Case Study 2014

Task: 1 Advantages of SAN over NAS

SANs: High Availability for Block-Level Data Transfer

A storage area network, or SAN, is a dedicated, high performance storage network that
transfers data between servers and storage devices, separate from the local area network.
With their high degree of sophistication, management complexity and cost, SANs are
traditionally implemented for mission-critical applications in the enterprise space. In a SAN
infrastructure, storage devices such as NAS, DAS, RAID arrays or tape libraries are
connected to servers using Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel is a highly reliable, gigabit
interconnect technology that enables simultaneous communication among workstations,
mainframes, servers, data storage systems and other peripherals. Without the distance and
bandwidth limitations of SCSI, Fibre Channel is ideal for moving large volumes of data
across long distances quickly and reliably.

In contrast to DAS or NAS, which is optimized for data sharing at the file level, the strength
of SANs lies in its ability to move large blocks of data. This is especially important for
bandwidth-intensive applications such as database, imaging and transaction processing. The
distributed architecture of a SAN also enables it to offer higher levels of performance and
availability than any other storage medium today. By dynamically balancing loads across the
network, SANs provide fast data transfer while reducing I/O latency and server workload.
The benefit is that large numbers of users can simultaneously access data without creating
bottlenecks on the local area network and servers.

SANs are the best way to ensure predictable performance and 24x7 data availability and
reliability. The importance of this is obvious for companies that conduct business on the web
and require high volume transaction processing. Another example would be contractors that
are bound to service-level agreements (SLAs) and must maintain certain performance levels
when delivering IT services. SANs have built in a wide variety of failover and fault tolerance
features to ensure maximum uptime. They also offer excellent scalability for large enterprises
that anticipate significant growth in information storage requirements. And unlike direct-
attached storage, excess capacity in SANs can be pooled, resulting in a very high utilization
of resources.
There has been much debate in recent times about choosing SAN or NAS in the purchasing
decision, but the truth is that the two technologies can prove quite complementary. Today,
SANs are increasingly implemented in conjunction with NAS. With SAN/NAS convergence,
companies can consolidate block-level and file-level data on common arrays.

Even with all the benefits of SANs, several factors have slowed their adoption, including
cost, management complexity and a lack of standardization. The backbone of a SAN is
management software. A large investment is required to design, develop and deploy a SAN,
which has limited its market to the enterprise space. A majority of the costs can be attributed
to software, considering the complexity that is required to manage such a wide scope of
devices. Additionally, a lack of standardization has resulted in interoperability concerns,
where products from different hardware and software vendors may not work together as
needed. Potential SAN customers are rightfully concerned about investment protection and
many may choose to wait until standards become defined.

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 Case Study 2014

Task: 2 Implementation of SAN Technology

The Haas School of Business at the University of California’s Berkeley campus was
founded more than 100 years ago, making it the oldest US business school at a public
university. Today, 160 faculty members oversee a student enrolment of nearly 1,700
in six academic degree programs.
The Haas School building, a mini-campus of three connected buildings set around a
central courtyard, serves as the focal point of the Haas community. This building is also
home to Haas’ Fibre Channel-based storage network, managed by system administrator
Chris Harwood.
With available FC ports becoming scarce and an increasing number of servers to
connect, Harwood recently embarked on a search for a more cost-effective SAN solution.
Already familiar with the benefits of the iSCSI protocol, he was confident that an IP SAN
solution would be a well-suited complement to his existing FC SAN. Harwood’s research
led him to evaluate iSCSI switches from StoneFly and SANRAD – the latter largely based
on the company’s recent “Product of the Year” award from Storage Magazine.
Product comparisons revealed a stronger feature set in the SANRAD V-Switch 3000
iSCSI switch. Harwood explains: “I especially liked that the V-Switch was ASICs-based
and had a true ‘open architecture’ design. The fact that there's no hard drive to crash
was a big plus.”
RADirect, Inc., a value-added reseller of SANRAD products, sent Harwood a SANRAD
VSwitch
3000 evaluation unit to “take for a spin”. Harwood and his colleagues installed
the unit, creating an IP SAN as an extension of their FC SAN. This new, tiered storage
approach allowed them to offload backup server traffic to the more cost-effective IP
SAN, thereby freeing up the more expensive Fibre Channel storage space for e-mail,
production
clustered SQL server services and general file sharing.
A short time later, Harwood purchased a second V-Switch 3000 from RADirect and
added it to the network for failover purposes as well as rudimentary load balancing.
While the first V-Switch unit is dedicated to research data traffic, and the other to
streaming video and VMWare images, both are configured to back each other up in the
event of failure. To ease congestion, traffic is segregated out by VLANs.
Today, Harwood enjoys significantly reduced network deployment and operational costs,
and a greatly simplified job. As an example of cost savings, he cites, “The servers we
use most often come with dual port onboard NICs, allowing us to use one port for public
network access, and the other as a storage adapter. Even when we have to purchase a
dual port GigE NIC, it only costs about $300. Compared to the $1,000 to $1,500 cost
of a typical FC HBA card, we’re looking at some pretty serious savings – especially when

you consider the number of servers we intend to use. Prior to the IP SAN, the cost of
storage was often higher than the cost of the server itself.”
From a time savings perspective, Harwood especially appreciates the fact that volumes
can now be quickly exposed to various test/development VMWare servers on the fly, with
no zoning of Fibre Channel switches or HBA compatibility matrices to check. If the
VMWare
host server has a major brand GigE card, guest OS iSCSI initiators are typically able to
access the volumes exposed on the V-Switch.

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Harwood is also impressed with the V-Switch’s seamless compatibility. “The servers on our
network run several different operating systems, and the SANRAD V-Switch works perfectly
with all of them.”
“Put simply,” he says, “the V-Switches have been solid and dependable since day one.
Dramatic improvements like dynamic storage allocation have made previously complex
tasks so much simpler.”
With both V-Switch 3000 units up and running and the IP SAN fully operational,
Harwood still had one more improvement to make. Frustrated with the complexity of
managing data scattered among several different arrays in what he likened to a “spider
web” configuration, he wanted to consolidate to one platform for storage. In considering
his options, he encountered some with extremely hefty price tags (such as buying
additional capacity for existing arrays or purchasing a new Dell/EMC native iSCSI array)
as well as some lower cost solutions (such as buying a generic array) that would have
required him to sacrifice on the feature set.
In the end, he again chose a solution from RADirect – Nexsan’s SATABeast RAID storage
array, fully populated with 21 TB of storage capacity in just 4U of rack space. Explains
Harwood, “The SATABeast offered the most robust feature set for the lowest price per TB.”
Today, the majority of the SATABeast’s capacity is dedicated to HPCC (high performance
compute cluster) statistical data sets and research data, with 2 TB of space allocated as
a depository for VMWare images that had previously been stored on an older FC-attached
black box. This consolidation of data allows Harwood to take advantage of the SATABeast’s
high-density performance while simplifying storage management.
Plans for the near future include using virtualization for simplified array management.
“Essentially, we’ll distribute quorum, data and backup LUNs to an MSCS server pair by
allocating one large LUN from an array to the SANRAD V-Switch, letting the V-Switch
partition the LUN into sub-disks, and exposing several smaller LUNs to the cluster.”