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Taking the Lid Off Open Storage
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How is Open Storage different from traditional storage, and what are its advantages and risks from the CIO's perspective?
 Open Storage is a topic that's getting a lot of attention in the industry these days. And while it sounds interesting to some, others are asking why they should depart from traditional storage architectures. To help sort the facts from the fiction, I've invited Art Licht, Distinguished Engineer within Sun's Global Sales and Services, to discuss the world of Open Storage and the benefits it offers the CIO community and beyond. Bob: For the average CIO, what does Open Storage mean? What problems does it address? Art: Open Storage is a new way to build a storage product by using open, industry-standard components. As businesses deal with the growth of data, this approach offers a simpler, less-expensive way to manage data. One of our design principals was to use industry-standard components instead of proprietary implementations. If you price out the controller of traditional storage products from our competitors or even our own products, you'll find you're paying $50,000 USD for a couple of processors and a small amount of cache. In the Open Storage space, using a general-purpose server, you can get four times the amount of processing power and cache for one fourth the price. That's just the beginning. Bob: For customers, is Open Storage primarily a cost play or are there additional benefits to the strategy? Art: Given today's economy, cost is where the conversation starts. But it's really about simplifying the management of data. We've put a variety of innovations into the software so that as data ages it will automatically reside on the less-expensive storage. We have three tiers: traditional cache or DRAM, a tier built out of flash, and the traditional disk. Your least-frequently accessed data will sit on your least expensive tier of storage. We call this Hybrid Storage Pools (HSPs). It's about the most efficient use of the assets. In addition, we've built an enterprise-class management interface that is browser-based and needs no software installed. You just point your browser to it and you have an enterprise-class, simple way to manage your storage assets. So yes, there's more to it than price, and going forward, it's going to get more interesting. Bob: It sounds like you're streamlining a lot of the policy management that many CIOs and operations people deal with every day. Art: We had this industry buzzword a few years ago — ILM or Information Lifecycle Management — and nobody really delivered on it. What we have in Open Storage is something I like to call “right tiering,” where your data gets on the right tier for your accesses. If you're frequently accessing it, it's in DRAM. If you stop accessing it, it slowly works its way to the lower tiers of storage while staying online. Bob: There are obviously many storage solutions on the market. Does locking into a proprietary solution cause long-term problems for CIOs, as opposed to the Open Storage model? Art: The open platform allows innovation to happen more quickly. As new processors come out, they can quickly be incorporated. The business model is also interesting. It's not a-la-carte; snapshots, replication, compressions and thin provisioning are built in. So customers who buy a proprietary storage product and then have a change in business requirements have to license or re-license the replication code, thin provisioning, or compression. With Open Storage, it's all included up front. There's nothing additional to license. It simplifies how you deploy storage. Bob: CIOs care a lot about reliability. Is Open Storage reliable? Art: There are two things worth mentioning here — the product architecture and the components. Sun has large, enterprise-class systems that have active/active dual-redundant controllers that eliminate the unplanned outages and allow for maintenance online. Then there are the components. For example, one of the new components is Flash SSDs and we're using them in a unique way. We're not using them as a disk. We're using them as cache for traditional disks, so if the SSD fails, there is no loss of data or loss of access to data. This is the most efficient, risk-free way to introduce these new technologies into the storage architecture. Since we are not using them as a disk, when they fail, the data is safe. It's nothing more than a cache miss. We are merely using the SSDs or the Flash to accelerate the access to data — yet another feature of HSPs. Bob: Do the Open Storage solutions provide any advance monitoring capabilities for the customer? Art: From a monitoring point of view, we've pretty much conformed to what the traditional storage market does. We send out email alerts, we can send out SNMP traps and most importantly, we have “phone home.” The systems can be remotely monitored by Sun, so if there is a disk failure, we know about it, the customers know about it, and the process of repairing it starts before anyone picks up the phone. Also unique are the built-in performance threshold alerts. You'll know if you're running out of CPU, or if your disks are getting busy. Once alerted, you'll have complete visibility into what's going on inside the storage. But I think the most unique thing we've done is analytics. We have the ability to look inside the storage. Not only can we see what the load is, but we can trace it back graphically to a client. We can tell you who is reading what data, whether they are writing to it, and we can take that right down to the file. So you can understand what the load is by application, by client, by server.This level of visibility can reduce the development time it takes to bring an application to market. Bob: What are some of the risks with an Open Storage strategy? Art: Storage is a lot about trust. You need to trust your technology. My recommendation is to get the technology in-house and use it on non-mission-critical applications first. The Open Storage effort is about simplifying deployment. The base underlying code is Solaris, which has been running some of the most mission-critical applications in the world. It's based on x86 servers, which have industry-standard components. A lot of this technology has been around for many years. It's the packaging that's new. Once you're comfortable with the technology, you can put more and more applications on it. Bob: What should people be doing today to prepare for an eventual migration to an Open Storage strategy and architecture? Art: The most important thing is to understand what you have and what your requirements are. Not all data is Tier 1. Understanding what you have on a Tier 1 environment versus what you require on a Tier 1 environment is a huge step toward being able to simplify your management and take advantage of Open Storage. Many companies are storing three-year-old data that's infrequently accessed on Tier 1 storage. They can save a lot of money by keeping that data online but storing it on a more appropriate device. There are tools, partners, and services available for helping CIOs better understand their environment. The simplest place to start is moving non-mission-critical applications off mission-critical storage. Because we are using a general-purpose operating system, we've made the code completely available. Anyone can go to sun.com to download the software and run it in VMware or Sun VirtualBox. What you'll have is the full-featured, fully functional emulation of what the product would look like. You can evaluate the snapshot, compression, thin provisioning replication, RAID, and mirroring in your own shop without the need for having any physical hardware on site. This is just one more unique thing you get with open components. Bob: Fabulous. So I encourage everyone to take advantage of this download opportunity and give it a try. Reading about it is one thing, but getting it in your hands and playing with it is far more enlightening. And if you have any comments, Art or I would be happy to hear them. Until next time, Bob Worrall | ||
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