Putting the T into CTO – the storage Holy Grail

In our busy & ever changing industry, I sometimes struggle to spend “enough time” working on the Technology bit of my role at Cobweb, but recently we spent the day in the Microsoft technology centre with a leading storage vendor looking at their storage roadmaps and talking cool storage detail. It’s an interesting time for storage vendors – not only are applications becoming less demanding on storage performance now, but there’s the entry of cloud services such as Amazon EC2 and the new announcements around the Microsoft Azure platform.

In the case of Cobweb, our storage demands are somewhat unique. We’ve traditionally been purchasing the fastest fibre-channel disk possible – 2 and 4GB FC disk with 180iops per disk are needed to run big Exchange clusters. We’re more than satisfied with our incumbent storage – it performs very well and the support and service from our vendor partner are excellent. However, to get the disk IO required for Exchange, even Exchange 2007 with lower disk performance demands, we need lots of disk and it’s a continual aim of Microsoft’s to lower the disk subsystem requirements of Exchange with each new version. Lots of disk consumes power, valuable rack space and usual requires capital expenditure.

So, as CTO I’m challenged and faced with a storage decision at a major cross roads in our path to Service Provider eliteness. Here’s my challenge - to find a storage platform that meets a balance of the following requirements;

a) It needs to be scalable as we’re well on the road to hosting 100,000 mailboxes now. I’m sure all storage can be piled high in the data centre, but with a ratio of one disk per 100 mailboxes, retention of several online backups, and the increasing popularity of our email archival services, this is an important factor is we’re not to have storage sprawl throughout our data centre.

b) Cost effective TCO –the important reality here is; support and maintenance costs, impact on operations time, data centre space and power consumption. Consider this from view point of hosting revenue – a full rack of storage contains ~180 FC disks, by comparison a 42u rack in a data centre can run 20-40 servers. The more disks we can get in a rack the better really. BTW, we don’t have a need for a storage management team now as everything is full taken care of by a very comprehensive support contract – maintenance, upgrades, new installs, patching, performance management etc. Failed disks are swapped within SLA on a 24/7 basis without our involvement – I wouldn’t have it any other way.

c) Versatility to offer a mix of capacity and performance demands. We still need uber-fast storage for SQL, CRM and some Exchange databases, but also need bigger capacity disks for ever increasing customer mailboxes. We also need huge capacities for disk based backups and email archival. Consider that some of this will be copied/replicated off site & across data centres also.

d) Enterprise-class solutions only need apply. This means SAS for performance 24/7 services. SATA may be ok for the slower volume services but not for our Enterprise services.

Now the dilemma. The business case for an enterprise storage platforms is not that hard to write. Our storage has been second to none for the last 3 years – money (lots of) well spent really. However, those business cases don’t look so rosy when challenge by a $/GB cloud based service. While this has got me considering my options, the vendors are equally challenged at the moment. In talking to Cobweb, it seems that vendors are confused by their own storage roadmaps and offerings as much as the Enterprise consumers are – we’ve been offered solutions from multi-million dollar solutions with 1000+ fibre channel SCSI disk to cloud platforms technology that we’d host ourselves but is only really suitable for high-latency consumer services like Flickr. I think I’m looking for the Holy Grail of storage platform – something that can do everything, is low cost & low footprint, and is available today.

For the moment it comes down to this - we’re evaluating a number of technologies from different vendors at the moment and concentrating on our two main needs; fast Hosted Exchange storage and volume storage for backup/archival. Most of them are much the same to be honest – disk IO is IO and that’s a fact, we can test this with JetStress and see how the disks actually perform. In the world of 64-bit Exchange the scalability of our platforms comes down to the IO of the disk and capacity for all those 2GB mailboxes! Every increasing disk capacities are helping here with support for 300GB-600GB SCSI become available from most vendors now.

Back to that business case - we’re looking at how as a provider of cloud-computing/hosted/managed/online/service-provider services we can become a consumer of cloud services and benefit from the easy setup, always on, low cost services that these cloud guys talk about.

I’ll let you know how I get on!

Dan

Comments

[santana]

Good tips, thanks.:)