Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
PROGRAM BSc IT
SEMESTER FIFTH
BT9003, Data Storage management
arrays use proprietary operating systems; others use embedded versions of the Windows or Linux network
operating system.
NAS has several advantages over a traditional file server. Some characteristics that make NAS attractive
to system architects are the use of open protocols for shared file services, ease of installation and
management, scalability, and high performance. The ability to install and manage NAS devices easily also
translates into lower operating costs. A file server may take hours, or even days, to get up and running in
its most basic form. A NAS system might do the same in minutes.
Another important advantage is that a NAS device does only file services. At first this seems like a small
thing, but it makes a difference when it comes to maintenance, performance, and uptime. NAS devices are
unencumbered by the extra capabilities that a general-purpose operating system has to have. Everything
that is not related to efficient file serving can be stripped out. There is also a lower chance that a nonstorage program will crash the system, because none can be installed. In the early days of networked
storage, there was a tendency for storage vendors to argue over which was better: Network Attached
Storage or Storage Area Networks. Both are useful for different applications and must be viewed by
themselves, not in opposition to each other.
Storage Area Networks (SAN) is not a specific technology. It has become so closely associated with Fiber
Channel that some people think they are the same, but they are not. A SAN is a storage system
architecture, and Fibre Channel is one way of implementing it. There are other technologies that can be
used to build a SAN. iSCSI is emerging as a way of creating a SAN without the expense and aggravation
of dealing with Fibre Channel. It uses the more common Ethernet and IP infrastructure instead.
The SAN architecture replaces the I/O channel bus common to technologies such as SCSI and ATA, with
a network. Whereas NAS is file storage on a network, SANs are a network architecture for storage,
capable of block I/O.
The storage bus architecture, developed for SCSI, suffers from a number of common restrictions.
Distance, address space restrictions, number of supported devices, and a one-host/several device
limitation make scalable, highly resilient storage systems difficult (and costly) to build and maintain.
SANs, being network-based, overcome these limitations. Maximum distance is measured in many
kilometers. Address space can be in the millions. The number of devices is usually limited only by the
address space. SANs are many-to-many systems and can easily support multiple paths between devices.
This makes SANs less susceptible to failures due to path failure.
engineered, it may degrade the overall availability specification of the director. A five-nines (99.999%)
available director will inevitably lose some nines if a marginal option card is introduced.
Because software virtualization products have been around for some time, it is tempting to simply host
one or another of those applications on a fabric switch. Typically, software virtualization runs on
Windows or Linux, which in turn implies that a virtualization blade that hosts software will essentially be
a PC on a card. This design has the advantage, for the vendor at least, of time to market, but as with host
or appliance virtualization products in general, it may pose potential performance issues if the PC logic
cannot cope with high traffic volumes. Consequently, some vendors are pursuing hardware-assisted
virtualization on fabric switches by creating ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) that are
optimized for high- performance frame decoding and block address mapping. These ASICs may be
implemented on director blades or on auxiliary modules mounted in the director enclosure.
Figure: A storage virtualization engine as an option card within a director should enable
virtualization of any storage asset on any director port.
secondary mirror is only brought into service if the primary array fails, or active/active, in which case the
secondary mirror can be accessed for read operations if the primary is busy. This not only increases
performance but also enhances the value of the secondary mirror. In addition, some vendors provide
mutual mirroring between disk arrays so that each array acts as a secondary mirror to its partner.
Heterogeneous mirroring under virtualization control allows mirroring operations to be configured from
any physical storage assets and for any level of redundancy. As shown in Figure 13.9, a server may
perform traditional read and write operations to a virtualized primary volume. The target entity within the
virtualization engine processes each write operation and acts as an initiator to copy it to two separate
mirrors. The virtual mirrors, as well as the virtualized primary volume, may be composed of storage
blocks from any combination of back-end physical storage arrays. In this example, the secondary mirror
could be used to convenience non-disruptive storage processes such as archiving disk data to tape or
migration of data from one class of storage to another.
Like traditional disk-based mirroring, this virtualized solution may be transparent to the host system,
providing there is no significant performance impact in executing copies to heterogeneous storage.
Transparency assumes, though, that the virtualizing is conducted by the fabric or an appliance attached to
the fabric. Host-based virtualization would consume CPU cycles to perform multiple mirroring, and
array-based virtualization typically cannot cross vendor lines. Because mirroring requires the completion
of writes on the secondary mirrors before the next I/O is accepted, performance is largely dependent on
the aggregate capabilities of the physical storage systems and the processing power of the virtualization
engine itself.
Figure 13.9: Heterogeneous mirroring offers more flexible options than conventional mirroring,
including three-way mirroring within storage capacity carved from different storage systems.
www.smuassignmentandproject.com
COST= 100 RS PER SUBJECT