Transcript Proposed storage Area Network Facilities

Proposed Storage Area
Network Facilities
For Discussion
Motivation
University investing SRIF funds in SAN
technology to help support future escience projects
Other University’s doing the same e.g
Edinburgh
Opportunity to review University’s
overall storage requirements
On Campus most disk storage is provided via
Direct Attack Storage (DAS)
Problems with DAS
File store growth exponential leading to:
Proliferation of hardware
Sub-optimal provision
Inefficient delivery
Close coupling leads to single points of failure
Backup regimes become stressed, costly and
labour intensive
Disaster recovery procedures become
expensive or impractical
Discussion
It is proposed that a storage
consolidation strategy based on Storage
Area Network (SAN) technology would
provide a flexible, manageable and cost
effective solution for the majority of the
University’s file store requirements
Storage Consolidation
Storage consolidation is about centralising and
sharing storage resources amongst a variety of file
and application servers
The management of storage resources is separated
from the management of servers by establishing a
network that removes the physical mapping of
storage devices to physical servers
This network allows isolated islands of storage to be
pooled together and allocated to servers in a more
flexible fashion
Storage Consolidation Benefits
Heterogeneous environment
Protects against SPF
Storage aggregation into virtual pools
Less complex management
Lower admin costs
More suited to DR
Potential for server consolidation
Significantly improves backup restore capabilities
Improves data security, accessibility and availability
Storage Consolidation Architectures
Enterprise RAID operates at Block level
Storage Area Network (SAN) operates
at Block level
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
operates at File level
Enterprise RAID
Storage Area Network (SAN)
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Future Trends
Integrate the benefits of different architectures into a
common model by enhancing the SAN architecture
with NAS head functionality and Fabric extension
capabilities
NAS heads provide:
SAN attached dedicated servers
Resilience through Clustering
High performance interfaces
Fabric extension via iSCSI, FC/IP and iFCIP provide
Integration of SAN islands
Lower cost server to SAN connections
Ability to extend SAN connectivity
Bringing it together
Potential SAN Benefits for the
University
More efficient use of storage resources
Less systems administration effort
Resilience via fault tolerance
Disaster recovery plans
Backup and restore operations
Server consolidation and resilience
Core service provision – Directories, E-Mail, CSCE,
SSD, Samba etc
Research projects
Faculty/Department Block and File level requirements
Proposed SAN Model
A core fabric spanning 2 sites
A number of FC edge switches linked to the FC core
A number of disk arrays providing the storage requirements for:
Research projects
Mirroring
Core services
Other applications
A number of servers connected via FC Host Bus Adaptors
(HBAs)
An enterprise class backup facility
NAS heads for file sharing functionality
iSCSI support for fabric extension to non FC attached clients
FC/IP support for native fabric extension
Proposed SAN Model
What factors need to be addressed
when considering a SAN solution?
Fabric costs
Fabric Design
Switch costs
HBA costs
Fibre provision
Manufacturers limits
Vendor and OS
support
Fabric extension
NAS heads
iSCSI and FC/IP
SAN management
Disk grouping
Security
Performance
monitoring
What factors need to be addressed
when considering a SAN solution?
Disk virtualisation
requirements
Virtualising file systems
Backup Regimes
Type – Snapshot, Full
and Incremental
Extent – wont be able to
backup all SAN storage
Media – Tape, staging
disk then tape
Costs – hardware and
media
Fabric Connection
Guidelines
Not an open SAN
Restrict to manageable
set of proven hardware
compatible systems
Funding
Initial SRIF
Requires significant
investment over time
Who pays?
Alternative Solutions
Lower cost IP/SAN solutions emerging based on
Standard hardware
Open source OS’s
iSCSI over existing campus networks
Examples
Open source NAS with future SAN support
http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=displaynew
s&NewsID=615
Open source NAS appliance
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/0428nasrev2.html
SANmelody http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmelody.asp