by Arjan | May 21, 2012 | Storage Field Day 2012
During Storage Field Day 1 we also visited the Drobo Headquarters. Drobo provided us with a great show and even better information. One of the great solutions I noticed for SMB environments is the combination of a Drobo B800i or B1200i and the Veeam Backup and Replication v6 software. First let’s dive a bit deeper into these Drobo products.
The Drobo B800i:
“The Drobo B800i is optimized for small businesses to provide reliable and high-performance storage to servers running applications like file services, data protection, email, and server virtualization. It integrates seamlessly into your TCP/IP network infrastructure and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide simple, consolidated storage for your servers.”
The Drobo B1200i:
“The Drobo B1200i is optimized for Small and Medium Business (SMB) IT to provide reliable, high-performance, and self-optimizing storage for server virtualization, email, and data protection. It integrates seamlessly into your TCP/IP network infrastructure and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide powerful, yet simple, consolidated storage for your IT environment.”
A great thing about the Drobo B1200i is that it can filled with SSD’s. This can be done by using 3,5″ OCZ Talos SSD’s or you could use a bracket for 2,5″ SSD’s. To be able to give your I/O consuming application the boost it needs you can add SSD’s and use BeyondRAID to easely setup a superfast datastore. Speaking of BeyondRAID, let’s dive into that feature a little more.
BeyondRAID:
Traditional SAN storage uses different kind of RAID levels. RAID levels 0,1,5,6,10,50 and 60 are most commonly in the SAN these days. Where enterprises often have a team of Storage administrators/Specialists to take care of the complex Storage environments (including the RAID levels), SMB’s most of the time have one or two system administrator’s that take care of the whole IT infrastructure (including the Storage environment).
Drobo created BeyondRAID to overcome the complexity of a Storage environment. Things like changing a LUN from RAID5 to RAID6, expanding a LUN and debilitated state after a drive failure are overcome by BeyondRAID. By providing an easy to use webinterface every IT-administrator is able to create and manage a Drobo.
BeyondRAID vs. RAID
Veeam Backup and Replication v6
Veeam Backup and recovery is developed specifically for virtual enironments, and with v6 it supports both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. With features like:
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Scalability: provides the oppertunity for multiple proxy servers (data movers). Dynamically assign VM’s to a proxy server and intelligent load balancing.
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2-1 backup & replication: Offers backup and replication in a single solution with one price point
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De-duplication and Compression: Cuts backup storage requirements up to 75% by compressing backup and network traffic and eliminating duplicate blocks of data.
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Agentless: There are no agents for you to license or deploy, manage, monitor or update on hosts or VMs.
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Synthetic Full Backups: Takes previous full and incremental backups to make a new full backup recovery point without duress on primary storage.
Veeam Backup and Replication v6 is one of the leading backup and recovery software suites in the field.
Bringing it all together:
Currently if you buy 2 B800i’s or 1 B1200i you will get a FREE Veeam Essential Standard Edition (2 Socket license). And as told by combining these very powerfull and industry leading products the SMB will be able to deliver the performance needed for their environment with and be able to backup, replicate and restore using a an easy to use but incredible solution. Veeam and Drobo are a match made in heaven for the SMB.
Ps. For people using Drobo (or other Storage devices) at home and thinking of buying another one…. Just hold your horses and wait for a month or two…. During the event Drobo took us Back to future, and believe me it’s looking great ;-P
by Arjan | May 9, 2012 | Storage Field Day 2012, Storage Field Days
In the last week of April I was in San Jose to attend the Storage Field Day 1. The first presentation was done by Tom Isakovich CEO and founder of Nimbus Data. His presentation was on the S- and E-class products that Nimbus offers as well as the HALO operating System that’s build from the ground up especially for an all flash storage system. NimbusData provides an energy efficient, high density, multi protocol and scalable all flash storage system.
With the S-Class Nimbus has a scale-up all flash storage system, which combined with the Nimbus HALO OS can scale from 2,5 TB to 100 TB of pure flash. On the other hand the cloud-scale E-class Flash Memory System is the industry’s first fully redundant, mutiprotocol Solid State System which can hold up to 500 TB of flash. The 500 TB limit will be broken within this year though, for 1 PB+ capacity’s.
Sustainable Storage
NimbusData provides an intelligent and efficient 100% flash based storage platform that enables company’s to solve their storage performance problems and reduces the IOP / GB per tile ratio drastically. So the NimbusData products will boost your Storage performance, consumes much less power, is less sensitive to mechanical failure and comes with intelligent software that eases the Storage Management.
Source (Website NimbusData):
Multiprotocol Storage
NimbusData provides ISCSI, Fibre Channel, Infiniband, NFS and CIFS support through it’s HALO OS within one system. This gives Nimbus an advantage as it integrates into the common infrastructures and already supports the future ones.
The Nimbus HALO Operating System
Nimbus created the HALO OS to be a software suite that provides end-to-end administration, optimalization, security and protection of data, and detailed monitoring of the storage system. By building the software special for an all flash memory system the HALO OS maximizes the lifespan of the flash memory and the capacity of the system, while it reduces TCO. Providing inline deduplication, thin provisioning, snapshots, encryption and replication through the GUI and the CLI interfaces complete the Nimbus system.
The Nimbus HALO OS
Build your own SSD
To be not just another flash storage vendor Nimbus makes sure they have one of the cards on their sleeve: making their own Solid State Drives. This has quite a few advantages. One is being able to create a 1 TB (800 GB netto) 2.5″ SSD and another is that with this they are not bound to any SSD vendor to produce updates and bigger/faster SSD’s.
a Nimbus Enterprise 800 GB netto Flash Drive
Ebay, Nimbus and Virtualization
Question is: Is this already being used? And if yes, how does it perform?
Ebay bought more then a 100 TB of the Nimbus E-class for the right performance on their VMware vSphere Infrastructure. The requirements eBay had were clear and simple: Tight integration with VMware vSphere, ISCSI connectivity over 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Ease of administration and inline deduplication to reduce storage capacity requirements. The fact that Nimbus could address all these requirements, and more, meant eBay made the choice to go for the Nimbus solution.
“The scope and scale of the eBay platform requires technology solutions that help us innovate faster and deliver outstanding results to our users, both internally and across eBay.com. Nimbus’ S-class solid state storage system delivers exceptional performance and response time that was not possible before with traditional disk-based systems,” stated Michael Craft, Manager, QA Systems Administration. “Most impressively, Nimbus delivered a solution based entirely on flash memory, not a hybrid approach, at a price point comparable to primary disk arrays and with no software licensing fees to boot.”
Link to the Press release: click here
Mitsubishi Power Systems implementing SAP
Mitsubishi Power Systems was struggling with persistent performance challenges that compromised Mitsubishi’s ERP deployment. While legacy high end disk arrays couldn’t address this challenge, the Nimbus S-Class system has proven itself as the perfect match in both performance and ease of administration. The Nimbus Flash Memory storage system provided the following advantages:
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A reduction from 4 hours to 1 hour of the SAP SQL server database load time
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Reduce the backup time from 2 hours to 20 minutes
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Complete the SAP SQL server database backups well within the required time window
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Increase and improve the end user experience and adoption for SAP
“The Nimbus S-Class system significantly increased performance in our SAP and SQL environment by relieving unacceptable IO bottlenecks that hampered our production ERP installation,” stated Matt Wattles, Enterprise Infrastructure Architect of Mitsubishi Power Systems Americas. “The S-Class delivers very low latency and rock-solid reliability that will continue to benefit our organization as we expand our infrastructure to include more IO-intensive database and virtualization solutions.”
Link to the Press release: click here
Conclusion
Nimbus shows that storage systems filled with all flash modules is not something for the future, but that it is already here. The E- and S-Class systems are ready to take an organization to the next level, by providing a scale-up as well as an scale-out storage system managable by a software suite that provides detailed monitoring, administration data protection, optimalization and security and intelligent storage management suite.
Photos
Video’s of the Storage Field Day Presentation
Part 1 Tom Isakovich CEO/Founder Nimbus Data
Part 2 Tom Isakovich CEO/Founder Nimbus Data
Links on Nimbus and TechfieldDay
TechFieldDay Website: Link
Nimbus Website: Link
Hans de Leenheer’s view on Nimbus: Link
Storage Field Day 1 The Links Website: Link
by Arjan | May 2, 2012 | Twitter
The last couple of days I’ve been getting multiple DM’s of people and companies following me with the following content:
Over the last 3 days I’ve received 12 of these DM’s. I made this blogpost to help you solve this problem.
- First go to the twitter website and log into your account
- Second go to the settings of your account (see picture below)
- Third go Password, and put in you Current Password and Twice your New password:
- Make sure you’ll use a very strong Password with both upper- and lower-case letters, inclusion of one or more numerical digits and inclusion of special characters, e.g. @, #, $ etc.
This will solve the problem, and shows that you need to know what to open and what to delete or dismiss when you get a message. As with email and other social media twitter is sensitive for spammers and other scammers. So be careful.
BeyondRAID vs. RAID
