Long-Distance vMotion: Part 2

This is a rapidly changing field and there have been new updates. Please see Long-Distance vMotion: Updates for the latest changes.

This is the second part in a multi-part series on the topic of Long-Distance vMotion. Part 1 introduced us to disaster recovery as practiced today and laid the foundation to build upon.

When building out Long Distance vMotion (LDVM), we still need to focus on the same components we focused upon building out disaster recovery. We will take the leap from our recovery time taking 5 minutes to a continuous non-disruptive operation. We’ll need to change our network from two different subnets in two different datacenters, to one stretched subnet. We’ll need to take our mirrored storage and create what I call a single shared storage image. Last, we’ll get rid of Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and replace it with a VMware vSphere split cluster.

Long-Distance vMotion: Part 1

This is the first part in a multi-part series on the topic of Long-Distance vMotion. I am currently architecting and building this out for a few of my customers.

Long-Distance vMotion (LDVM) is the holy grail of business continuity – the ability to migrate workloads across data centers or in and out of clouds with no disruption of service and zero downtime. When I started consulting in the 1990s, after my several years as a software developer, I was a high availability clustering consultant, among other things. Later I architected geographic clusters, but one thing was certain, it was very expensive, complex in architecture and difficult to manage.

Long-Distance vMotion attempts to tackle one issue, that of business continuity. Let’s face it, disasters are rare. I know there are earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, floods and other bad things that happen. In my many years of consulting, these have rarely happened to my customers. I have two customers that have had their storage ruined, each by their own fire suppression system failing and pouring water onto their equipment. These disasters, although rare, do happen. They must be planned for. It’s risk mitigation; a business decision that doesn’t come for free.

The Empire Strikes Back

I was getting ready to write EMC off, at least in the mid-tier. The Clariion was old-tech, and an old way of doing things. They screamed unified, but it didn’t feel that way. Celerra in the NS/NX felt like a bolt-on. They were expensive, fragmented and difficult to work with.

EMC had been making a number of good buys over the past couple of years. RSA, VMware, Kashya and Data Domain come to mind. Avamar and YottaYotta were lesser-known pieces. When it came to primary storage, however it seemed stale. Then they started showing the cards they were holding.

First came VMAX. They refreshed the Symmetrix line with a modular, scalable architecture. It could grow from something small to something big. But the real changes starting coming with FAST and FAST VP.

I’ve Got The Remote Replication, Single-Storage Image MPIO Blues

There are not a lot of customers I meet that don’t want some form of replication to a disaster recovery/colocation facility. What used to be financially unreachable has come down over 10-15 years to be affordable for most businesses. Remote replication, coupled with VMware or one of the other hypervisors providing server virtualization has made recovery quick, easy and within budget.

So as I look at some of the new storage systems being released lately, I’m scratching my head. Why would an affordable small to medium business mid-tier storage system provide only FibreChannel-based replication – today?

The Storage Evolution Part 2: Deduplication

This is part 2 in the Storage Evolution series.

When we created SANs we stored more and more data retrieved at higher and higher speeds, and it was good. Then we added advanced functionality like creating copies (clones, snapshots, etc.) quickly, and it was good. Then development wanted to have 6 copies of that production database, one for each developer, also test, QA and staging. We needed a daily clone for the data warehouse and business intelligence. We virtualized our servers, we booted from SAN, some of us ditched the desktops and workstations opting for Citrix and VDI. We were making copies of the same data, over and over and over again. And at the 11th hour of the second half of the day, we backed it all up.

And it just got worse.

The Tale of Tape

We had a love/hate relationship with tape. We loved it’s density, it’s streaming speed, we hated its bulk, daily off-site management, library management and load and seek time. But it was cheap, alternatives expensive.

The Storage Evolution Part 1: Virtualization

In order for me to talk about storage virtualization, I feel it’s important to describe what I mean by it. Storage virtualization is introducing a layer of virtualization, or abstraction, when dealing with storage. What I’m not talking about is storage for server virtualization, or storage of VMware, Hyper-V, etc. While server virtualization and storage virtualization are very complimentary, they are not the same thing.

Storage virtualization adds some kind of pointer-based approach abstracting the physical blocks from the logical blocks of a disk, LUN or unit of storage. This approach adds power and benefit to give us more flexibility on how we allocate, move, make recovery points (snapshots, copies, etc.) and replication (mirroring) for business continuity or disaster recovery.

IBM V7000 and SVC 6.1 – What IBM is Getting Right

On Thursday, IBM made some storage announcements: Storwise V7000, SVC 6.1 and DS8800. I’m going to ignore the DS8800 for now; it may be a needed upgrade, but the thunder was stolen in my opinion by the other two areas.

Storwise V7000

IBM has made a big decision introducing the V7000. IBM’s mid-tier lineup has consisted of two main OEM’d players over the last decade, LSI’s IBM DS3/4/5000 lineup, and NetApp’s IBM N-Series. The V7000 is not an OEM product, but an IBM product.

This is a big departure.

While I’m not expecting IBM to immediately ditch LSI or NetApp, IBM is clearly out making their own hardware. They had some well-known pieces DS8000, XIV and SVC; the V7000 joins this homegrown family.