Author: Jason Blosil

Impressions from Cisco Live 2012

Jason Blosil

I recently attended Cisco Live in San Diego last week and wanted to share some of my impressions of the show.

First of all, the weather was a disappointment. I’m a native Californian (the northern state of course) and I was looking forward to some sweet weather instead of the cool overcast climate. It’s been so nice in Boston, I have been spoiled.

Attendance was huge. I heard something north of 17,000 attendees. I don’t know if that was actual attendees or registrations. But, it was a significant number and I had several engaging conversations about data center trends, applications, as well as general storage inquiries with the attendees.

Presenting at the Intel Booth

My buddies at Intel asked to make a couple of presentations at their booth and I spoke on the current status of 10GbE adoption and the value it offers. My two presentations were in the morning of the first two full days of the show. Things didn’t look good when only a few attendees were seated at the time we were about to start. My first impression seeing the empty seats in the theater was, “the Intel employees better make a great audience.”

Fortunately, the 20 or so seats filled just as I started with more visitors standing in the back and side. The number of attendees doubled the second day, so maybe I built a reputation.  Yeah, right.

Anyway, let me share just a couple of the ideas from my presentation here:

1)      10GbE is an ideal network infrastructure that offers great flexibility and performance with the ability to support a variety of workloads and applications. For storage, both block and file based protocols are supported which is ideal for today’s highly virtualized infrastructures.

2)      The ability to consolidate data traffic over a shared network promises significant capital and operational benefits for organizations currently supporting data centers with mixed network technologies. These benefits include fewer ports, cables, and components which mean less equipment to purchase, manage, power and cool. Goodness all around.

3)      There are a couple of applications in particular that are making 10GbE particularly useful.

  1. Virtualization – high VM density drives increase bandwidth requirements from server to storage
  2. Flash / SSD – flash memory drives increased performance at both the server and storage which requires increased bandwidth

After the presentation, I asked for questions and was pleased with the number and quality of questions. Sure, we were giving away swag (Intel t-shirts). But, the relevance of the questions was particularly interesting. Many customers were considering deploying converged networks or just moving to Ethernet from Fibre Channel infrastructures. Some of the questions included, where would you position iSCSI vs FCoE? What are the ideal use cases for each? When do you expect to see 40GbE or 100GbE and for what applications? What about other network technologies, such as Infiniband?

Interestingly, very few if any were planning to move to 16Gb Fibre Channel. Now, this was a Cisco show, so I would expect attendees to be there because they favor Cisco’s message and technology or are in the process of evaluating it. So, given Cisco’s strength and investment in 10GbE, it shouldn’t be a surprise that most attendees at the show, or at least my presentation, were leaning that direction. But, I didn’t expect it to be so one sided.

Conclusion

Interest in vendor technology shows is clearly surpassing other industry events, and Cisco Live is no exception. And each Cisco Live event continues to reflect greater interest from customers in 10GbE in the datacenter.

SNIA ESF Sponsored Webinar on Advances in NFSv4

Jason Blosil

Good news.

The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) will be presenting a live webinar on the topic of NFS version 4, including version 4.1 (RFC 5661) as well as a glimpse of what is being considered for version 4.2. The expert on the topic will be Alex McDonald, SNIA NFS SIG co-chair. Gary Gumanow, ESF Board Member will moderate the webinar.

The webinar will begin at 8am PT / 11am ET. You can register for this BrightTalk hosted event here http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/41389.

The webinar will be interactive, so feel free to ask questions of the guest speaker. Questions will be addressed live during the webinar. Answers to questions not addressed during the webinar will be included with answers from the webinar on a blog post after the event on the SNIA ESF blog.

So, get registered. We’ll see you on the 29th.

What’s the story with NFSv4? Four things you need to know.

Jason Blosil

Experts from SNIA’s Ethernet Storage Forum are going to discuss the key drivers to consider working with NFSv4. For years, NFSv3 has been the practical standard of choice. But, times have changed and significant advances in the NFS standards are ready to address today’s challenges around massive scale, cloud deployments, performance and management.

Join our host Steve Abbott from Emulex and our content expert, Alex McDonald from NetApp, as these SNIA representatives discuss the reasons to start planning for deployment with NFSv4.

Date: November 8, 2011
Time: 11am ET

Register for a live webinar. http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/35415

Everything You Need to Know About iSCSI

Jason Blosil

Are you considering deploying an iSCSI storage network, and would like to learn some of the best practices of configuring the environment, from host to storage? Well, now you can learn from an expert. The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum will be sponsoring a live webcast with our guest speaker, Dennis Martin from Demartek. Dennis will share first-hand expertise and actionable best practices to effectively deploy iSCSI storage networks. A live Q&A will also be included. It doesn’t matter if you have a large, medium or small environment, Dennis will provide application specific recommendations that you won’t want to miss.

When: April 21st

Time: 8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET

Free registration: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/26785

The SNIA ESF has several other web events planned for the rest of this calendar year.  Let us know what topics are important to you. We want to make these events highly educational.

SQL Server “rocks” with iSCSI – Emulex and NetApp tell why

Jason Blosil

The leading storage network technology for mission critical applications today is Fibre Channel (FC). Fibre Channel is a highly reliable and high performing network technology for block storage applications. But, for organizations that can’t afford single purpose networks or the added complexity of managing more than one network technology, FC may not be ideal. With the introduction of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), the ability to deploy your FC storage resources over a shared Ethernet network is now possible. But, FCoE isn’t the only available option for block storage over Ethernet.

Initially used primarily by small and medium sized businesses or for less demanding applications, iSCSI is now finding broad application by larger enterprises for mission critical applications. Some of the drivers for increased iSCSI adoption in the enterprise include lower cost for 10Gb Ethernet components as well as the drive toward cloud based infrastructures which benefit from increased flexibility and scalability associated with IP network protocols.

On February 24th, the SNIA Ethrnet Storage Forum will present a live webcast to discuss the advantages of iSCSI storage for business applications and will show test results demonstrating the performance of SQL Server deployed with 10GbE iSCSI. Hosted by Gary Gumanow, co-chair of the iSCSI SIG and ESF board member, this presentation will include content experts from Emulex and NetApp along with a live Q&A.

Guest Speakers

Steve Abbott – Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Emulex

Wei Liu – Microsoft Alliance Engineer, NetApp

Data & Time: February 24th, 11am PT

Register today at http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/25316

SNIA ESF

The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum is dedicated to educating the IT community on the advantages and best use of Ethernet storage. This presentation is the first in a series of marketing activities that will primarily focus on data center applications during the calendar year 2011.

Ethernet and IP Storage – Today’s Technology Enabling Next Generation Data Centers

Jason Blosil

I continue to believe that IP based storage protocols will be preferred for future data center deployments. The future of IT is pointing to cloud based architectures, whether internal or external. At the core of the cloud is virtualization. And I believe that Ethernet and IP storage protocols offer the greatest overall value to unlock the potential of virtualization and clouds. Will other storage network technologies work? Of course. But, I’m not talking about whether a network “works”. I’m suggesting that a converged network environment with Ethernet and IP storage offers the best combined value for virtual environments and cloud deployments. I’ve written and spoken about this topic before. And I will likely continue to do so. So, let me mention a few reasons to choose IP storage, iSCSI or NAS, for use in cloud environments.

Mobility. One of the many benefits of server virtualization is the ability to non-disruptively migrate applications from one physical server to another to support load balancing, failover or redundancy, and servicing or updating of hardware. The ability to migrate applications is best achieved with networked storage since the data doesn’t have to move when a virtual machine (VM) moves. But, the network needs to maintain connectivity to the fabric when a VM moves. Ethernet offers a network technology capable of migrating or reassigning network addresses, in this case IP addresses, from one physical device to another. When a VM moves to another physical server, the IP addresses move with it. IP based storage, such as iSCSI, leverages the built in capabilities of TCP/IP over Ethernet to migrate network port addresses without interruption to applications.

Flexibility. Most data centers require a mixture of applications that access either file or block data. With server virtualization, it is likely that you’ll require access to file and block data types on the same physical server for either the guest or parent OS. The ability to use a common network infrastructure for both the guest and parent can reduce cost and simplify management. Ethernet offers support for multiple storage protocols. In addition to iSCSI, Ethernet supports NFS and CIFS/SMB resulting in greater choice to optimize application performance within your budget. FCoE is also supported on an enhanced 10Gb Ethernet network to offer access to an existing FC infrastructure. The added flexibility to interface with existing SAN resources enhances the value of 10Gb as a long-term networking solution.

Performance. Cost. Ubiquity. Other factors that enhance Ethernet storage and therefore IP storage adoption include a robust roadmap, favorable economics, and near universal adoption. The Ethernet roadmap includes 40Gb and 100Gb speeds which will support storage traffic and will be capable of addressing any foreseeable application requirements. Ethernet today offers considerable economic value as port prices continue to drop. Although Gb speeds offer sufficient bandwidth for most business applications, the cost per Gb of bandwidth with 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) is now lower than GbE and therefore offers upside in cost and efficiency. Finally, nearly all new digital devices including mobile phones, cameras, laptops, servers, and even some home appliances, are being offered with WiFi connectivity over Ethernet. Consolidating onto a single network technology means that the networking infrastructure to the rest of the world is essentially already deployed. How good is that?

Some may view moving to a shared network as kind of scary. The concerns are real. But, Ethernet has been a shared networking platform for decades and continues to offer enhanced features, performance, and security to address its increased application. And just because it can share other traffic, doesn’t mean that it must. Physical isolation of Ethernet networks is just as feasible as any other networking technology. Some may choose this option. Regardless, selecting a single network technology, even if not shared across all applications, can reduce not only capital expense, but also operational expense. Your IT personnel can be trained on a single networking technology versus multiple specialized single purpose networks. You may even be able to reduce maintenance and inventory costs to boot.

Customers looking to architect their network and storage infrastructure for today and the future would do well to consider Ethernet and IP storage protocols. The advantages are pretty compelling.