Virtualisation Storage, Backup and de-duplication
Well I haven’t written anything in the last week or so as I appear to have been far to busy. Luckily for me one of the reasons I was busy was down to the fact I was visiting Storage Expo in London.
I was there on official work business but as always I got the chance to indulge my unhealthy interest in all things virtual. So what was the main theme doing the rounds at Storage Expo this year? Well de-duplication appears to be the hottest topic of the moment. Everyone is jumping on the band wagon and claiming to do it in some way or another, I only heard about this technology about 9 months ago and now it seems to be spreading like wild fire.
I went to a talk by a technical architect from the Associated Press (Daily Mail, Evening Standard, etc) who had implemented a Data Domain DD580 appliance as a location to store his Vmware Snapshots / Backups. He was getting a 20:1 and 25:1 de-duplication ratios and in some instances 60:1 ratio, in fact it performed that well they were worried there was someting wrong with it when it didn’t fill up. They’ve since moved a number of backups off tape and on to this device quite successfully and over time the de-dup ratio climbs as there is more data on the device that’s duplicated. How good is that, you fill it with more data and the ratio goes up?!?!? no wonder they’re valued at $1 Billion It was summed up well at the end with a copy of an email from one of his storage team.
“to free up some space I deleted 22TB of old backups off a 5TB Data Domain storage device ??!?!?!”
A San administrator from CB Richard Ellis in the same talk had implemented a solution from FalconStor, a company I had heard of but had not ever looked into. He was getting 350:1 ratios on his file system backups, unbelievable!! I couldn’t help thinking they must do a lot of contracts that have single word version changes or something because that is a crazy figure, he certainly couldn’t explain why it was that high, I wonder if FalconStor can.
I had a good chat with the guys at NetApp, who interestingly enough are currently offering a guarantee (with some terms and conditions) that they can save you 50% on your storage usage for your virtual environment. It’s all based on efficiency and some of it seems pretty sensible but neat at the same time, however the disk setup the NetApp setup was being compared to in the presentation resembled a lesson in how not to setup your storage. Won’t be to hard to gain 50% efficiency over something that wasn’t efficient in the first place. However don’t get me wrong NetApp had some fantastic stuff going on in thin provisioning, SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure and de-duplication, I always have to stop and wonder though, how much is it all going to cost me???
I had a great chat with Sean from NetApp on the benefits of using NFS for Vmware, now I’ve not had a lot of storage experience and it’s something I’m working on all the time to learn. Sean took me through a whole load of stuff on the NetApp storage suite and how it complimented Vmware, He used to do Vmware consultancy and it showed, he knew his stuff and I have to say for 40 minutes we were scribbling on the whiteboard like mad, I learned a lot in that 40 minutes so thanks Sean. Safe to say Im going to take a more indepth look at NFS for vmware and try learn a little more to see if it’s worth suggesting when we come to replace our VMware storage next.
Other highlights for me were meeting the guys from Compellent, a company I’ve been following since VMworld 2007 and who seem to finally be getting a decent presence and excellent press in the UK. Their managing director Andy was buzzing, so excitable and so energetic about the product, it’s definately one I’ll be keeping a close eye on and was a worthy winner of a “best in show award” at VMworld 2008.
