John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

I spent an hour today with an Onaro customer and through the conversation learned a little bit about how different companies handle the separation of duties in IT processing.  I met with the customer to better understand the critical decision criteria that were behind his choice of Onaro, what features were most valued and what alternatives were considered.  Turns out, at the time of his decision several years ago, he didn’t see many alternatives.  Onaro, which was an independent software supplier at the time, was recently acquired by NetApp, a storage systems company.

This customer originally licensed Onaro’s SANscreen offering to ensure that the company’s IT change-control process was being followed in the storage network.  SANscreen maps the entire data path from the host bus adapter (HBA) in the server, through the cables and switches, ultimately to the storage array.  Anytime someone makes a change to the configuration of his fibre channel storage area network (FC-SAN), he gets a notification.  If the change hasn’t been authorized through the change-control process, he investigates.  As we were talking he showed me several alerts, that he had just received on his Blackberry, regarding changes that had not been authorized. (more…)

I’ve spent a good part of this past week getting ready for Storage Networking World, co-sponsored by SNIA and ComputerWorld, and the I’m-Not-Going-to-Storage-Networking-World event hosted entirely at his own expense by Jon Toigo at a nearby, but semi-secret, location.  In honor of the two events, I felt compelled to write about storage.  But first, I’ll start with a one-question qualifying quiz.

Small and Medium Business (SMB) Storage Administrator Qualifying Exam

Question: Your “storage system” consists of 25 disk drives that are housed in 8 separate database and file servers.  Some of your applications are growing rapidly and require a lot more storage.  Others are not growing. In total, you have plenty of available storage capacity, but it sits inside servers that aren’t accessible to the applications that need extra capacity.  You want to move to a storage area network, because you’ve heard that all of the storage will then be available to all of the applications and can be managed as a shared pool. You must accomplish the migration of data from the internal drives to a new, blazingly-fast, infinitely-scalable storage area network without interrupting application availability or data access, and without screwing up volume names.  From the following,  select the answer that most closely describes the correct approach: (more…)

Taylor Allis asked this question on his most recent blog post: “What is server virtualization’s impact on Storage?”  Here’s my opinion. But I’m interested in yours, too.

First, I think storage comes out of the server and into a shared pool. Some might say that’s a book-of-duh comment, but given the enormous storage capacity you can put inside a server today, why would anyone need to go external? Here’s the reasoning.  Server workload, virtual or not, is relatively independent of the storage workload.  By that I mean, running out of server resources to support an application has no implicit or explicit relationship to running out of storage resources (capacity or performance) to support that application.  If you need to move a virtual server from one physical server to another, because the physical server is running out of head room, there’s no explicit reason I should also have to move the data. There are some impediments, like unwanted down time, to moving data out of a server and into a shared pool, but one of our clients, StorMagic, has pretty much solved that problem with their non-disruptive data migration capabilities. (more…)