Tiered Storage (and new features) for the rest of us

Pubblicato da il 25 agosto 2009 in Storage | View Comments

During the last two weeks I was out of the office for some vacation and only in the last couple of hours I’ve been able to read all of the posts that piled up on the blogosphere.

I would like to add my humble opinion to this discussion started Hu Hioshida about Tiered Storage and followed by Sthephen Foskett, Carter George and others.

I do agree with Hu that before virtualization was quite impossibile to migrate chunks of data storage between tiers but now it’s technically easy to develop new features like this one. Furthermore I think that in a (maybe or maybe not) close moving data to/from the cloud will be desiderable an cheap but now it’s simply impossibile since there are no standard protocols to do this in an easy way!

But what is the subject of this post? The ease of use of new features (Tiered storage in this case)!

Ease of use, low acquisition costs and ease of implementation of new features in a storage systems means less TCO. One of the most important thoughts in this days of recession is to cut the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) in IT and, above all, in Storage! Tiered storage going that way but to reduce the costs we need to comprehen the complexity to may hide behind the implementation of0 a feature and how this impact on the rest of the storage or whole IT infrastructure!

One example? EMC will deliver FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) next year but only for the new V-MAX… if you have a DMX, you need to buy a new storage, understand the implementation of FAST and relative constraints (probably FAST will limit some other features…. ), train people on the VMAX and FAST, migrate all data, hire consultants to implement tiering (will it works as expected in release 1.0?????), dismiss your old DMX, :-( Uhm!

Storage tiering needs to be simple! if we think about fully virtualized storage systems or a federated pool of storage systems we need to be sure to not spend valuable and scarse resources to implement new feature every time they are released! It is likely to inexpectedly become a pricey affair, since some times, costs are

hidden!

Compellent has his Data Progression: a fully integrated feature for automated tiered storage. This feature is a softwre license to add to Storage Center systems…. every generation of Storage Center is capable of Data Progression!!! As soon as I enable it I can use it for every LUN that are just a “point and click” away from associating them to the right tiering profile!

so, to recap:

EMC (and other taditional storage vendors): buy new stuff, train (new?) people, hire consultants, migrate data, adopt new features (FAST in this case) and manage new costraints == very high TCO!

Compellent (and other next generation storage vendors): buy a license, use it immediately without specific training, no migration or whatever else! == very low TCO!

If your storage infrastructure TCO is too high you will evaluate Cloud Storage as a viable option for tiering… but if you can lower down the TCO than you will be able to do tiering in your local, fully integrated ease of use infrastructure!!! ;-)

ES

  • http://breathingdata.com Ed

    What point is trying to be made here? Though I’ll agree that Compellent’s management of software tiering is very easy and simple to use, I’ll disagree on the comparison.

    The comparison between a Compellent array, which is usually classified as mid-range, to V-Max isn’t a good one. EMC is trying to make V-Max much easier to manage than its DMX counterpart and FAST is one of these things. This is just from a speed, capacity and replication perspective. The Clariion which should receive FAST as well would probably be much better and as such the costs are comparable to a Compellent box. In the end we need to reserve judgement until FAST arrives on both the Clariion and the V-Max.

  • http://pillardata.com Chris

    Good read. I completely agree that storage tiering, if done properly, can lower TCO. There are many forms of data tiering available today. Some are expensive and complex (read: EMC), and others are more user-friendly and cost-effective but migrate data based largely on access frequency. In some cases that may be a viable trigger for data migration, but in many more I suspect not. With an Application Aware storage system, data tiering is predicated on the values of various applications to the business. Tier 1 applications receive tier 1 storage services, while lower tier applications (and their associated lower tier data) receive less intensive storage services. All applications receive the appropriate amount of performance, availability and capacity. In concert, storage utilization rates increase to unprecedented levels (80 percent guaranteed, in Pillar’s case).

    And BTW, not all emerging storage technologies require a software license key to enable data tiering. For more information, check out http://www.pillardata.com.

    Chris

  • http://topsy.com/tb/bit.ly/HzDdy Twitter Trackbacks for Cinetica Blog » Tiered Storage (and new features) for the rest of us [cinetica.it] on Topsy.com

    [...] Cinetica Blog » Tiered Storage (and new features) for the rest of us blogs.cinetica.it/cinetica/2009/08/25/tiered-storage-and-new-features-for-the-rest-of-us – view page – cached During the last two weeks I was out of the office for some vacation and only in the last couple of hours I’ve been able to read all of the posts that piled up on the blogosphere. — From the page [...]

  • http://www.cinetica.it Enrico Signoretti

    Chris,
    Probably Compellent and Pillar have different licensing models… but Pillar has a “Tiered Storage” and not “Automated Tiered Storage”, ;-)

    ES

  • http://www.cinetica.it Enrico Signoretti

    Ed,
    I compared Compellent Storage Center with EMC V-MAX only because Clariion will have a feature like this one in a far future.
    I think that when we will see FAST on CX (or V-MIN ?!?!) the tale will be the same!

    EMC has a strong “Rip-And-Replace” policy:
    with Compellent you can buy a Storage Center series 30 (the last controller version) and you will preserve ALL your licenses with no additional costs in future upgrades of the controllers…. and viceversa you can install every software option on the oldest models!

    If you have a CX-3 you can’t buy options like “virtual provisioning” and when you will need to migrate to CX-4 or next generation CX you will need to buy every license again!!!!

    ES

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