A Guide to
Virtualizing Your
Information Infrastructure
Server Virtualization Block Storage Virtualization File Storage Virtualization
Table of Contents
Virtualizing Your Information Infrastructure with EMC
3
Manage More, Manage More Effectively
3
Things to Do as You Begin
4
Server Virtualization
5
Block Storage Virtualization
7
File Storage Virtualization
9
The transformative capabilities of EMC virtualization solutions allow you to increase the utilization of your information infrastructure and improve your availability and performance.
The EMC approach to virtualization distributes intelligence across all levels while centralizing the control and management of your entire environment. EMC technologies for virtualization include server, block-storage, and file-storage virtualization. Each area provides distinct benefits.
EMC offers a comprehensive set of products, skills, experience, and best practices to help you virtualize your information infrastructure:
• Advanced solutions for VMware help you get the most out of your virtualized server environment.
• EMC Invista and Rainfinity products help address some of the biggest problems associated with growth—storage system migration, load balancing, and planned outages. • EMC’s virtualization and infrastructure optimization
services can help you attain your goals faster and with less effort.
Virtualizing Your Information Infrastructure with EMC
Manage More and Manage More Effectively
Today, virtualization is at the top of nearly every IT shop’s “must-have” list as CIOs and data center managers seek to stem a seemingly endless flow of challenges including:
• Uncontrolled growth
• Sprawling servers and storage • Underutilized IT assets • Insufficient power availability • Skyrocketing costs
• Low ROI
• Excessive downtime • Inflexible infrastructures • Immobile data
As you move to virtualize your environment, you need to gather information about your infrastructure.
• Determine the utilization rate of the server enviroments. • Gauge the difficulty of making changes, deploying
new initiatives, and ensuring consistent and reliable service levels.
• If your company is undergoing, or has recently gone through, a merger or acquisition, determine how it will integrate distributed and redundant infrastructures. • Analyze the possibility of reducing facility costs by
eliminating excessive data center capacity.
• Determine if limits in rack space, power, cooling, or generator backups hamper the implementation of new IT infrastructure.
• Discover and catalog the tolerance for downtime when making infrastructure changes to each class of information used by different applications and business processes.
• Determine if your organization suffers from too much down time, business disruption, or insufficient service levels.
• Investigate whether the organization would benefit from a common method to manage storage across
heterogeneous storage platforms.
Things to Do As You Begin
Virtualization technologies can optimize performance and simplify information infrastructure management. The result is a consistent way to address today’s most difficult challenges, to free you from the constraints and
complexity of dealing with each individual piece of hardware. With virtualization, relief is at hand for CIOs and data center managers in the form of:
• Lower TCO
• Improved service levels • Simplified management • Platform independence • Improved flexibility • Higher rates of usage • Better availability
• Non-disruptive data migration
Optimize Resources and
Improve Flexibility
Server virtualization is sweeping through the IT industry with companies commonly deploying it for consolidation. There are other uses as well from application testing to disaster recovery to creating a pervasive virtual infrastructure for information systems across the enterprise.
EMC’s virtualization solutions use VMware, the leader in virtual infrastructure technology. VMware helps optimize resources and improve flexibility by providing server abstraction. This allows the management of applications and services to be decoupled from the physical servers that these applications need in order to run. This fundamentally transforms the traditional model by enabling you to support and maintain your applications independent of the server platform as shown in figure 1.
VMware enables much greater flexibility for managing your underlying hardware and provides dynamic provisioning of computing resources, increasing flexibility and utilization across server environments. To realize all these benefits, the VMware hosts must attach to a SAN.
Virtual servers are fundamentally different from physical servers. As a result, extensive use of server virtualization creates new issues and challenges for infrastructures designed solely for physical servers. EMC has identified key infrastructure issues arising in advanced VMware deployments. We have invested in a comprehensive set of product enhancements and services designed to help you fully exploit the advantages of server virtualization while minimizing the risks that jeopardize envisioned
virtualization goals.
The old way of meeting data center challenges no longer works. You can’t simply buy a box whenever a new application is implemented or a line of business requires a higher level of service functionality from an IT system. Without server virtualization, a traditional environment usually has a number of applications dedicated to specific server hardware. Maintaining and supporting the environment to meet growth requirements can become expensive and complex.
Server Virtualization
Figure 1: Before and After—Traditional Deployment and Deployment
with VMware Server Virtualization
Applications live on virtual
machines that share storage
and computing resources.
Storage Network APP OS APP OS APP OS APP OS
After
Before
Applications are dedicated to
specific server hardware.
These services enable you to decide how
and where to invest to maximize your return
on virtualization technology.
Our advanced solutions for VMware include:
• Storage optimized for advanced VMware deployments • Integrated solutions for backup and business continuity • Management solutions that work in physical and
virtual environments
VMware Services
EMC provides assessment and design services to: • Perform discovery and analysis of the
current infrastructure
• Align technology recommendations with customer business objectives
• Provide a business value impact evaluation • Develop design recommendations for the proposed
virtualization initiative
These services enable you to decide how and where to invest to maximize your return on virtualization
technology. EMC takes a holistic approach to infrastructure virtualization with designs that consider servers, storage, scale, security, backup, business continuity, networking, management, and IT best practices.
Block Storage Virtualization
With storage growing consistently at an annual rate of 40 to 60 percent, IT organizations are seeking ways to improve productivity and asset utilization, lower costs, and increase service levels. Many IT organizations leverage a tiered storage strategy to provide the right levels of performance, availability, recoverability, and cost points for a range of applications. While storage infrastructure tiering helps optimize resources, the ability to change storage systems without affecting application availability becomes a challenge. The requirement to migrate data as part of a
technology refresh can consume significant time and resources for both planning and execution. The fact is that most storage environments change frequently today—migrating data to a new device as part of technology refresh, adding new storage systems to accommodate information growth, and moving application data to balance and optimize
performance. Block storage virtualization, sometimes referred to as “SAN storage virtualization” enables you to make changes to any storage system on the SAN (storage area network) without impacting users or requiring downtime. That makes it possible to achieve and maintain optimal levels of performance, utilization, and availability.
Moving Data to the Right
Place at the Right Time
Block storage virtualization creates an abstraction layer between the physical hardware and its logical presentation to applications as shown in figure 2. This abstraction layer enables changes to be made to the underlying hardware without disrupting the application. This results in the ability to move, expand, or change the storage infrastructure while the application remains online. Users are no longer required to take an application outage when migrating applications between storage tiers or refreshing storage systems.
Key benefits of block storage virtualization include: • Reduced time and cost associated with moving data • Improved management of heterogeneous
storage assets
• More flexible and cost-effective data protection and copy services
• Increased return on storage investment and ongoing operational savings
Block storage virtualization also provides a common means for storage management across
heterogeneous storage platforms. This simplifies management and provides replication services that enable data protection and disaster recovery across heterogeneous assets. IT organizations deploying storage virtualization realize savings by simplifying storage management and reducing the time and resources required for planning and performing data migrations.
Virtualization of the SAN environment allows applications to access data from anywhere on the SAN by presenting virtual volumes that are abstracted from the physical storage devices. It enables simplified data access while providing nondisruptive data mobility to optimize resources.
Figure 2: Block Storage Virtualization with EMC Invista
Block storage
virtualization with EMC Invista
Virtual Volumes
Runs in the Storage Network
Invista
EMC Invista
EMC’s experience in managing the data path and designing high-performance, highly reliable storage controllers enhances our ability to design, build, and deploy a network-based, block storage virtualization solution. With port-level processing in intelligent switches and a highly scalable architecture, EMC Invista is well suited for deployment in enterprise data centers. EMC Invista increases the flexibility of your SAN storage infrastructure by:
• Moving data seamlessly and minimizing storage-related down time across multi-tiered, heterogeneous SANs • Reducing management complexity and simplifying
storage allocation in heterogeneous SANs
• Operating with a wide range of intelligent SAN switches and arrays with an open, standards-based solution EMC Invista runs on intelligent storage area network (SAN) switches, placing virtualization intelligence in your existing SAN infrastructure. Invista enables enterprises to achieve non-disruptive operations, eliminate planned downtime, and centralize and streamline storage
management. This high-performance, integrated hardware
and software solution delivers these benefits through the simple and non-disruptive movement, copying, and migration of data across multiple tiers of heterogeneous storage arrays. The benefits of EMC Invista are depicted in the before-and-after diagram in figure 3.
With Invista, you can migrate the data from one storage array to another over the SAN without affecting the availability of the applications. Invista allows you to replace old storage systems, add new storage systems, or leverage multiple tiers of storage—all without disruption or other effects on service levels.
EMC is an active participant in an industry-wide effort around network-based storage virtualization. We have developed Invista to run on intelligent switch platforms from the major switch vendors. What’s more, we have adopted an open, standards-based approach that writes to vendor APIs rather than requiring custom code for each supported switch platform.
We’ve worked with our SAN switch partners to give you the widest choice of intelligent switches. As a result, you can rapidly leverage updated hardware from our switch partners as it becomes available.
Figure 3: Block Storage Virtualization—Before and After
Before
All applications have dirrect knowledge of storage location
Multi-vendor storage arrays Storage area network (SAN)
After
Simplify volume access Nondisruptive mobility Optimize resources Multi-vendor storage arrays
File systems present a unique set of challenges that have made it difficult for IT to optimize and manage. Although very easy to use and set up, simply adding new file storage can leave environments with too many files in one file system and too few in another—reducing performance and resulting in poor utilization rates. Further, there’s no easy way to consolidate many smaller systems into more efficient larger systems without subjecting users to long periods of downtime and causing them to deal with new file and address changes that will be required. File storage virtualization addresses both of these issues by enabling file storage systems to be changed without downtime, and by transparently moving files (users don’t change their file name or address) throughout the environment to optimize the load—resulting in higher performance and better utilization rates.
Balancing Performance and
Optimizing the Environment
EMC Rainfinity Global File Virtualization (GFV) optimizes heterogeneous NAS and file server environments making them simpler to manage while dynamically moving information without disruption to clients or applications. Rainfinity GFV allows files on heavily used NAS systems to be transparently moved to other NAS systems with lower utilization, balancing performance and optimizing the
environment. In addition, multiple underused NAS systems can be consolidated into fewer NAS systems without affecting users or availability service levels. Figure 4 presents a before-and-after scenario with file virtualization. The underlying technology of file virtualization is based on the global namespace that provides an abstraction layer enabling end users to employ a logical name that is separate from the actual physical location. Rainfinity provides administrators with an easy-to-use management GUI to simplify namespace management, centralize the management of distributed namespaces, and automate multi-protocol namespace synchronization.
The advantage of the Rainfinity approach is that it is not constantly in-band and does not require proprietary agents to be deployed on every client machine. Rainfinity accomplishes this by leveraging industry-standard namespaces as a transport mechanism to automatically update client mappings. This includes Microsoft DFS and Automount for UNIX environments. Rainfinity can also leverage “home-grown” applications that perform namespace functions as well as login scripts.
File Storage Virtualization
Figure 4: File Virtualization—Before and After
Before
All applications have direct knowledge of file locations
Multi-vendor NAS systems Multi-vendor NAS systems File Sytems
After
Simplify volume access Nondisruptive mobility Optimize resources
=
EMC has the experience to put virtualization to
work for you. In addition to the powerful
technologies discussed above, EMC services are
in place to help solve your individual problems.
EMC has the experience to put virtualization to work for you. In addition to the powerful technologies discussed above, EMC services are in place to help solve your individual problems.
EMC Assessment Services for Virtualization: Provide a
review of your current server and storage environment and includes recommendations for improving that environment with consolidation and virtualization solutions.
EMC Design Services for Server Virtualization:
Provide a detailed design and migration plan for server virtualization based on the results of the assessment service and future business needs. Designs include
EMC Design Services for Block Storage Virtualization:
Provide a detailed design and migration plan for implementing Invista block storage virtualization based on the results of the assessment service and future business needs.
EMC Design Services for File Storage Virtualization:
Provide a detailed design and migration plan for implementing Rainfinity file storage virtualization based on the results of the assessment service and future business needs.
Infrastructure Virtualization Services
EMC Rainfinity Global File Virtualization:
• Optimizes your heterogeneous file system environment— including NAS, CAS, and file servers.
• Improves capacity utilization and performance
• Accelerates consolidation with non-disruptive read-write access during migration
• Reduces TCO and capital expenditures through tiering and more efficient use of existing storage
• Implements changes without impacting users • Simplifies management with a single interface for
monitoring data movement
Rainfinity GFV includes seven purpose-built applications that simplify management and optimize the efficiency, data protection, and performance of networked-attached storage.
Capacity Management: Finds and resolves capacity
issues; balances storage utilization.
File Management: Automatically identifies and archives
static files based on policies to streamline backup and recovery and lower TCO.
Global Namespace Management: Manages and
seamlessly integrates with standard namespaces to enable multiple filesystems to appear as a single virtual filesystem. Centralizes the management of industry-standard Windows and UNIX namespace services across distributed environments.
Migration and Consolidation: Enables administrators
to move files transparently, without affecting end users or applications. Rainfinity includes task-based automation that migrates the data, performs security ID translations, and relocates all file attributes—with no client or server reconfiguration.
Performance Management: Identifies and addresses
performance bottlenecks and hotspots.
Synchronous IP Replication: Synchronously replicates
selected directories between locations to protect critical data.
Tiered Storage Management: Uses frequency-of-access
More Guides from EMC
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• Automating Data Center Operations
• Accelerating Business Value for SAP Applications • Virtualizing Information Infrastructure
• Leveraging Content for Competitive Advantage • Securing Critical Assets
• Accelerating Business Value for Oracle Environments
Take the Next Step
For more information on specific ways EMC can improve the operation of your information infrastructure, contact your EMC sales representative, call 1-866-464-7381, or visit our website at www.EMC.com.
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© Copyright 2007 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 10/07
