Information Technology Data Cycle

I. Storage holds Data
In the same way that carbon dioxide is captured and becomes part of natural resources, Business data is captured and becomes part of storage systems.

Data can be seen as a non-wanted result of business activity: besides the fact that primary goal of a business is to make money it also results in the production and proliferation of data ("data emission"), which, following to the "Information Technology Data Cycle" (ITDC), is captured in storage systems. In the same way a musician will create musique from noise, a businesse will create Information from accumulated data

One way of measuring a business efficiency, is Return-On-Investment calculation: assessing the value created from the investments. One way of adding value into a business is to create new products and services out of various sources like, for example, published market intelligence reports or analysis of historical data on sales and customer behavior. In other words, a business creates many financial reports, like sales performance, consumer spending trends or other statistics, so to make a new meaning from all data accumulated over the course of its activity. Finally, every data being potentially a valuable asset, a corporate must preserve it all.

Without a doubt, every business emit data, all of which must be kept, as it can potentially generate extra value by extracting Information out of it. On the other hand, excess of information can lead to inefficient decision making, hence a loss of business agility.

In the same manner as energy, Storage is a limited resource. We propose an approach to storage management that is as natural as managing energy nowadays: invest in efficient technologies in-line with defined targets

II. Storage types

2) Business critical storage: Tier-1
no consumable parts
short life time (4-5 years)
forklift upgrade
high electrical power
high cooling power
Goal: running business critical services

High-End spec storage for business critical applications. Transactional workloads is prime targets. No-downtime allowed. Made out of specialized storage controllers, fully redundant and maintained without disruption.
Production lifetime is 4 to 5 years on average. Hardware upgrades are forklift, due to specialized storage controllers. High manufacturing quality control

2) General Purpose Storage: Tier-2
High performance, high available storage repositories aiming mainly at non business critical applications, while offering storage for transactional workloads.
Build out of general purpose components, in order to maintain a low price/GB.
price is up to 1/3 of Tier-1, for same performance. Expect possible downtime during some maintenance windows. Quality control is lesser than on Tier-1
Lifetime is equivalent to Tier-1 (4-5 years on average). Hardware upgrades are components basis (modular upgrades)

3) Capacity oriented storage: Tier-3
Made partly from consumable parts (such as tapes/cartridges..)
long life time (up to 20 years)
very low power requirements
very low heat emission

Mixed storage systems: tapes+disks, in order to propose very large storage repository while maintaining performance in-line with expectations. Price/GB half of Tier-2.
High upgrade level (software and hardware) and long production life expectancy: 4 to 5 times longer than Tier-2 and Tier-3. Migration is is an important process and must be made possible without vendor lock-in (adoption to storage standards is mandatory, opensource is a guarantee). This tier is aiming at offering very large storage for both long term storage and large filesystems storage, while making sure customer controls its data


III. Storage Performance Characteristics

SPC-1
SPC-2
MTTDL, MTBF

IV. Storage Efficiency Characteristics

Price per unit of storage ($/GB)
Watts per unit of storage (W/GB)
FRU per unit of storage (#FRU/TB)
Lifetime per unit of storage
Maximum/minimum storage capacity
Usable vs Raw storage ratio

Open Doors!

Vendor: really you should install our latest remote console platform..it's win-win for you and us
Me: we can, but only to send alerts , we don't want remote control over our infrastructure
Vendor: in that case we aren't interested in installing it. You know it's a very secure console, with VPN, encryption, strong authentication, CERT compliant, you really don't have to worry about security
Me: (here we go again with remote monitoring)...we cannot allow external people to take control over our infrastructure and risk downtime, that's as simple as that
Vendor: Listen, last day we received an alarm for a drive failure at a customer site. I got connected to the box to assess the state of it. That allowed me to check the reconstruct was taking place correctly and I even corrected the alerting plus one or two wrongly set parameters. You see it's very useful for you, we can take proactive actions, isn't that great??!!
Me: (is this guy dumb or what I wonder)....That is exactly what we cannot accept: we cannot allow that a guy, connects to our boxes to make corrective actions...can you understand this? You might correct things, but you can potential disrupt things. I tell you what we are going to do: if something breaks, you receive an alarm, you take your car and you come right away to fix the problem under our supervision; what do you think about that? isn't that what our $1M contract says anyway?

Do you think we are a fast-food?

As a customer, what kind of remote monitoring solution would fit my IT governance ?

1) One way remote monitoring
a remote monitoring that is only able to send reports and alarms to my vendor is acceptable system. I must make sure that only authorized data is sent over (non-confidential data is defined by IT security group, in accordance to IT Strategy&Principle policy)

2) Two way remote monitoring
if vendor puts in place a mechanism whereby we authorize him to
a) Only connect to the faulty component
b) troubleshoot only the concerned fault
The system in place must also record every actions done by storing securely (write-once) all the audit logs

Building Blocks to Develop

1. Risk Management in SAN

• How to detect and measure risk in SAN configuration
  

2. Change Management in SAN

• How to track and simulate changes in a SAN
  

3. Storage Provisioning Process

• 3 steps approach to storage provisionning: Reservation, Configuration, Allocation
  

4. Storage Tiering Definition

• Storage tiering definition varies between a vendor and a customer perspective

Storage Architecture: Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Related Documents
• Strategies & Principles
• Information Technology Principles
• Storage Technology Principles
• Overview of a Software Architecture
• Storage Architecture Building Blocks
  
• Media Types
• Storage Tiering
• Topology
• Internal Disk
• DAS: Direct Attached Storage
• SAN: Storage Area Network
• NAS: Network Attached Storage
• Consolidated Storage
• Physical Isolation
• Logical Isolation
• Virtualisation
• Storage Transport Technology
• SAN High Level Architecture

• Data Protection
• Replication
• Mirroring
• Backup

• Archiving
• General Purpose Archiving
• Compliant Archiving

• Storage Security Principles
• Storage Provisioning Principles
• Storage Management Principles
• Storage Usage patterns
• Tiering Selection Principles
• Naming convention for Storage
• Storage as a Service
• Storage Services portfolio
• Storage Cost Center
  

• Summary of Design

The other day a vendor came and told me he wanted to help me solve my storage problems:

Vendor: we want to help you solve any storage problem you have
Customer: how's that?
Vendor: because we have a solution approach, we can help you solve your problems
Customer: right, you bring solutions to my problems! so here's one of my problem: How can I honour storage requests coming from various groups
Vendor: easy, buy our SRM tool!

The term solution can be ambiguous, as it can either mean
1. the answer to a problem:
the answer to my storage provisioning problem would be a SRM tool
2. the process of solving a problem
the key word here is process: what "things" can I put in place in order to solve, on a long term basis, my particular problem

As a matter of fact, as a customer, I was after the 2nd definition of "solution", when this vendor offered me the 1st one.
What I was looking for, was a process to solve my provisioning problem. A good process survives any technology.

In other words, the answer to my problem is a building block, part of an IT architecture

Mister Vendor, listen to me, an IT Solution is either
* building block, which is part of a framework called: IT Architecture.
* Service defined as part of a service catalog

If you own the architecture, you own the building blocks and all the components that go into them. Otherwise, just sell the components that make my building block, but don't expect to be my trusted advisor.

For an introduction to IT Architecture check this out

Next blog, I will post a table of content of an Storage Architecture document. keep coming!

The time is coming

CIFS server for Opensolaris is now reality: first release is available here
anytime soon, it will be integrated into Solaris its self and : bye bye Netapp!
Company starts to undestands limits of Netapp, and this is a fact I am not allowed to prove
but we are near the time where, from a simple DVD, one will be able to install, on a commodity server (as well as a high end server) a fully functional NAS appliance, with all advanced features such as snapshots, ndmp backup, CIFS/NFS (without addditional cost), FC (as Lun provider), and even archiving features such as SAMFS

Parmigiano for my Spaghettis

I invited 2 colleagues of mine at a pasta restaurant called "Netapp" to try their speciality "Spaghettis" (see previous post). I has happily eating the superb pasta with my fork (no spoon!) and suddenly I felt I needed to add Parmigiano ... I asked the waiter to bring me some when he announced it would cost me...$47.000 to add "cheese from Parma" on those spaghettis !!

• Me: What?? you must be joking! $47k to use a stupid cheese??
• Waiter: Mi dispiace, parmigiano for 3 plates cost $47.000
• Me: no thanks, next time I need parmigiano, I'll choose another pasta restaurant..crook!

Frankly, do you think Netapp is really entitled to ask $47.000 to use NFS ??? is this fair when NFS has been around for as long as unix exist.

Basically I'll wait a couple of month to have more recent boxes doing NFS without additional licenses (may be fishworks or Nexantastor)


bon apetit!