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Go from 0 to 8Gbps in 10 minutes with the HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit
by Jack Fegreus
2008-03-11
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Go from 0 to 8Gbps in 10 minutes with the HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit by Jack Fegreus 2008-03-11 |
For CIOs today, efficient and effective utilization of IT resources, both capital equipment and human capital, is a top-of-mind proposition. With regulatory-compliance demands escalating and labor costs devouring up to 70% of an IT operations budget, there is a near-desperate need to free-up funding for innovative process change. Making matters worse, CEOs judge IT by its ability to support a business response to a change in marketplace conditions. For a CEO, the value of IT rests in its ability to help gain a competitive edge, better serve customers, mitigate risk, or streamline key business processes: Challenges that often depend on acquiring and leveraging new technologies.
| openBENCH LABS SCENARIO |
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UNDER EXAMINATION 8Gb-per-second SAN Infrastructure WHAT WE TESTED HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit
HOW WE TESTED HP ProLiant DL360 G5 Server
Benchmark
KEY FINDINGS
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The key to reducing labor costs in the datacenter is the simplification of tasks so that administrators become more efficient and consistent when performing routine operations. In particular, a great deal of attention is now being placed on resource consolidation and virtualization. Moreover, synergy between virtualization and consolidation has made joint initiatives the premier way to reduce the cost of IT operations at a growing number of sites.
Through virtualization, the functions of IT resources can be separated from their physical implementations and logically managed as members of a small number of generic pools. As a result, the task of creating rules and procedures for utilization is much easier. What’s more, infrastructure virtualization opens the door to the use of templates for deploying operating systems and applications software, which helps to simplify and standardize configuration provisioning. This makes virtualization of systems, storage, and networks a holistic necessity and explains why three out of four large data centers were implementing server consolidation and two out of three were implementing systems virtualization in the Symantec State of the Data Center Report for 2007.
While the infrastructure acquisition costs for a SAN, which is essential for storage virtualization, are fairly similar to the acquisition costs of a comparable direct-attached storage infrastructure, SANs remain few and far between at SMB sites, where IT is no less under the gun to provide an infrastructure that is responsive to business needs. What has stymied the adoption of SANs at mid-tier sites is the infrastructure disruption and management complexity associated with storage networking. As a result, the benefits of SAN architecture have not widely spread beyond larger corporate data centers. The HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit, however, is positioned to radically alter the SMB IT storage landscape.
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| Creating a logical disk using the wizard is a deceptively simple matter of choosing a data redundancy level—RAID 0,1 or 5—a volume size and name. While seasoned SAN managers may be taken aback by such simplicity of this process, they will certainly be astonished by the performance of their creation. |
To mitigate the notion that either SAN adoption or a SAN upgrade to 8Gb-per-second technology will be a disruptive event, the new HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection portfolio of HBAs and switches introduce a number of new technologies that are critical to ensuring a long lifecycle for these devices. In addition to enhanced security and data integrity options, the new HP HBAs and switches all support the ability to virtualize multiple HBAs via N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). NPIV technology allows system administrators to create multiple virtual HBA ports that have there own N_Port IDs from a single physical Fibre Channel initiator with its own physical N_Port.
That support will play an expanding role to a VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI) environment, which is far more amenable to a SAN than a traditional operating system. That’s because the ESX file system, VMFS, incorporates a distributed file locking mechanism, which provides multiple systems with a consistent view of a shared volume’s contents. With the issue of exclusive ownership moot for VMFS datastores, and more importantly, the virtual disk images owned by virtual machines, a SAN becomes the ideal solution to ensuring the performance, mobility, and recoverability of virtual machines. The combination of superior bandwidth and the ability to represent an ESX server’s HBA as multiple virtual HBAs associated with VMs provides a long-term stable infrastructure for an IT resource-consolidation strategy built upon a foundation of resource virtualization.
No less important for SMB sites is the issue of simplified end-to-end device management. For IT in small SMB shops, the power to configure and manage all devices using a single unified GUI cannot be over estimated. For SMB sites, minimizing the number of administrators involved in a task takes precedence over minimizing the number of steps in that task. Along those lines, HP partnered with QLogic to pioneer the simplification of SAN management through a suite of wizard-based tools for the configuration and management of SAN HBAs and switches.
Now HP is upping the ante for SAN adoption at SMB sites with the introduction of a future-proofed 8Gb-per-second SAN infrastructure bundle that is valued priced at a level commensurate with 4Gb-per-second SAN components. The HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit includes all of the components required to create up to a 4-host SAN infrastructure with a connection to a single or dual-controller storage target. More importantly, the CD that comes with the kit provides a one-step installation that discovers the underlying topology, installs all of the drivers and services needed to leverage that topology, and fully optimizes the SAN configuration.
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| Having created our first logical drive—a RAID 0 10GB volume—we ran oblLoad, a benchmark that generates transactions in a simulated database pattern. Using 8KB reads, we processed more than 60,000 I/O requests per second without having performed any custom tuning on the volume. |
Once installed on a management host, the Simple SAN Connection Manager software provides an easy-to-use wizard-based GUI to manage all SAN components. Most importantly, when combined with an HP StorageWorks EVA or MSA array, the SAN Connection Kit’s management GUI provides a single end-to-end management interface for all SAN switches, HBAs, and storage arrays. Whether provisioning RAID storage tiers or zoning a SAN at a switch, a single system administrator can invoke a wizard to implement all of the steps needed to complete a task. What's more, the wizards ensure that all tasks are done correctly and optimally every time. As a result, the HP Simple SAN Connection Manager creates a highly automated easy to manage SAN that imposes very little operational overhead on IT staff.
For risk-averse IT decision makers at SMB sites, the new SAN components go beyond simply doubling the I/O throughput capabilities of 4Gb-per-second SAN components. The HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection portfolio provides significant new technology advantages to help ensure a long life cycle free of disruptive upgrades.
Making SAN adoption all the more compelling for IT at SMB sites is the announcement that VMware's ultra-thin hypervisor software, VMware ESX 3i, will be broadly integrated on 10 models of HP ProLiant servers and include seamless, out-of-the box integration of VMware virtualization capabilities with HP System Insight Manager (SIM). This will speed the adoption of virtualization via VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI), which is far more amenable to a SAN than a traditional operating system environment.
Virtual machine (VM) environments will further benefit from support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) within the HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit’s portfolio of HBAs and switches. Via NPIV, system administrators can create multiple virtual HBA ports for a physical HBA and monitor switch traffic for the virtual HBAs. In future releases of VMware, administrators will be able to zone a virtual HBA into a virtual SAN (VSAN) for a VM.
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| During initial installation, the Simple SAN Connection Manager had configured our host running Windows Server 2003 to distribute traffic optimally to each of the storage arrays over all available paths in our SAN. |
First Step to SANity
For an SMB site with its characteristically small IT staff, the installation—let alone the optimization—of a first SAN can be a daunting hurdle to get over. The trauma often starts at the first step of the first SAN installation: the gathering of all of the equipment, software, and documentation that will be needed.
First, there are all of the arcane Fibre Channel hardware components and options that will be needed for a SAN. There are questions of mode, diameter, and connectors for the cables. Once the cables are settled, the real fun begins as the newly appointed SAN administrator discovers that it is necessary to specify the proper transceivers in order to connect the FC cables to the FC switch.
Once all of the physical components are in place, there is the onslaught of configuration options for all of the various devices. Not knowing which options can be safely ignored or how settings on an HBA might affect settings on a switch can turn a routine event into an arduous task. With a myriad of unfamiliar options on topics from arbitrated loops to packet framing, the fear of possible errors can paralyze the most capable administrator and halt any semblance of steady progress. Is it any wonder that the initial complexity associated with the configuration and maintenance of a SAN topology has led many SMB sites to prolong the use of DAS technology?
In stark contrast to the build from scratch approach, the HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit contains all of the necessary components for up to a 4-host SAN:
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| Using 32 KB I/O operations with our oblLoad and oblDiskWrite benchmarks, we pushed full duplex I/O to just over 1.6Gb per second—about 840MB per second for reads and writes simultaneously. |
The full kit packaging makes physically connecting and preparing the SAN no more challenging than opening a box. The ability to offer a simple end-to-end boxed SAN solution dramatically rationalizes a SAN as a cost-effective SMB storage approach. Nonetheless, the real magic occurs when the Simple SAN Connection Manager software is launched on a host server.
Once a system administrator starts the HP StorageWorks Simple SAN Connection Manager application, the installation scripts literally discover and optimally configure everything necessary to start running a storage network. In our test scenario, we launched the program and waited roughly 8 minutes before being presented with our first option by the Simple SAN Connection Manager.
In just 8 minutes, all of the necessary drivers were installed and the HBAs and switches were configured. Even our host operating system was optimized for the configuration at hand.
8Gbps in 10 minutes
We were now ready to begin creating logical drives on our two HP StorageWorks 4100 Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA 4100). At this point, a novice SAN administrator can invoke a simple wizard and begin creating logical volumes that have the redundancy characteristics of RAID level 0, 1, or 5 arrays. The wizard then guides the administrator through the process of virtualizing the volumes ownership by offering a choice of servers to which the logical disk can be "presented." That's all that’s necessary to bring a virtual volume online to be mounted and formatted on a host.
Taking that path, openBench Labs created a simple 10GB RAID 0 logical disk; mounted and formatted the new drive on a ProLiant DL360 server; and ran our transaction processing benchmark, oblLoad, on the new volume. Using standard 8KB I/O requests, we were able to process over 60,000 I/O operations (IOP) per second on the HP Proliant DL360 server. Those results have profound implications for scaling up applications such as Oracle and Microsoft Exchange. Moreover, at that IOP level, we were reading over 500MB of data per second, which is greater than the throughput of one FC port on the EVA 4100 array.
With that one benchmark, we exposed the complexity of what had occurred behind the scenes during the initial 8 minutes when running the HP StorageWorks Simple SAN Connection Manager. The wizard had discovered our topology: one server, one HBA port on the server, two storage arrays, two controllers on each array, and two FC ports on each array. The wizard then configured the host operating system, Windows Server 2003, on our server with a Multipath I/O (MPIO) service that supported possible data paths for each of our two storage arrays.
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| The Simple SAN Connection Manager wizards also mask the underlying complexity of StorageWorks arrays when creating logical volumes. The details of the multiple disk “plexes” can be discovered by drilling down on the device. |
Thanks to that MPIO service, whenever we imported a logical drive from one of the EVA 4100 arrays, our OS would default to setting up I/O load balancing for that volume over all four possible paths based on shortest queue service time. We had done nothing to optimize our configuration, yet as our oblLoad benchmark demonstrated, SAN I/O was tuned like an F1 McLaren-Mercedes at the Grand Prix de Monaco.
As a result, we were easily able to reach full-duplex wire speed—8Gb per second for both reads and writes simultaneously—by using our benchmarks to read and write data using several logical drives distributed over the two storage arrays. This validates the ability to leverage existing storage devices to scale I/O in a well-balanced fashion within an 8Gb-per-second infrastructure. While our performance benchmarks underscore the value of the new HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit infrastructure as a platform for storage consolidation, the benefits derived from such a scalable SAN infrastructure border on the self-perpetuating. The data-intensive applications that drive the need for higher throughput are also the applications that benefit most from the introduction of the new SAN technology.
Services on our Windows server were not the only complexities that the HP StorageWorks Simple SAN Connection Manager optimally exploited and then masked. On both HP StorageWorks EVA 4100 arrays, the wizard presented a very simple dialog for the creation of RAID 1 disk arrays. This dialog entirely masked from the system administrator a much more sophisticated process. The actual data redundancy structures that were underpinning each of our logical volumes were mirrored multi-drive “plexes." Hidden from view, the EVA had created striped multi-drive structures in a storage pool. As a result, our simple RAID 1 volume was far more akin to RAID 10 than to RAID 1.
Even drilling down on the devices in a SAN is made enticingly simple by the Simple SAN Connection Manager GUI. From a clean and simple topological view, a SAN administrator can drill down and manage arrays, switches, and HBAs. More importantly for an SMB site, there is virtually no need to do that at any time. A novice system administrator can—perhaps should—work exclusively with the wizards and benefit from results that are characteristic of a perfectly optimized SAN.