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Storage 102: more concepts of the
IT enterprise storage
Published on 2016-06-21

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Storage 101: common concepts in
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Carlos Ijalba
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This article is an update and follow-up of my previous article:

Migrating and Managing
Storage 101: common concepts in the IT enterprise storage Backup Exec 2014
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This time, I expand on more frequently used storage concepts.

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Source Virtualization
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The purpose of this article series is to describe acronyms and
abbreviations used commonly in the storage marketplace, so we
can understandbetter this technologies.

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14/07/2017 Storage 102: more concepts of the IT enterprise storage

Some of the descriptions are just basic explanations of the terms

(similar to a dictionary), but some others are a bit more detailed
(like FPGAs as Storage Controllers, or SSD is Flash but Flash is not
always SSD).
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Table of Contents
SDDC - Storage De ned DataCenter
SDS - Software De ned Storage
JBOD
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Storage Pools
RAID groups
VDisk
MDisk
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SAN Requirements
Thin Provisioning
Thick Provisioning
Storage Oversubscription Keep in touch with
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Storage Over Provisioning
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SSDC

SDDC or Software De ned Data Center is the de nition of a fully

virtualized Data Center: Hardware (Servers), Networking
(Switches, Firewalls, Routers), and Storage (JBOD, SAN and NAS).

SSDC is currently where the future of IT is evolving due to its

better use of resources, granularity and uni cation of di erent
platforms and vendors.

To better understand it, we can say that it will bring to the storage
what VMware, Hyper-V and KVM have brought to the Server and
OS space.
SDS

SDS or Software De ned Storage is the term used to designate

software based storage virtualizers.

SDS creates a SAN by virtualizing the storage found in servers or

storage cabinets (SAN and NAS), and manages them all like a
single pool of storage,easing administration and maximizing
storage resources.

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Examples of SDS products are VMware's vSAN, EMC ViPR

&ScaleIO, IBM Spectrum Scale and Microsoft's Windows Storage
Server.
vSAN has its own de nition in this document, but it permits creating
a virtual SAN with local storage from the ESXi hosts. Ask a Question
ViPR uni es storage from servers JBODs and storage cabinets from
EMC, HDS, IBM, DELL, Oracle, Solid re and NetApp.
Spectrum Scale uses GPFS to unify storage from NFS, SMB, HDFS, S3,
and JBOD creating a single storage entity of all thestorage of the
organization,both local and cloud based.
Windows Storage Server lets us create a NAS from JBODs and other
NAS.

JBOD

JBOD is an acronym for Just a Bunch Of Disks, usually related to

the disks used by the servers which are local to them and that
haven't beencon gured with RAID protection, but today we can
also have dedicated JBOD enclosures, used to build SDS and NAS
appliances (See SDS de nition).

Storage Pools

At the core of the storage subsystems there are disks (SAS, NL-
SAS, SSD), but each disk by itself is just a hardware piece like a
bolt. When disks are grouped together, they become a part of
disk set, which are known by many names, depending on
vendors: Storage Pools (IBM, EMC), Disk Aggregates (NetApp).It is
usually a logical disc group, which then can be divided in RAID
sets.

Generally speaking, in the storage world, a storage pool is simply

an aggregation of storage devices: disks, tapes, or les. For
example a storage cabinet can use SSDs, SAS disks and NL-SAS to
form a storage pool. You might separate them in three di erent
storage pools for performance reasons. Under Tivoli Storage
Manager or Spectrum Protect, you might have a storage pool
formed by disk, another by tape and another by WORM discs, and
migrate data between them toaccommodate di erent retention
periods or for audits (LOPD, SOX, Internal Security Audits, etc).

RAID groups

RAID, or redundant array of inexpensive disks, is a technology to

deliver storage virtualization over a group of disks. The idea is to
group various disks together to deliver a single or several virtual
disks, that can be bigger than the original disks,to o er myriad
bene ts like recovery from disk failure, read speed, write speed,
expansion, reduction, backup and replication, or cloning.

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Today there are nine standard RAID algorithms or RAID sets, from
RAID 0 to RAID 6, and combinations of RAID 0 and 1, known as
RAID 10 and RAID 0+1. There are also RAID sets modi ed by
manufacturers and vendors for special purposes, or to o er
Ask a Question
advanced or extended functionalities, like NetApps RAID-DP,IBMs
VSR, Linux MD RAID10, or LSI RAID5E and RAID6E. To know better
the added bene ts of this non-standard RAID sets, refer to each
vendor's documentation.

VDisk

Virtual Disk: Names given by various appliances to RAID Volumes

or LUNs. Used by Oracle, Sun, StorageTek, IBM, and LSI.

MDisk

Managed Disk: Name given by various appliances to RAID

Volumes or LUNs. Used by IBM Storage.

Logical Volume Manager (LVM)

UNIX/Linux storage layer to provide storage virtualization. It

permits managing FileSystems over multiple disks,
increasing and decreasing a FS (it can be on-the- y or cold,
depending on the LVM version and/or implementation). LVMs can
also provide protection features such as mirroring, encryption
and snapshots. The feature set present on the LVMs are
dependent on the OSrelease and version.

SAN Installation Considerations

InstallingaSANrequiresattentiontodetail and careful planning;

it's not something that can be done "on the spur of the moment".
A project plan to take into account hardware,software,storag
e,andin some cases even applicationsmust be prepared in
advance, to guarantee its success.

The most important part is to study and meet the vendors'

requirements and components compatibility to save you from
unwanted surprises.

SAN Requirements

TointegrateallcomponentsofaSAN
seamlessly,vendorshardwareandsoftwarecompatibility
requirements must be met,which includethefollowing:
HBAs( rmwareversion,driverversion,andlatest patches)

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Switch/es( rmware, FCPs, port licenses, dual PSUs or UPS

protection)
Fiber Cables (the correct type to be used: Monomode, Multimode,
and adapters: LX, SX)
Storage( rmware,management software,andlatest patches)

Ask a Question
And the most important part: Make up a map (Visio, Dia, Draw,
etc) in advance with the connections, so it's easier to implement,
cable and labelat installation time, as well as to help produce a
nal documentation of the infrastructure.

As any project, remember the sixpence rule: Planning and
Preparation Prevents Pretty-Poor Performance.

Thin Provisioning

Thin Provisioning is a technology that o ers virtualized storage to

a host on-demand from a storage pool. That is, a storage cabinet
might o er a LUN of100 GB of disk space to a server, but will
only allocate blocks as the server uses them, in which case if the
server only uses 40 GB,the server "thinks" that has 60 GB of
space free, and this space is what the storage cabinet can use for
other LUNs.

Thin provisioning is faster when allocating a new volume to a

server since it creates an empty volume, and once the server
starts usingthe volume blocks they get allocated and formatted
in real-time, which causes a small performance hit.

Thin provisioning is a great way to save space, since most OS

disks are rarely used at 100%, but if you do have space problems
and most ofyour local OS disks are nearly full, avoid using thin
provisioning, because if one of the volumes goes AWOL (an
application problem creating huge logs, or a DB whichcannot
archive transaction logs, etc) and lls up, it might a ect another
thin volumes on the storage pool. If the one becomes full, the
whole storage poolwill become read-only (for safety and integrity
reasons), perhaps stopping all the VMs using the storage pool.

So, IT IS a great technology, but with serious impactin availability

if not monitored closely.

Thick Provisioning

Thick Provisioning is the name given to a Not-Thin Provisioned

volume (basically what we used to call a LUN before Thin
Provisioning technology). A Thick provisioned LUN is fully
assigned and formatted on creation time, which makes a time
delay, but once the server starts using it, it's faster than a thin

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volume, since it is already prepared.

Storage Over Subscription

Storage Over Subscription is the condition reached after giving

Ask a Question
more virtual storage than there is physically available. It is closely
related to thin provisioning.

Thin provisioning is capable of presenting volumes bigger than

what they really are, and storage over subscription is the
condition reached when we have actually given more storage
than available.

NOTE: VMware also calls Storage Over Subscription "Storage Over

Provisioning" (explained in another point of this article), but for
SSD manufacturers they are quite di erent storage concepts.

Storage Over Commitment

For some providers (like VMware) Storage Over Commitment is

the same concept as Storage Over Subscription; for others over
commitment is the condition reached when storage has been
over subscribed and it has actually been used (hence committed).
In any case, both concepts can be considered synonyms.

Storage Over Provisioning

Storage Over Provisioning is a technology that sets aside extra

free space on a SSD device, so its controller can later be used to
increase SSD performance and lifespan by using a xed portion
of the SSD as bu er to perform operations, and to replace
damaged cells within the SSD.

Basically enabling Over Provisioning on a SSD will cut the total

SSD capacity in a percentage (usually 10%), to dedicate it to
operations acceleration and to improve reliability, so it is a
recommended best practice on SSD devices (usually on single
SSD devices, as All-Flash storage cabinets might have other

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technologies to perform the same result).

SSD is Flash, but Flash is not always SSD...

SSD disks are built upon ash memory MLC or SLC chips (solid-
Ask a Question
state chips) packed in a hard drive's case, so traditional HD
cabinets can be upgraded by replacing HDs for SSDs. The
performance improvement when replacing HDs for SSDs is BIG.
However HDs have a connection bus (SATA, NL-SAS, etc) that puts
a bottleneck on the newer, faster access memory chips.

To overcome this bottlenecks, another ways to deliver solid-state

storage at faster speeds appeared.

PCIe IOPs accelerator cards pack solid-state chips in a PCIe card,

taking advantage of the faster PCIe bus to deliver internal storage
to be used for accelerating IOP intensive applications like
databases and business intelligence cubes.

All- ash storage cabinets use solid-state chips placed on modules

(similar to RAM DIMMS) which might also pack additional
hardware controllers to deliver RAID protection at chip level,
rather than SSD level. This modules are then plugged to a
purpose-built bus with a higher throughput and lower latency
than existing all-purpose I/O buses.

Now the performance improvement when replacing HDs for

solid-state systems with a purpose-built bus is HUGE.

FPGAs as Storage Controllers

Some performance improvements introduced by hardware

vendors are replacing CPUs and storage controllers by FPGAs
( eld-programmable gate arrays). This kind of processor is
designed for a low number of operations instead of the hundreds
of instructions supported by a CPU, but the operations are
optimized to perform huge parallel processes in a single clock,
outperforming CPUs by orders of magnitude.

FPGAs therefore can run at lower clock speeds and consume a lot
less power than CPUs, but perform the tasks they where
programmed for much more e ciently than using general-
purpose CPUs to do the same task. Companies that employ
FPGAs for storage acceleration are Xilinx, IBM, and Altera (part of
the Intel Group).

FC vs iSCSI

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The fastest connection available actually for storage is Fiber of

16Gb (there's also 40Gb ber but this is only used for Ethernet
switch interconnects). It is still quite expensive, so 8Gb FC is more
widely used as of today, but usually new implementations will use
16Gb. 32Gb FC (32GFC) should come out during this year 2016.
Ask a Question
Fiber is used for speed and distance as there's nothing faster
when travelling on a wire.

VSAN Note: VMware's ESXi case thinks that VSAN can use PCIe-
SSD cards connected directly on the host through an internal bus,
so this should be faster than FC comms, and without HBA
overhead (so this will actually be faster than using an externally
attached SAN).

10Gb ethernet is comparable to 8Gb FC in speed (this is so

because ethernet uses TCP protocol, with fragmenting packets,
packet re-send, error checking, and FC uses FCP protocol), but
iSCSI is cheaper and you can always use multiple connections, or
LACP, and its a lot easier to install and administer than FCP.

Recommendations:

Usually go for iSCSI, unless you already have a FC infrastructure and
knowledge, and want to carry on using it rather than learning
something new yet again.
If you need the best performance available, then go for FCP 16Gb
upwards or consider WMware VSAN with a lot of SSDs.

Thank you for reading my article, feel free to leave me some

feedback regarding the content or to recommend future work. If
you liked this article please click the big "Good Article?" button at
the bottom.

I look forward to hearing from you. -- Carlos Ijalba (LinkedIn)

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Author:
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Carlos Ijalba

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Author Comment
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14/07/2017 Storage 102: more concepts of the IT enterprise storage

by: Carlos Ijalba 2016-07-11

This article is an update and follow-up of my

LVL 9
previous article: Storage 101: common
concepts in the IT enterprise storage.
Ask a Question
1

Expert Comment
by: Kyle Santos 2016-07-14
LVL 16
Great job!
Active today

Expert Comment
by: Senior IT System Engineer
2016-11-14
LVL 8
Active today
Thanks for publishing such a great article here
Carlos !

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