Storage Networking Design and Management

Day 1
Application Classification
Work group,

Enterprise

Externally networked

Drivers for Storage Purchase

Capacity

Infrastructure SW

Performance segments
Ease of management

Availability

Throughput

Heterogeneous connectivity and inter operability

Business Value Analysis

Total Cost

Direct Cost
CAPEX

OPEX

Indirect Cost
TCO

ROI

BEP (pay back period)

NPV

Methodology to perform Business value analysis

Savings

Business cost savings

Capital cost savings

Operational cost savings

Requirements Analysis
FR

NFR

Goal vs. NFR

SMART

Storage metrics

Capacity

IOPS

Response time

RAID effects and disk potential

Metrics for SAN

SAN Quality of Connection

Availability

Path minute of performance degradation Scalability

Bandwidth
Connectivity

Class of service 1 to 5

Case study for Business value analysis

Day 2
Overview of SCSI & its limitations

Fibre channel introduction

15 mil devices

eliminating distance limitations

FC components
Port type

basic topology

FC layers
FC4

upper layer protocol mapping (SCSI commands, SCSI data SCSI sense
information)
FC3

thin layer
FC2

FC Frames
SOF

Frame header

Payload

CRC

EOF
FC addressing
Domain id

Area Id

Port Id

Flow control
Exchanges

Sequences

Frames

FC1

Encoding

Decoding

Ordered States
FC0

data transmission

copper vs. optical

Optical
SM

MM
FC theory of operations

Login

Name server

FC controller

FLOGI

PLOGI

PRLI

BB credit

EE credit

FSPF

Class of service

Importance of domain id and principle switch

FAN in and Fan out

ISL

Trunking
Types of trunking

Error detection and recovery

SAN Design Principles

Keeping the topology simple

Switch characteristics, low port count/fabric, selection of principle

switch

Physical and logical tiers

Fabrics
Balanced
Mirrored

Application specific

ISL lay out

over subscription

computing % utilization of ISL (remember protocol overheads)

Cabling sparing and other best practices

Host - storage connectivity for HA and performance

SAN security

Defense in depth

port zoning

LUN masking

port, switch wide and fabric wide security settings

Host based security settings

Day 3
What is NAS

NAS integrated vs. Gateway

decision points
Components in a integrated and Gateway solution

NAS storage sizing

Application layer
CIFS

CIFS uses TCP

CIFS based on SMB used in Windows

NFS

NFS uses UDP

NFS in UNIX

Transport layer protocols

TCP - connection oriented stateful

UDP - stateless

Ports

logical constructs

Network and Data layer

Switches

routers

Collision domain

Gateway devices

NAS performance
Bandwidth
latency

Causes of latency - 7 reasons

Gigabit Ethernet

MTU

Jumbo frame

end to end support

Ethernet Errors

Causes for retransmission

Network errors
NETSTAT

Network settings for speed duplex

TCP Windows scaling setting

SACK

NAS Security
ACL

Permissions

ACE

LDAP

AD

NIS,

Firewalls
Kerberos

iSCSI
iSCSI initiator

NIC with Host SW

TOE card

iSCSI HBA
iSCSI implementations

Native

Bridged
TCP portal groups

iSCSI PDU

iSCSI frames

iSCSI ordering

iSCSI numbering

Discovery domains

iSNS

SLP

FCIP, iFCP architecture,

iFCP

FCIP

Day 4
Performance stack Application layer

Requirements to gather

Types of applications
OLTP

DSS

Backup

Email

ERP

e-Business

Application buffering

Databases
Implementations

SAN

NAS

Hybrid
Database Tradeoffs

Cost

Convenience

Performance
Database Views

Logical
Physical
DB file I/O profiles

Separating DB workload

Sequential I/O and parallel workload in DB

SAME methodology

Host layer
File system

Buffering

parameters

Raw partitions Vs File system

Fragmentation

Alignment

Volume managers

Host virtual memory

HBA, multi path

Std tools to collect performance data

Sar

sa

Storage layer
Backend

Distribution of I/O across LUNs

RAID effects (Read modify write for parity)

Plaids

Meta-LUNs

RAID optimizations

Cache

Cache read write

Cache mirroring

Cache flushing
High and low water mark

Email exchange case study

# drives need to support IOPS

# users / drive

Mail box size /user

Implementation
Design work book, Service implementation guide

Risk analysis

SEI risk paradigm

Migration challenges

Day 5
WBS
delivery oriented,
five level hierarchy

project

deliverable

sub deliverable,

Work package

activities
WBS - project plan

Testing
Unit test

Integration test

Functional test

Performance test

Acceptance test

Test should always have a expected result against which test is done

Proof-of-Concept and prototyping for all new and novel ideas

Project hand over check list

Storage management
SEI maturity of storage management

Initial

Repeatable

Defined
Managed

Optimized
Plan build and Run teams

Storage management tasks

Configuration management
CMDB

Audits
Partial

full audits

Change management
Change record

CAB

cWED

Analysing the impact of change updating cmdb after change

Incident and problem management

Root cause analysis for high priority problems

Capacity management
Capacity plan

Capacity database

Trend analysis

Availability Management
Single point of failure analysis

Cross function management issues

Resources
Advocacy

Measurement

Reporting

Test craft exam review