An interesting post from Tony Asaro: Invisible Storage and Strategic IT. Virtualization means many different things to many different people, but it is an essential underpinning of any advanced system and storage infrastructure. EqualLogic customers get to experience storage virtualization on all the levels Tony is talking about.
Deni Connor at Network World published a column yesterday, capturing the thoughts of technologist Joel Snyder. Here's the link to the Network World article: Network World Column: Is Fibre Channel Dead? I actually saw the story first on Hartmut Wiehr's blog here where there is a permalink: Hartmut Wiehr's posting on "Is Fibre Channel Dead?"
Joel is not a storage guy per se, but a technology guy with a long career who has seen a lot. Here is his profile at Network World: Joel Snyder bio
I'm not sure that I agree with Joel altogether. I do feel that iSCSI will eclipse Fibre Channel relatively soon, but I think Fibre Channel is going to have a longer tail and slower decline than other dinosaur technologies like FDDI and Token Ring- only because the market for storage tends to be extremely risk averse and the process of swapping infrastructures is both risky and expensive. Still I talk to customers every week that have jettisoned Fibre Channel in favor of iSCSI because of the flexibility shortcomings and the relative high cost of owning Fibre Channel.
Two guys, Eric Waters and Ron Whitling running the data center operations for E-Chx, an Internet payroll processing service provider, talking about how EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage solved their performance problems on SQL Server and the overall ease of use and operations that you get with an EqualLogic SAN.
This is my first YouTube video and therefore also the first time linking a video directly into my blog. It didn't exactly work perfectly and there are several rough edges that I expect to make better in the future. The video ends at the 6 minute mark, but extends into blackness for over an additional minute. I'm not sure why that happened..... Don't be surprised if I re-post this one with a better quality video later this week.
You might need to click twice to make it play.
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.
Lucas Mearian at Computerworld published an interview yesterday with Greg Scherer, formerly the Chief Technical Officer at Emulex. Greg saw a lot of changes in the storage industry in the course of his 24 years career at Emulex and has the catbird's view of the Fibre Channel industry. Now he is putting his experience into a startup, Neterion, which is working on high speed iSCSI technology. Lucas did a great job in this interview and asked a number of intriguing questions. Definitely worth a read:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9015082
If you still haven't linked over, here's a quote from the interview to whet your whistle:
If you think about where Fibre Channel is deployed, it's really mainly in tier three of the data center. And it never jumped into being a real channel product. It's really an OEM-driven product. The OEM channel is an expensive channel. The channel [vendors] will make maybe 15 points. It's a pretty slim margin, but there's also very little support. The channel [market] is really just a facilitator to get the product from point A to point B. In the Fibre Channel market, which is OEM driven, there is anywhere from a 40-to-65-point margin. It's very lucrative.
I know there were times when some of the OEMs where making more money off the sales of Fibre Channel adapters and switches than they were off the system sales. It's one of those protected ecosystems where people were willing the pay it and they [the vendors] were willing to take it.
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.
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.
Here is a link to a post Chuck Hollis from EMC made last week about EMC's CX3-Ultrascale storage products achieving five nines availability. Here is a link to my post welcoming EMC to that level of availability.
Chuck and I disagree from time to time and this time it apparently is about the nature of indepedent analysis and verification.
From page 4 of the IDC Report referenced by Chuck Hollis in his blog:
"This sound method for monitoring and analysis has led EMC to determine that its CX3-UltraScale series of storage arrays has achieved an impressive 99.999% (5-9s) availability between May 8, 2006 (when CX3 products first began shipping) and April 28, 2007. "
I'm not sure how anybody else interprets the statement above, but it does not exactly look like an independent analysis to me. Hmmm.... what ever led me to think that maybe this was not an independent study of customer opinions? Maybe the words "Sponsored by EMC" under the title of the document.
I commented on Chuck's blog and left a URL for a study conducted last year and published in December by Storage Magazine. When he approved my comment, he managed to leave out the URL for this article. Chuck's rationale for doing this is that the Diogenes Research study for Storage Magazine was a "popularity poll". So what is more objective - an indpendent body of research conducted with end users or a self-certification study verified by a sponsored white paper? Readers that didn't click the Diogenes link might still be interested in this quote from their site: " The company will not accept fees from vendors to create published opinions, white papers, or validations. The company also will not provide competitive analysis services to any vendor."
OK, the Diogenes study was not an independent certification of five nines availability (it was an overall customer satisfaction study), but neither was the EMC-sponsored white paper from IDC. The only way we are going to get real data for availability is from independent surverys by companies like Diogenes. Sponsored white papers of EMC collected data? Hmmmm...... I don't doubt that EMC has vastly improved the reliability of its mid range products, but that doesn't mean that other vendors haven't achieved same/similar/better results already. Competitive industries creates pressure for all vendors to innovate and get better.
Here's something to consider about availability: Storage volumes on EqualLogic systems that are fully provisioned and approaching full capacity (volume is almost full with no available storage to allocate on the array) can have their storage capacity upgraded through the addition of another system to the SAN - or by upgrading the drive capacities in the system. There is no planned or unplanned downtime during this process - data stays online all the time. This means customers don't have to buy lots of extra storage to make sure they don't have more than 5.3 minutes of downtime during the year. Anyb --------
Oracle is certainly one of the most important applications for many customers and there are a lot of misconceptions about its performance as Kevin Closson points out in this somewhat humorous MANLY MAN post on his blog. FWIW, EqualLogic has a number of customers running Oracle databases and applications on iSCSI storage networks - both with SATA and SAS drives.
Considering the nature of EMC Zilla-man's post earlier today and referenced in my posting immediately below - here is an interesting report from Network Appliance showing the relative performance of Oracle over FC, NFS and iSCSI. The fact that EqualLogic doesn't have the same bottleneck built into its iSCSI products, you can see how Oracle performance on EqualLogic storage arrays can be very good - and it explains why we have so many customers that are perfectly happy running Oracle on EqualLogic iSCSI storage networks.
Stephen Foskett, one of the sharpest storage thinkers I know has a data management practice with Contoural - and he just started a blog called 'Stephen Fosekett, Pack Rat', with a subtitle of "Understanding the Accumulation of Data'. One of his first posts discusses his opinion of Microsoft's Simple SAN initiative, which he feels is one of the best kept secrets in the storage world. I would agree with him, Microsoft has done a number of things very well to create "Microsoft Standards" for storage interoperability. In a nutshell, Microsoft has made it easy for their operating and application systems to work with storage vendor products through a common set of APIs across their server software products. Is simple SAN a "true" standard? - no. Is it a workable standard for Microsoft shops? - definitely.
Without any preparation, Stephen got a chance to see how simple an iSCSI SAN configuration can be, although he did say that the Microsoft iSCSI software initiator config slowed him up a bit. I would agree with that too, because I had the same experience the first time I set one up (I seldom RTFM). But the fact is, the time it took was almost nothing. It only seemed noticeable because the rest of the configuration process was so freaking easy. Here is a 2-page "Coffee Break" (PDF file) from EqualLogic that discusses how simple it is.
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.
Kirk Goodwin the IT Manager at Unicity - and James Rupprecht, the Storage SE at Valcom in Salt Lake City talk about their success working together on the installation of an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN.
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 like the way Nicholas Carr thinks and writes. He reflects in his blog today about what some people see as an impending power crisis for the IT industry. Nicholas is the author of "Does IT Matter?" - a book that speculated that there might not be sustainable business advantages from the use of IT - only disadvantages if you don't keep up. This sort of entropic view of the universe fits my physics-educated world view - you can build big things, but its very, very difficult to maintain them. Lets face it - how many people are inspired by maintenance tasks?
There are many examples of crumbling infrastructures around any major city in the US. The power grid is one of those things that is more out of control than we like to think and is decaying. We should expect to see these types of snaps, crackles and pops periodically until their frequency becomes a financial hardship or a major catastrophe occurs because the power infrastructure falls and can't get up. We've certainly had our taste of what this could be about in the Bay Area. Several years before yesterday's Web 2.0 power outage we had the infamous wintertime power outages across California. Power plants became meaningful again - but the grid is still a feeble, fragile living museum of power distribution.
I've been to 365 Main, the Internet data center where several prominent Internet Services are colocated and who lost power and went off-line yesterday. The startling thing about that is the contingency technology - diesel power generating equipment - didn't work for 45 minutes or so, meaning a bunch of their clients lost power. Of course, that means a whole bunch of other less-than-perfect systems problems occurred too and the restoration of these sites was a high wire experience for a group of system admins. You don't get to practice recovering your data center in a power swamp every day. The chronology offered by 365 here here is an interesting read.
At the end of the day, the green movement in IT will be about the economics of self preservation. We need to figure out how to survive on a power diet just to maintain our grip on flowing electrons. How are we going to do that? By using less power for starters and looking for ways to spread IT resources to eliminate single points of failure. Storage will be hard-pressed because spinning disk drives take power and require cooling. Slower drives are greener than faster drives, but raising the temperature around disk drives reduces their reliability. Technologies that allow us to reduce the amount of disk resources we need will be very important. Data deduplication and thin provisioning are examples of storage software functions that help us do more with less. So is booting from the SAN - although not nearly as big a hitter as server virtualization. Technologies that inherently use less power will also be very important. SATA drives and storage tiering are examples of that. MAID is another example.
There's accusations and questions going around the storage blogosphere about which of this stuff is real and what is fluff and hype. In the end, however, I think the issue is real and I think vendor's attempts to respond are real. Striving for greater efficiencies is certainly nothing new. Its going to take time for everybody involved to figure it out, but that's normal. Changes are going to come.
A couple days ago, I wrote about the problems of the power distribution infrastructure as well as some thought I had about which storage technologies could contribute to easing the problems.
That got me thinking about the nature of infrastructures again and it occurred to me that we are close to hitting an inflection point in the market for data center electrical power. Here's the point - if the electrical generation and distribution infrastructure becomes too unreliable or too expensive, customers will find contingencies and alternatives to the infrastructure that give them the results they are looking for. Call it a hybrid power architecture.
If the facilities for alternative energy generation become cheap enough, why wouldn't businesses start augmenting their utility-supplied power with their own? I'm not talking about putting excess energy into the grid, but in storing excess energy locally where it is available as a backup power source to the business if the grid is unable to deliver. The challenge is storing electrical energy - this is a lot easier said than done, but battery technology is improving all the time.
Green power generation is happening already, but I think it will accelerate when businesses customers start seeing how to reduce the costs and risks of running a data center.
A world of hybrid power - am I smoking something funny?
Robin Harris, the StorageMojo, has a couple interesting posts on his ZDNet blog and his StorageMojo blog.
If you are interested in this topic, I think both are worth a look see.
A week ago I wrote two posts about infrastructure problems for power distribution.
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.
Robin Harris at StorageMojo has an excellent post on energy consumption of systems. Worth a read.
Here is our schedule for VMworld. Many have asked me about the BOF (birds of a feather) meeting. It's going to be at Terra on Wednesday the 12th from 4:00 to 5:00 followed by a customer appreciation party from 5:00 - 7:00. For those that recall last year's party it was a pretty good time. Definitely a lot of energy and excitement around VMware, consolidation and virtualization. I know - it sounds geeky, but if you are into it, there is nothing better. See You there.
Storage veteran Nik Simpson at the Burton Group writes thought provoking articles for their Data Center Strategies blog. Today he wrote about SSPs (storage service providers) – and why they didn’t succeed several years ago and what his thoughts are about how they could become more successful in the future. He concludes that the best application for SSPs is archiving and I agree with him, perhaps for slightly different reasons.
To me outsourced archiving makes sense as a corporate governance practice. If a company (and their IT organization in particular) wants to remove any implication of tampering with archived data, the best way to do it is through an SSP that provides the functionality. The idea is that once the data is sent to the SSP, the SSP more or less “owns it”, along with the responsibility of keeping it available for legal, audit and corporate reasons. Like WORM, but as a service. No writes, no updates.
It follows that the missing link for this is encryption of the data at the SSP site, which brings into play all sorts of thorny issues surrounding key management. The SSP needs to be able to share its storage resources among its customer base AND guarantee complete privacy of data. It is economically backwards to fence data on along physical storage boundaries, but customers are not keen on trusting logical fencing methods, such as partitioning, for fear of hacking and operator errors. Encryption with logical storage partitions would probably be acceptable and affordable.
I caught up with Chris Fricke, from Clackamas County Oregon and we were talking. I like to say we have the greatest customers in the world and in this video, Chris shows why I say that. Thanks Chris!
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.
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.
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.
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.
John Webster wrote a piece yesterday in praise of FCoE. Now John is somebody I like to talk to and I usually think his arguments are sound, but I can't disagree with him more on this one. Here's what he says: "it leverages the Fibre Channel protocol’s use of SCSI directly over Ethernet, whereas iSCSI uses a different encapsulation method to send SCSI over TCP/IP, which then usually goes over Ethernet."
The glossing over of the FC protocol is important: FCoE uses the FCP protocol, which is an encapsulation of serial SCSI developed for Fibre Channel networks and mapped instead onto non-routable Ethernet frames. It is not somehow more "natural" as John's statement implies.
There are two key takeaways: 1) FCoE is going to cost a lot of money in fork lift upgrades of data center switches. It doesn't run on your existing switches and its going to be disruptive and expensive to purchase and deploy. 2) John Webster mentions that FCoE developers are missing the ease of management message. It's probably more realistic that they are trying to hide from the management question because management doesn't improve much with FCoE. It uses Ethernet MAC addresses, which are roughly equivalent to Fibre Channel's worldwide names, which are one of the root causes of so much pain installing, configuring and changing a Fibre Channel SAN.
Customers with lots of FC storage want FCoE because they want to maintain their investment in their FC storage systems. That's understandable, but they ought to think through what that means for their virtual server plans. It will probably work, but it might not be as simple to manage or as flexible as one would hope for. After all, who would have predicted that FC was going to be so taxing to manage ten years ago when it was first being deployed? And who would have thought those fundamental management problems would still be unsolved ten years later? FCoE is not pain relief, its the reason SAN administrators will need pain relief.
The best course of action for those customers might be to stick with 4Gb FC and avoid all the disruption and cost.
This post is for people wondering how to set up iSCSI drivers for Solaris.
It has not been tested or approved by EqualLogic. I'm just passing along a link that looks like it would be useful to blog readers. Please send any comments about its contents to the author on the Weibeltech site.
I like Chris Wolf's take on Oracle's OVM. It looks like Oracle is trying to wedge its way into the VM business using proprietary-support tricks as their competitive advantage.
It's somewhat ironic that Oracle, a company that won the DB battles decades ago with aggressive cross-platform support, is taking this approach. Like Chris, I know several customers that are running Oracle very successfully on VMware machines and are also using EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage.
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.
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.
Dave Simpson, Editor at InfoStor is an old friend who has been contributing pearls of wisdom for many years. He recently wrote that
