Networked Storage “Need-to-Knows” Thinking about upgrading your storage array soon? Before you make any decisions, explore this guide to catch up on all of the latest trends, techniques and technologies in the networked storage market today. Networked Storage Need-to-Knows Contents Whether it’s the need for more capacity, to improve performance or for the ability to support new applications, NAS Need-to-Knows there are more reasons than ever to upgrade your storage . File storage focuses on array. Fortunately for you, these technologies have likely scalable NAS become a lot more sophisticated since your last purchase. Scale-up vs. scale-out NAS So what do you need to know now before making an . NAS options: Pros and upgrade? Find out in this exclusive guide. cons of scale-out and scale-up Catch up on what’s new in the networked storage market – . Improve NAS from the latest trends to the newest technologies – and help management with private ensure your latest storage array can adhere to your current storage clouds and future storage requirements. SAN Need-to-Knows Contents . FC dominates enterprise NAS Need-to-Knows storage networking File storage focuses on scalable NAS..….……………….…….…………Page 2 . Storage networking Scale-up vs. scale-out network-attached storage..…..……………..…...Page 8 infrastructure trends NAS options: Pros and cons of scale-out and scale-up.………….…...Page 10 . iSCSI performance Q&A Improve NAS management with private storage clouds……………....Page 13 . Primer: Getting started with iSCSI SAN Need-to-Knows Unified Storage Need-to- FC technology still dominates enterprise storage networking………..Page 15 Knows Storage networking infrastructure trends must figure in upgrade plans . Understanding unified …….…………………………………………………………………………Page 18 storage architecture iSCSI performance: An expert discussion with Dennis Martin..………Page 22 . Unified storage growing Getting started with an iSCSI storage system: An iSCSI primer..……Page 25 in popularity . Unified storage Unified Storage Need-to-Knows advantages Understanding unified storage architecture...……..……………………Page 27 File-based growth increases popularity of unified storage systems.…Page 28 Unified storage systems offer cost savings and management advantages ……………………………………………....…………………………….…Page 29 Page 1 of 32 Networked Storage Need-to-Knows Contents File storage focuses on scalable NAS Network-attached storage (NAS) systems are at the heart of burgeoning file NAS Need-to-Knows data stores. But scalable NAS systems will have to evolve to meet new capacity, accessibility and management needs. File storage focuses on scalable NAS The evolving features and capabilities of network-attached storage (NAS) . Scale-up vs. scale-out systems are being driven by a rapidly changing computing landscape and a set of trends and technologies that are morphing NAS into devices that bear NAS little resemblance to traditional corporate file stores. NAS options: Pros and cons of scale-out and To start, next-generation NAS is no longer confined to corporate data centers but is increasingly used to power cloud services with their need for unbridled scale-up scalability. But even in enterprises, the rising interest in big data and the . Improve NAS accelerating growth of unstructured data are pushing scalable NAS to the top management with private of the next-gen NAS feature list. A 2011 study by Framingham, Mass.-based IDC found that the world's data is doubling every two years, and predicted storage clouds enterprises will have to deal with 50 times more data and 75 times more files SAN Need-to-Knows in the next decade. FC dominates enterprise The consumerization of IT and the fading of boundaries between personal computing and the workplace require NAS systems to be securely and easily storage networking accessible from a wide range of devices. In addition, the continuous need for . Storage networking more efficient IT and the unstoppable journey to a virtualized IT infrastructure infrastructure trends are pushing for the incorporation of new features into next-generation NAS . iSCSI performance Q&A systems. Scalability, accessibility and manageability are the key areas in which next-gen NAS systems will be measured to determine if they're up to . Primer: Getting started the task in a world of clouds and proliferating consumer devices. with iSCSI NAS scalability Unified Storage Need-to- Scale-out architecture. Until recently, storage systems in which two storage Knows controllers share the workload and provide failover for each other dominated the enterprise space. Capacity scaled by adding disks and shelves, and . Understanding unified performance by adding additional processors, memory, spindles and storage architecture upgrading storage controllers to the next level. Eventually, and often rather quickly, a scalability limit was reached, and the only available options were to . Unified storage growing either add another storage system or do a fork-lift upgrade and replace the in popularity existing NAS. The results were sprawling NAS silos and bloated storage . Unified storage budgets. While dual-controller storage systems worked in the 20th century, advantages they've failed to efficiently support the unchecked growth of unstructured data in the 21st century. With established NAS vendors sticking with traditional architectures, in the early 2000s, startups like Isilon and Ibrix ventured into multinode NAS systems that scale proportionally as nodes are added. Their systems were first adopted in vertical markets like health care and the gas and oil industry where large unstructured files prevail; since then, the systems have increasingly found their way into the enterprise. It took established storage Page 2 of 32 Networked Storage Need-to-Knows Contents vendors almost a decade to yield to the pressure and success of scale-out architecture NAS; lacking scale-out experience, they sought to acquire scale- NAS Need-to-Knows out pioneers. The acquired technologies have either been incorporated into existing systems, as NetApp Inc. did with Spinnaker, or simply repackaged, . File storage focuses on as EMC Corp. is doing with Isilon (EMC Isilon), Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. with Ibrix (HP Ibrix X9000) and Dell Inc. with Exanet (PowerVault NX3500). scalable NAS With the majority of large storage vendors now on board, scale-out has . Scale-up vs. scale-out become the architecture of choice for NAS. NAS . NAS options: Pros and The benefits of scale-out NAS are compelling: cons of scale-out and Scalable performance in I/O and throughput scale-up Scalable capacity . Improve NAS Lower cost management with private Improved high availability (HA) Simplified management by being able to manage a single large NAS storage clouds rather than NAS silos SAN Need-to-Knows At this point, the ability to scale horizontally and manage a multinode NAS . FC dominates enterprise system as a single storage system with a global namespace are must-haves and should top anyone's NAS wish list. By the same token, it's important to storage networking realize that not all scale-out NAS systems are equal; while each vendor . Storage networking claims to lead, there are significant differences in how they scale, how they infrastructure trends support a global namespace, the number of file systems and files per file system they support, the makeup of their storage pool and how they manage . iSCSI performance Q&A metadata. Primer: Getting started with iSCSI Tiering solid-state drives (SSDs), disk and cloud. Storage tiering and the ability to efficiently support solid-state storage are instrumental to scale costs Unified Storage Need-to- efficiently. Next-generation NAS systems need to support SSDs, disk and Knows cloud tiers. Almost all NAS systems have some level of SSD support, but there are substantial differences in how SSD is leveraged and the tiering . Understanding unified methods used to ensure that active data remains on fast flash tier and stale storage architecture data on slower disk or cloud tiers. In its most basic and common implementation, SSDs are added to a NAS system to supplement . Unified storage growing mechanical drives, with files and applications allocated to appropriate tiers in popularity manually. Despite a consensus that data movement between tiers needs to . Unified storage be automatic, the support for automated data tiering varies significantly in contemporary NAS offerings. advantages "Isilon supports SAS, SSD and SATA as part of a storage pool, but today we don't move data between tiers automatically," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing at EMC Isilon. Flash as cache is another way to supplement a NAS with solid-state storage. While more complex to implement and requiring a change in the underlying storage architecture, flash cache has several advantages over simply Page 3 of 32 Networked Storage Need-to-Knows Contents substituting disks with SSDs (at least as long as the cost of SSD remains an order of magnitude higher than that of mechanical disk drives): NAS Need-to-Knows A cache will always keep the most active data in SSD without the . File storage focuses on need for tiering policies scalable NAS It benefits all files on the storage system A cache moves data at a sub-file level between tiers . Scale-up vs. scale-out NAS NetApp and Oracle Corp. (in the Sun ZFS Storage 7000 series appliance) . NAS options: Pros and have been early advocates of using flash as cache. The combination of a flash cache and low-cost, high-capacity SATA drives can challenge the cons of scale-out and performance of high-end disk arrays but cost less. "Next-gen NAS should scale-up support both tiering with cache, as well as by policies," EMC's Grocott said. Improve NAS management with private While solid-state storage aids performance and may yield lower overall storage costs, storage clouds enable unprecedented levels of capacity storage clouds scalability. Today, the integration between traditional NAS systems and the cloud is usually accomplished using cloud gateways, but next-gen NAS SAN Need-to-Knows systems are expected to support native cloud integration to enable virtually infinite scalability.