Storage: What's in 'Store' for the Future

Continued from page: 1

Friday, May 01, 2009

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HAMR
Seagate is working on HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology that could extend magnetic recording areal density of hard drives by about a factor of 10 beyond what can be accomplished with perpendicular recording, and has the potential of extending the hard drive technology another six to seven years beyond its five-year limit.

Use of laser and a magnetic head together to read and write data on a new and more stable disk medium such as iron-platinum is what lies at the heart of HAMR. The laser heats the disk medium while the magnetic head writes to it, allowing the disk to store more data. After the media cools, the disk and data becomes very stable. Research is being carried on a large number of media that can be written by HAMR and iron-platinum materials and can theoretically support 50 terabits per square inch.

We believe the phrase 'data increases in leaps and bounds' has outlived itself. It's a given as far as corporates are concerned. Let me cite an example. Did you know that the good old telephone took a massive 89 years to reach 150 million users, whereas the TV took 38 years. Any guesses on how much time did Facebook take to reach the same mark? The answer is just five and that's not the end of the debate. Facebook says it added five million users each week in January 2009 and around 850 million photos were uploaded in February this year, and the social networking site is used for 3 billion minutes everyday. So that's my idea for analyzing the increase in data-get the idea?

Challenges in storage mgmt
Thanks to the ever burgeoning expansion in applications, digital media formats, and regulatory compliance, taming today's exploding storage requirements with the existing storage management methods has become an unsurmountable task. Don't believe me? Well, according to IDC, storage administrator productivity must increase by 60 percent every year to keep up with the growth in storage capacity in an organization. And again that's not all. Giving administrators nightmares are 24x 7 data access requirements which brings down the number of windows available to perform management tasks to a close to nil figure.

In order to achieve dramatic improvements while simplifying capacity, performance and structured storage management, what's required is a holistic approach. To start with, while alleviating data integrity problems, disaster recovery issues and performance bottlenecks, any potential solution should not bring any associated risk to the storage environment. Another legitimate concern that IT managers have is how should end user access be managed as a solution that needs special software installations and fine tuning at each server or client easily outweighs the advantages of uninterrupted access during data movement. Some of the key challenges when it comes to storage management are:

1. Challenges related to capacity
As mismanagement of storage capacities still prevails in most organizations, average utilization is not up to the mark. Adding to the problems is the 'per TB management cost' approach. And over- provisioning, which might seem like an easy way out, can be an extremely expensive affair.

2. Challenges related to performance
Performance related challenges pose a threat to the efficiency of the people working within an organization. For example, when the administrator performs management tasks, the user productivity takes a beating due to poor response times. Also, application throughputs are limited due to I/O bandwidths.

Managing a heterogeneous storage environment comprising of Linux and Windows file servers can be seamlessly done without much downtime.

3. Storage consolidation challenges
With the potential to harm and have a negative impact on the productivity of the workforce, consolidation projects might face internal roadblocks due to organizational impact. Data relocations along with security and access settings also come as a byproduct when executing consolidation projects.

EMC Rainfinity
By enabling unstructured data management without disturbing end user or application access, EMC Rainfinity is the first solution to optimize IP based storage with its patented Global File Virtualization (GFV) platform. The solution optimizes Network Attached Storage (NAS), eases storage management overhead, simplifies end user access and enables additional storage management functionality. One major advantage of Rainfinity Global File Virtualization is its capability to transparently move data including active, open files.

Where is it required?
Storage networks are getting more and more complex. The traditional Network Attached Storage solutions have found siblings in larger enterprises. A NAS, which was mainly used for file and print services over the network has now been supplemented CAS and CFS. CAS or content addressable storage is mainly focused on compliance issues and for securing data, whereas CFS or clustered file systems are used to spread a large amount of data across devices usually in an HPC (high performance computing) environment. Each of these storage systems have their own storage management capabilities but you need a solution that can work in the heterogeneous environment provided by them as well as manage them together. It is environments like these where global File Virtualization can be used. For example, a bank where data availability is mission critical and data consolidation, archiving and other management steps need to be executed with as less downtime as possible.

How does it work?
We all know, data migrations can be costly and time consuming as they require long planning windows and coordination with end users. However, Global File Virtualization (GFV) leverages the power of an IP network. The Rainfinity appliance is deployed on the IP network itself. Let's take an example of a data center environment where you have ten file servers. Now if you want to migrate data from server one to server 4 in order to balance capacity, end users might face performance issues like greater response times. However, with the Rainfinity appliance installed on the same network, it would take the ports associated with these servers on the virtualization network till the time the migration gets completed, hence giving the end user a lag free experience. Now scale this example up to a very large enterprise where you might have billions of files stored in different file servers and where authorizations and policy management also play a major role. Rainfinity enables transparent data migration without any disruption to the end user. In fact, files being used by the end user can also be migrated as it allows the transfer of open files. Through the global namespace management, the entire remapping and remounting can occur seamlessly due to a single interface for devices, protocols and locations.

Benefits
Data migration and consolidation projects can take advantage of this solution as it eliminates the need to coordinate with end users and schedule downtimes. Such solutions can also dramatically reduce performance issues that are usually caused by overburdened file systems while balancing storage utilization. On the lines of capacity management, administrators can adjust the available resources or take actions as and when needed in order to achieve a greater value for money from the data storage investments. And finally the solution can be used in a heterogeneous environment as it is capable of supporting network storage solutions from different sources, including EMC Celerra, NetApp, and Windows/UNIX/Linux file servers.

GFV & storage mgmt apps
To simplify storage management, increase flexibility and lower costs in the data storage environment EMC Rainfinity combines Global File Virtualization with purpose built applications. As a result, it makes optimization of networked storage with applications that identify, analyze and rectify capacity, performance and tiered storage issues, provisioning for active data management. A few areas where such data management applications are used can be capacity management, file management, global namespace management, tiered storage management, performance management, storage consolidation and synchronous mirroring.

Varun Jaitly with inputs from Rahul Sah

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