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Data News

April, 2009

Compos Mentis
Sanity Speaks

In today's difficult economic times most everyone is trying to do more with less resulting sometimes out of necessity and sometimes because of business strategy. Unfortunately organizations are forced to cut costs including headcount. Because of this an increasing number of our customers are taking advantage of the professional services that Sanity Solutions has to offer. We have been busy hiring additional staff to perform these services, increased our training budget, and have been working with our customers and partners to develop and offer the services that our customers are requesting.

In addition to installations and redeployment of software and hardware our engineers are helping our customers to improve their current environment. As consultants we first seek to understand if our customers can use what they already own but make it better for their changing environment. What was a good intention when the product was originally purchased might not be the right solution after business needs have changed and we first attempt to understand this dynamic before recommending a new solution.

Recently we have been able to increase the performance, improve reliability, and possibly most importantly save our customers a lot of money by improving what they already own by a tweak here or there.

In the article below are just some of our new services that we are offering. I hope that you will find some of them of benefit to you and your organization.

Thank you for your ideas and your continued support.

Sincerely, Jason

Keep your Sanity with Our New Services and Assessment Programs

For the sanity of all of our clients, we are now providing comprehensive service and assessment programs. Our current offerings include assessments in Storage (performance, LUN creation, and utilization), Data Centers (power and cooling) and an evaluation of the CommVault Simpana technology and it's best practices. If you are looking to maximize your existing infrastructure, optimize your data efficiency, improve business outcomes, manage current storage technology or increasing capacity, the technology specialists at Sanity Solutions can analyze your current infrastructure and create a management strategy to meet all of your needs.

Give us a call to learn more about our services that will help your business run more efficiently.

Following Sanity's News and Industry Best Practices on Twitter

A great way to easily keep up with Sanity's free educational events, Sanity news and industry best practices is to follow us on twitter.
We will regularly post our events and other educational material available to help you keep up with changes and offerings within the SAN environment. Twitter id: sanitysolutions.

A Case Study: CommVault and Sanity Solutions Mesa County Strikes Gold with CommVault Backup & Recovery, Archiving and Deduplication Sanity Solutions Partners with Local County Government to Elevate Enterprise Data Management: Slashing Backups, Reducing Overhead and Retaining More Data on Disk Customer Profile: Mesa County, located in western Colorado, is home to more than 120,000 people in 15 communities. Previously land of the Ute Indians, the discovery of gold and silver drew many to the area and by 1883 Mesa County was created with Grand Junction as the County seat. As the largest metropolitan area between Denver and Salt Lake City, Grand Junction also serves as the region's banking center, healthcare services provider and retail trade center for Western Colorado and Eastern Utah. The population of the region is projected to grow nearly 23 percent by 2010, putting it in the top 10 percent of counties nationwide for population change. In serving this thriving area, Mesa County's IT department connects 1,200 users and 20 sites over a state-of-the-art fiber optic network backbone. The 25-person department ensures the well-being of various information databases and online tools, including an award-winning geographical information system (GIS) as well as a web-based, document imaging system for recording and maintaining all public records dating back to 1883. According to Jeff Sharp, network administrator for Mesa County, technology innovation is an undercurrent that runs throughout the county's operations. "We strive to make it easy for county employees, local businesses and residents to have accurate information at their fingertips," he explains. The Challenge: Over the past five years, Mesa County's production data has tripled, with 15 TBs of production data residing on 20 file servers. In addition to supporting the GIS and document imaging systems, the IT department oversees Microsoft® Windows®, Novell® NetWare®, Novell GroupWise®, VMware®, Oracle® and SQL® applications. The team also supports a data management infrastructure, including Xiotech® Magnitude® primary storage, Apple® Xserve® RAID storage and tape-based backup. As part of its overall data management strategy, the county traditionally performed nightly incrementals with weekly full backups of 6 TBs of mission-critical data. However, the team found that its legacy backup software didn't meet the county's data protection needs. Since backup and recovery efforts were coordinated among three network administrators, Mesa County also wanted to have a global view of the entire backup process, as well as centralized management with granular reporting to pinpoint problems and summarize overall status. The Solution: In March 2008, Mesa County approached Sanity Solutions, a Denver-based specialist in data management, backup and recovery, business continuity, security and infrastructure support. Having worked with Sanity Solutions since its inception, Mesa County turned there once again for data management expertise. "Sanity Solutions is a trusted partner with a lot of knowledge and hands-on experience," explains Sharp. "We knew they would help us elevate our level of data protection with a best-of-breed solution." Sanity Solutions realized the county needed an enterprise-class data management platform that integrated seamlessly with Microsoft, Novell and VMware environments. The county also required centralized management, granular reporting and cost-effective archiving. "After talking with Mesa County, we knew there were problems to solve beyond backup," explains Jason Cherveny, president and CEO of Sanity Solutions. "We felt CommVault was a great fit as it offered a whole data management strategy, with one technology and one interface for managing all their issues. "Mesa County briefly considered other products, but quickly came to the realization that CommVault was the best match. "CommVault could deliver a complete product suite, with backup, recovery, archiving and other functionality all built from the ground up to work together," says Sharp. "It made better sense from an ROI standpoint to invest in a more robust, intelligent, storage management solution." Sanity Solutions guided Mesa County's deployment of CommVault data protection and archiving, along with Overland's cost effective ULTAMUS RAID disk storage to house document imaging backups and archives. "Sanity Solutions served as the general contractor, playing a major role in coordinating the vendors and ensuring a seamless cutover," adds Sharp. "After two weeks of ‘oohs' and ‘ahhs' over the new CommVault console and feature set, we saw tangible proof of its benefits." The Benefits: With CommVault, Mesa County quickly alleviated its backup pain as full backups now run concurrently and finish well within the 48-hour window each weekend, enabling the team to perform nightly incrementals according to schedule. Moreover, the centralized management console makes it easy for the county's three network administrators to coordinate operations while working as a cohesive but independent team. The ability to generate both at-a-glance summaries and detailed reports is another big time saver, providing unprecedented visibility for troubleshooting, storage resource management and strategic planning. "Now, I spend about 20 minutes on Monday looking over reports instead of the six hours it took previously to oversee the process," Sharp says. "We now have the most intelligent, transparent and effective reporting and knowledge of our backup system." Mesa County also leverages CommVault's archiving module to move data from the document imaging system onto secondary storage, thereby reclaiming valuable primary storage space. As a result, the county now retains an archive of the system along with 30-days of full backups on two Overland ULTAMUS RAID 4800 general-purpose storage arrays. "Mesa County was able to migrate very economically from a monolithic storage architecture to a tiered approach with a multi-layer disk structure and much more efficient and scalable data management platform," notes Sanity Solutions' Cherveny. When Mesa County upgrades its Novell environment to Open Enterprise Server (OES), they will take full advantage of CommVault's deduplication capabilities to further leverage disk-based data management. With deduplication, Mesa County will be able to eliminate duplicate copies of files and attachments found in both its backups and archives stored on disk. "Our goal is to retain the last three to six months of backups and archives," says Sharp. "With CommVault, we'll be able to hit a button and restore any data, whether it resides on disk or tape. Thanks to Sanity Solutions and CommVault, we have an industry-leading data management platform that can keep pace with our rapid growth and take us into the future." ©1999-2009 CommVault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. CommVault, CommVault and logo, the "CV" logo, CommVault Systems, Solving Forward, SIM, Singular Information Management, Simpana, CommVault Galaxy, Unified Data Management, QiNetix, Quick Recovery, QR, CommNet, GridStor, Vault Tracker, InnerVault, QuickSnap, QSnap, Recovery Director, CommServe, CommCell and ROMS are trademarks or registered trademarks of CommVault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.

Podcasting For Your Data Management Success

Sanity will be hosting a series of five podcasts that address common best practices for data management in your business environment. Listen to our second podcast, Data Deduplication in Backup Architecture now, and stay tuned for future topics including:

• Encryption in the Data Center and Beyond
• Server Virtualization and Its Considerations
• Storage Virtualization for Your Environment

Already on the website best practices section is the podcast on Archiving and its Impact on Your Data Center.

The Storage Silo Dilemma

Take the guesswork out of your storage strategy
Written by: Chris Harrold

What kind of storage will best meet my needs? This question is a source of major concern for any IT operation and unfortunately there is not a "one size fits all" solution. The sheer magnitude of storage products in today's marketplace is staggering. A quick Google for 'storage manufacturers' produces a link to a page listing over 150 makers of NAS hardware alone. Just NAS! That does not even begin to count all the manufacturers of SAN, CAS, WORM, MAID, JBOD, and even good old fashioned hard drives that are in existence. No wonder then that even the smallest of organizations face an ever-increasing difficulty in not only identifying the right storage for their needs, but even simply differentiating the types of storage available.

This Sanity-Check article will dive headlong into the fray and help you decipher the storage lingo and determine what types of storage go with the needs that you have.
What are my options?
Dedicated storage systems in today’s IT world fall into 3 top-level categories:

1. NAS or Network Attached Storage
2. SAN or Storage Area Networks
3. Specialized storage like CAS – Content Addressable Storage or WORM – Write Once Read Many

In general most organizations will leverage one of the first 2 primary storage models. The 3rd silo is reserved for that information that is required to be maintained in its original format or so highly sensitive that only a highly specialized storage device can satisfy the requirement. This 3rd silo has seen a rapid growth in recent years with changes to the way companies must discover data, federal regulations for compliance, and more strict regulations on protecting PII (Personally Identifiable Information). We will be covering this 3rd silo in greater detail in a future Sanity-Check.

NAS Explained
The 1st silo of NAS storage was originally relegated to the sidelines in the storage world. NAS devices were seen as under-performing SAN wannabes that were designed only for extremely small organizations that could not afford or did not desire good disk performance. This perception has rapidly changed as NAS devices continue to push the limits of disk performance and make their mark on the Enterprise Storage space. The primary difference between a NAS and a SAN is in the way the data they store is accessed. A NAS operates as an independent file system that does not need any additional hosts or applications to provide the front-end access to the information it stores. In the simplest terms a NAS is an incredibly efficient file server without the server.

SAN Explained
A SAN, contrary to many users’ beliefs, is not a big array of disks. Rather it is a network, fiber or copper based, made up of clients and switches that interact together and provide an isolated path for storage related I/O. Essentially a SAN works like a phone switching system – the caller, in SAN terms the initiator, places a call which is picked up by a receiver, the target. Like a phone switch a SAN switch is configured with many ports allowing many lines to connect to each other. The storage device holds the data in blocks which are transparent to the storage array itself. This distinction between SAN and NAS is important for two reasons:

1. The data on a SAN is held in blocks logically grouped into a unit called a LUN (Logical Unit) – this means that the LUN can be accessed by any host connected to the SAN
2. The data on the SAN is stored in its RAW form and cannot be requires a connected host to interpret it

So which is right?
The consideration of which storage is right boils down to three fundamental questions that you must ask yourself:

1. What performance level is required for the data that will reside on the storage?
2. What infrastructure will be required or is already in place?
3. What is the cost?

The first step to take in determining which storage option is right for your organization is to analyze the stuff you want to store. Is it primarily the back-end to applications like SQL, Oracle, or Exchange? If so then you are definitely looking at some sort of SAN storage, either traditional Fiber Channel (FC) or iSCSI depending on the amount of I/O required for the applications. The simple rule of thumb is the higher demand on the application; the higher the I/O needed and the more likely you will want to look at a full-blown FC based SAN.

For a smaller organization, or even a set of lower tier applications in a large organization, an iSCSI SAN offers an excellent way to reduce the higher cost of FC SAN with the tradeoff coming in the performance. Today’s copper networks commonly operate at 1GB speed and with multiple interfaces an iSCSI SAN can easily approach the throughput capacity of an FC SAN. Unfortunately iSCSI does pay a penalty in overhead because it must convert block I/O into TCP/IP packet traffic and back to block I/O.

The pure NAS device really comes into its own in an environment where multiple users need to access files from a central repository. There are incredible variations in performance capabilities of NAS devices so a careful consideration of your needs is still required to get the right solution. For example there are “home NAS” devices that have Gig-E connectivity and can hold multiple terabytes, but if you are performing video editing from your NAS this will be woefully inadequate and the lack of any redundancy of hardware means you are putting your data at risk. Today’s NAS devices can perform file I/O operations over the network at near-local storage speeds in ideal conditions and in the real world of IT networks they perform superbly with many of them able to compensate for latency on the LAN through caching and high performance disk subsystems.

In considering the cost of your storage needs, there are a couple of simple rules. In broad general terms SAN storage costs more than NAS storage because of the additional infrastructure required for the SAN connectivity – FC Cables, switches and Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), the servers to connect to the SAN and the storage subsystems. However with the emergence of iSCSI SAN technology and copper-based SANs the cost to provide high-performance storage has come down considerably in the past few years. The price point of your storage decision is a consideration, but it is largely driven by the answer to the first two questions. If you need a full FC SAN because of the performance required, then the cost is going to go up – if you can sacrifice some performance you can drive costs down.

In Summary
Hopefully this article has given you some direction on determining your storage requirements and what considerations to take into account when identifying your storage requirements. With the sheer number of solutions available in the marketplace it can be a daunting task to make the right choice in your storage platform. While there are no “right” answers that are universal – these best practices and consideration apply to everyone and will help you formulate a sound strategy for your storage platform decision.

The Sane Choice Monthly Drawing

Anyone who registers for an event or requests to receive an information package will automatically be entered to win in the Sanity Solutions Sane Choice Drawing. You can also fill out this form and type the word "DRAWING" in the event code section.

Check back monthly to see what you could win!

New Technology Partners

Sanity is please to announce partnerships with DataCore and Elliptical Mobile Solutions. Both of these companies will enhance our already strong service and product offerings in order to solve all of your storage area network needs. If you have questions or would like product demonstrations for either company, please contact one of our sales representatives.