are no beat-the-drum new product announcements, no new SKUs, no new licenses to figure out and no big marketing splash to draw interest to it and sell it. There is no revenue coming to us and so there is no big push attempting to increase sales. Analysts and the trade press tend to ignore it because its not a new product, just an upgrade. It's weird; we come out with something valuable at the best deal possible (free) that a lot of people are interested in, and we have a hard time telling people about it.

Another problem appears to be how we make information like this available on our web site. In writing this blog post, I went to find a link on our site for our SQL AutoSnapshot Manager and couldn't really find one. There were a couple links that I needed to register for and I didn't want to use one of those for the blog. I don't want you to have to register to get information linked to from the blog. It shouldn't be like this.

Our Host Integration Toolkit includes VSS-based SQL Server snapshots. It significantly improves data protection for SQL Server. SQL Server backups go faster and restores are much simpler. If you are interested in finding out more send me an email or comment here.

We have a webinar coming up on Friday, December 14th at 1:00 Eastern time with Darren Miller, our SQL Server Technical Marketing Specialist. If you want to know more about this important data protection tool you should attend. Here is a link to the page where you can register.

Also, here is a link to the technical report Darren Wrote on our SQL Server AutoSnapshot Manager. If you look at it, you'll see that Darren has a lot of in-depth knowledge of this stuff and knows what he is talking about. If you are using EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage arrays and are also running SQL Server, you really ought to check out both the webinar and Darren's white paper.

Arun Teneja posted today on the requirements for surveillance video storage.

His main point seems to be that there is going to be lots of data and so your storage needs to be dirt cheap. But then he says that the storage needs to scale a single image and support clustering. Oh ya, dirt cheap clustering, single image scaling and cows that jump over the moon.

I don't agree that clustering is needed, but you do need systems that can survive component failures. The ability to mix and match components as you grow is very important. You don't want a system where all nodes have to have identical configurations to work together - that makes upgrading almost impossible.

You get what you pay for. In the end you want high availability combined with storage that is the easiest to operate, maintain and expand. He thinks EqualLogic costs too much, but what he probably doesn't know is that we have people using our products for large scale surveillance operations that are very happy with it because it allows them to concentrate on the application and not the technology. It's not the purchase price, its the ownership costs that make storage valuable.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a meaningful concept. It establishes new methods for software systems and applications. It is probably the most important step forward in software modularity ever. It is much more than a way to provide web services, its a way to implement software on a completely different scale.

There are many things to consider with SOA, including the abstraction of storage from application processes. As applications evolve towards associated services, the one-to-one relationship between data and software applications evaporates. This will not make things any easier for data stewards who are struggling to meet data management expectations with incomplete and inconsistent tools - and have developed application-centered storage practices.

The way I see it, SOA is all about the data (almost everything in IT is). It's great to have modular services that allow fast deployment of business processes, but those services depend on having data access and management practices that are up to the task. Storage will have a minor role, but most of the heavy lifting will occur at the file/object/metadata level, where most of the "storage" work is going to take place.

Hitachi seems to think their flavor of virtualization is Service Oriented Storage (SOS). The acronym is appropriate insofar as their SOS is obviously a desperate call for help with product positioning. There is nothing about spoofing targets and initiators that makes SOA-style data management problems go away. Sure, virtual storage makes the containers easier to manage - and BTW, I'd gladly put EqualLogic's management model up against Hitachi's any day - but virtual storage doesn't provide file-level functions. Service Oriented Storage is an exercise in Service Oriented Spin. It has no real substance.

The best storage infrastructure for SOA turns out to have the same characteristics as storage for anything else: high availability, effortless scaling of capacity and performance, flexibility to change/move resources when necessary, and low cost of ownership.

RED is an organization started by Bono and Bobby Shriver with the purpose of bringing life saving drugs to AIDS sufferers in Africa.

The idea is simple: companies sell products designated as RED products and when customers buy them, those companies make donations to RED. Here's a web page on the Dell site with a RED system that includes a RED version of Microsoft Vista.

You can join RED here and start looking for products. If you feel moved to make a donation, there is a link at the bottom of this page.

There is a video link on this page that shows the RED spot that Dell aired during the Super Bowl.

Storage blogger Stephen at the Ruptured Monkey site wrote this on his last posting:

Its amazing how much time you can waste with troubleshooting in the SAN if you don't have any tools. Especially when you decide to offer some of your knowledge to staff who just joined your team and have some basic idea of what a LUN but don't have a clue what a WWpN or a