White Paper “Storage Consolidation: SANs Without Complexity”
November 5, 2003
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Storage consolidation pays off A widely published study by Meta Group, a leading research firm based in Stamford, CT, reported that 60% of IT organizations would pursue enterprise storage consolidation. This represented a significant increase from previous Meta Group studies in which only about 40% of the organizations were pursuing storage consolidation. Today storage consolidation has certainly become the byword for large organizations. But small and midsize organizations still struggle with storage consolidation. A widely reported study from Gartner Inc. found that 70% of companies with between 100 and 1000 employees still rely mainly on directattached storage, while only 32% have begun using SANs for block storage. “Among these midsize companies, SANs are still seen as quite expensive and complicated to manage. Most of them think it’s not a good investment,” said Pushan Rinnen, senior analyst for Gartner, in a published article (Storage Magazine, Sept. 2003, “SAN Holdouts” by Jeff Moad). Still, it is no surprise that organizations of all sizes would want to consolidate storage if they believed it was practical. Demand for storage has exploded, driving organizations to constantly add storage capacity. However, this capacity, often attached to individual servers, is labor intensive to install and difficult to administer. Certainly the potential to reduce costs and improve storage operations through consolidation is there. Organizations can reduce the cost of assembling and running a storage environment by networking storage together to create storage area networks. The resulting networked storage environment enables organizations to achieve a number of benefits:
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Greater utilization of their storage capacity, which allows organizations to get more mileage out of their storage investment Increased flexibility by allowing organizations to allocate and reallocate their storage capacity quickly and easily as needed Efficient centralized management of storage rather than running around trying to configure and provision the storage wherever it may be located
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Achieving these benefits, especially for small and midsize organizations, however, has proven frustrating due to the cost and complexity of storage area networks (SANs). This paper examines the challenges of storage consolidation for small and midsize organizations. It builds the case for the use of multiple smaller SANs that are centrally managed to achieve the benefits for storage consolidation. In the process, it shows how to assemble small SANs that avoid the high cost and complexity of a large enterprise SAN. Finally, it introduces Winchester Systems’ FlashDisk virtual SAN-in-a-Box approach as an efficient way to build and manage one or multiple smaller SANs. Storage consolidation hurdles for small, midsize organizations When consolidating storage on a SAN, organizations must overcome a number of significant hurdles, especially when using conventional SAN technology. The hurdles fall into five general categories: complexity, skills, cost, deployment and management.
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Complexity—conventional SANs are expensive to acquire and to maintain. They combine networking components such as switches, host bus adaptors (HBAs) and Fibre Channel-enabled storage arrays from multiple vendors. They also require special software that establishes the SAN and enables the storage to act as a single, logical pool of storage capacity. In short, there are more complex parts, pieces that the organization may never have encountered before, and each piece has to be properly matched with the rest of the pieces, down to the specific firmware versions and drivers, if the SAN is to function as expected. Skills—all this complexity, in turn, requires learning new skills and/or hiring people with the appropriate skills. Those who manage systems and storage, especially in small and midsize organizations, typically do not have sophisticated networking skills and advanced storage skills – and even if they do, they are often in short supply. For many organizations, this means extensive retraining, new hires, and heavy reliance on outside consultants. Cost—none of this comes free. The various pieces of SAN hardware and software and skill retraining carry a substantial price tag. And since SANs are intended to store the bulk of the organization’s data, and often some of the most mission-critical data, they must include redundancy to ensure high availability. Many vendor architectures require doubling the number of HBAs, switches, and software licenses, which translates into double the already high cost, making SANs prohibitive for many organizations.
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Deployment—SANs typically require weeks to install, configure, document and test including setup of complex management software. Management—ongoing administration and management of the SAN is not simple or straightforward today. SANs are subject to a variety of cascading failures and vulnerable to various security breaches. The tools to manage SANs are just emerging. Although SAN-based storage consolidation eliminates the need to administer each disk array individually, the SAN itself still must be managed.
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Given their complexity and cost, a fully redundant enterprise SAN can be justified only by the need to consolidate large volumes of mission-critical data. Small and midsize organizations, however, usually need to consolidate pools of storage that are smaller in scale but no less essential to the operations of the organization. Although these systems can benefit from SAN-based storage consolidation, they cannot justify the upfront investment in an enterprise SAN. Too often those SANs, with all their cost and complexity, amount to wasteful overkill for the small or midsize organization. In fact, large consolidated SANs present problems in terms of cost, complexity, scalability, and manageability for large enterprises too, leading many to deliberately adopt a strategy of deploying multiple smaller, independent SANs. Experienced SAN managers complain that consolidating storage for many servers creates more problems than it solves. Even such SAN basics as setting up LUNs and zoning correctly can easily turn into a nightmare. Consequently, there are real advantages in pursuing a strategy of multiple smaller SANs for storage consolidation, especially if you can manage them with a single management tool.
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Simplified storage consolidation Clearly, many organizations need a way to lower the cost and complexity of SAN-based storage if they are to achieve the benefits of storage consolidation. These organizations have their own SAN requirements that differ from those needing large-scale, enterprise SANs. Specifically, they need:
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the specific function or department and any related systems. In addition, security concerns around unauthorized data access are greatly reduced if not completely eliminated when data is isolated on the appropriate SAN. FlashDisk from Winchester Systems has become the basis for a family of products that lets organizations easily create and share pools of storage capacity, which is exactly what a SAN is—a shared pool of storage. However, the company’s approach removes much of the complexity and cost of conventional enterprise SANs while retaining flexibility and scalability. This approach is ideal for organizations that want to create specific SANs to consolidate servers and storage around particular needs, functions, and departments but not necessarily build a massive, complex enterprise SAN infrastructure. FlashDisk, a RAID array with multiple ports, creates what amounts to a virtual SAN-in-aBox by allowing multiple servers to connect to a shared pool of high performance disk storage. It provides a low cost, scalable alternative to the enterprise SAN. Using the SAN-in-a-Box alternative, organizations can consolidate multiple servers and their corresponding storage into one or more shared pools of storage for 40% - 76% less than the cost of a comparable enterprise SAN with the same storage capacity. [See accompanying table: SAN Cost Comparison]
A low cost, easy way to implement SANs fast Cost-effective implementations when even small volumes of storage and just a few servers are involved Simple, fast scalability when they do grow Easy management and maintenance Flexible implementation and deployment, where redundancy can be added if, when, and wherever necessary
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The solution, as demonstrated by the success organizations are having with departmental SANs, is to focus on assembling smaller SANs based on specific needs or a subset of the organization’s servers. Using this approach, the organization might develop multiple small or midsize SANs, each consolidating 4, 6, even 12 servers. As a practical matter, each SAN focuses on its specific mission, having no need to share its data with unrelated systems. The benefits come from consolidating the servers and storage serving
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The following is an example showing the cost savings of using a Fibre Channel or SCSI “SAN-in-ABox” with dual redundant controllers to manage a 4 TB storage pool shared among eight servers. Typical SANs require dual HBAs and dual switch ports. These are optional with SAN-in-a-Box solutions where no external switch is necessary. Table: SAN Cost Comparison SAN Elements
4 TB Storage Pool Number of Servers Controllers Host Bus Adapters External Switches Hardware Cost Hardware % Savings Volume Management Centralized Array Management Total Cost Total % Savings
Traditional Fibre Channel (FC) SAN FlashDisk “SAN-in-a-Box” (FC) FlashDisk “SAN-in-a-Box” (SCSI)
$80,000 8 1 or 2 $24,000 $16,000 $120,000 -$30,000 $30,000 $180,000 —
$60,000 8 1 or 2 $12,000 $0 $72,000 40% $0 $0 $72,000 60%
$40,000 8 1 or 2 $2,400 $0 $42,400 64% $0 $0 $42,400 76%
Notes: · Costs are approximations only. Actual costs will differ based on exact configurations. · Example is based on using eight servers. FlashDisk SAN-in-A-Box for SCSI supports up to 12 servers. · Switch capability is built-in to all versions of SAN-in-a-Box. · Only one HBA is required for redundant controllers; second HBA is optional on all SAN-in-a-Box products. · FlashConsole management appliance is included at no charge with each FlashDisk storage solution.
The virtual SAN-in-a-Box allows small and midsize organizations and departments within large organizations to capture the benefits of storage consolidation and SANs at a far lower cost while avoiding the hurdles that hinder the creation and deployment of enterprise SANs. Winchester Systems promotes the pay-asyou-grow model ensuring that organizations can start with a small SAN and scale it as
needed within their budget. With this approach, organizations can consolidate some storage and servers now and add others later, immediately collecting the benefits and payback—efficient utilization of storage, centralized management and provisioning, flexible allocation and reallocation of storage—at each stage.
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SAN-in-a-Box Family Winchester Systems provides a complete family of SAN-in-a-Box products including FlashDisk OpenRAID, FlashDisk OpenSAN and FlashDisk SATA. FlashDisk OpenRAID provides a high performance disk array with multiple SCSI ports and optionally two Fibre Channel ports for migration to a full SAN. FlashDisk OpenSAN similarly provides a high performance RAID disk array - but with multiple Fibre Channel ports. FlashDisk SATA disk arrays, both SCSI and Fibre channel versions, provide low-cost secondary storage for disk-to-disk backups, nearline storage and other bulk storage applications. All the complexity of SAN switching and SAN software, including virtualization, provisioning and address mapping, is integrated within an easy-to-manage FlashDisk solution, making it transparent to the organization. SAN-in-a-Box can be configured to be fully redundant. The disk arrays support any level of RAID for data protection and supports popular clustering and multipathing software.
The Fibre Channel version of FlashDisk virtual SAN-in-a-Box can handle up to 8 host servers (any “open” server, any operating system) and provide up to 32 TB of storage and dual redundant RAID controllers to rival conventional SANs but without the need for switches, additional host bus adaptors, or software. 6
The FlashDisk-based virtual SAN-in-a-Box product family can scale as high as 32 TB without switches or additional HBAs. Storage can be allocated in any amount by partitioning the storage into multiple logical volumes. In terms of performance, FlashDisk delivers from 32,000-160,000 I/Os per second and from 230-1,400 MB/second throughput
per unit. This level of performance is more than enough to handle database, OLTP, manufacturing, multimedia, financial, imaging, prepress, email, web serving, and other disk-intensive tasks. Given their low cost and easy implementation, organizations frequently use multiple FlashDisk devices to boost performance of key applications.
The SCSI version of SAN-in-a-Box supports 2 to 12 SCSI hosts (any “open” server, any operating system) with single, redundant or dual independent controllers providing 200 GB to 12 TB of storage. With optional Fibre Channel ports, the storage can easily be migrated to a full SAN.
Administrators can manage the resulting SAN through FlashConsole, a browser-based management appliance easily accessible from any workstation on the network. It lets administrators partition storage capacity into multiple logical volumes and set up and manage server access. Through FlashConsole, administrators can assign each volume to a specific host server or to multiple servers connected via point-to-point SCSI or Fibre Channel links.
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Through a single FlashConsole, which can centrally manage up to 32 SAN islands totaling 1024 TB (1 petabyte). This enables administrators to aggregate the management of multiple smaller SANs quickly and without the cost and complexity of conventional enterprise SANs
The SAN-in-a-Box payback comes quickly:
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Easy on the budget—low initial investment, pay-as-you-grow easy scalability, and low ongoing cost of ownership Easy implementation—quick to install (as little as one hour), flexible deployment Rock solid reliability— high performance and fully redundant, simplified management through the FlashConsole web-based appliance
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The bottom line: the SAN-in-a-Box product family brings plug-and-play convenience and the economy of direct attached storage to the world of SANs, allowing any organization to create small, secure, centrally-managed independent SANs quickly and easily, as needed.
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Advantages of the SAN without the Complexity and Cost Organizations can now build small centrallymanaged and affordable SANs for storage consolidation without the high cost and complexity of traditional SANs. To work as promised, a conventional SAN needs costly hardware and software components and often requires excessive redundancy, all of which leads to complexity that results in high costs, slow, painstaking deployment and extensive on-going maintenance of hardware and SAN software with tiered pricing,
frequent upgrades and constant version and compatibility issues. The SAN-in-a-Box approach from Winchester Systems delivers SAN capabilities for small and midsize organizations while shielding the organization from the complexities of typical SAN technology. This lowers the cost even as it increases the flexibility, enabling organizations to cost-effectively create and deploy centrallymanaged independent SANs for storage consolidation.
Winchester Systems Inc 149 Middlesex Turnpike Burlington, MA 01803 www.winsys.com
781-265-0200 – 800-325-3700
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