Yesterday I received the following tweet:
@vMario156 Yes, this was stated in an older version of the best practice guide. 1 IO is currently best practice, not only for 3PAR.
— Patrick Terlisten (@PTerlisten) June 5, 2014 Later Craig Kilborn joined the conversation and I decided to clarify this 100 or 1 IOPS myth the next morning.
@Craig_Kilborn @vMario156 I check this tomorrow at the office. I don't know why this was changed, but it has changed from 100 to 1 IO.
One of the tasks that I finish before I present the first Virtual Volumes (VV) to hosts is to discuss the need of a custom SATP claimrule with the customer. Requirement for a custom claimrule is usually, that the active and optimized path should be switched after each IO and not after 1000 IOs. Duncan Epping wrote a nice blog post some years ago. I recommend to read it.
Some basics The Storage Array Type Plug-In (SATP) is responsable for array-specific operations, like health monitoring of physical paths, reporting of path state changes and path failover.
HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization (AO) enables autonomic storage tiering on HP 3PAR storage arrays. With this feature the HP 3PAR storage system analyzes IO and then migrates regions of 128 MB between different storage tiers. Frequently accessed regions of volumes are moved to higher tiers, less frequently accessed regions are shifted to lower tiers. I often talk with customers about AO and I know that this feature is sometimes misunderstood and misconfigured.
I would like to thank Calvin Zito for the donation of StoreVirtual NFR licenses to vExperts. This will help to spread the knowhow about this awesome product! If you are not a vExpert, you can download the StoreVirtual VSA for free and try it for 60 days. If you are a vExpert, ping Calvin on Twitter for a 1y NFR license.
This blog post covers the deployment of the current StoreVirtual VSA release (LeftHand OS 11).
Part I of this series covered the deployment, part II is dedicated to the configuration of the StoreVirtual VSA cluster. I assume that the Centralized Management Console (CMC) was installed. Start the CMC. If you see no systems unter “Available Systems”, client “Find” on the menu and then choose “Find Systems…”. A dialog will appear. Click “Add…” and enter the ip address of one of the earlier deployed VSA nodes. Repeat this until all deployed VSA nodes are added.
Today DataCore announced their latest SANsymphony-V release. After the merge of SANmelody & SANsymphony, SANsymphony-V10 is the 10th generation of DataCores flagship product. Interestingly DataCore uses the terms “software-defined” and “Virtual SAN”. Whether the product of the definition of the terms corresponds everyone should decide for themselves. But this is another story.
What is DataCore SANsymphony-V? What DataCore definitely does is automating and simplifying storage management and provisioning. I really like it the simplicity.
In 2008 HP acquired LeftHand Networks for “only” $360 million. In relation to the acquiration of 3PAR in 2010 ($2.35 billion) this was a really cheap buy. LeftHand Networks was a pioneer in regard of IP based storage build on commodity server hardware. Their secret was SAN/iQ, a linux-based operating system, that did the magic. HP StoreVirtual is the TAFKAP (or Prince…? What’s his current name?) in the HP StorageWorks product familiy.
While talking with a colleague, she told me that she would like to know more about NetApp. Unfortunately we don’t have a NetApp system in our lab and playing with customer equipment is… mmh…unfavorable. But there’s a solution for this problem: Simulate ONTAP 8. This software allows you to simulate a 7-Mode or Cluster-Mode (c-Mode) system and to test many of the features. All you need is a VMware Workstation/ Player/ Fusion or an ESXi host.
This is a really short post. A first step can be the configuration of CIFS. This is done using “cifs setup” command. After you’ve setup CIFS, you can create volumes and qtrees, you can share them with you Windows server etc. It’s a good start into your Data ONTAP 8 journey.
The requirements All you need is a configured ONTAP 8 simulator instance and a Windows Domain Controller with Active Directory.
Nutanix was founded in 2009 and left the stealth mode in 2011. Their Virtual Computing Platform combines storage and computing resources in a building block scheme. Each appliance consists up to four nodes and local storage (SSD and rotating rust). At least three nodes are necessary to form a cluster. If you need more storage or compute resources, you can add more appliances, and thus nodes, to the cluster (scale out).
