Introduction to Storage Devices
Is This for You? The Storage Devices document set is written to meet the requirements of information technology (IT) professionals who are responsible for the planning, design, deployment and operations of storage services in the enterprise, corporate, or branch office environments. The readers of this document set are expected to have an understanding of its technical details; however, service-level expertise is not needed to follow the enterprise-level discussions and to understand the decisions that are made.
On This Page
 | Introduction |
| Blueprint |
| Planning Guide |
| Build Guide |
| Operations Guide |
Introduction
The need for storage management is driven by the nature of an organization's business, and is often affected by a number of historical and geographical factors. An organization that has existed for a number of years has most likely experienced several changes in the technology landscape, either through evolution or mergers and acquisitions. An organization may also spread across a number of locations with different functions and unique requirements. All organizations will have some core storage goals, including:
| • | Timely availability of quality business data where it is needed. |
| • | Minimized total cost of ownership (TCO). |
| • | Scalability in alignment with business requirements. |
Hidden within these three needs are an array of subordinate requirements, such as zero data-loss, 24x7 operation, effective utilization of resources, and interoperability. The Storage Architecture Blueprint identifies three potential architectural designs, and also provides the evaluation process for determining the overall storage requirement that the architectures are expected to meet. The next step toward completing the design, and thereby fulfilling the business need, is to understand the various design steps required for implementing each of the following three main storage technologies:
| • | Direct attached storage (DAS) |
| • | Network-attached storage (NAS) |
| • | Storage area network (SAN) |
The design steps needed to design, plan, build and operate a reference architecture for DAS, NAS and SAN technologies are explained in detail in the Storage Devices Implementation Guides. The following references can be used to find additional information about storage devices used in our scenarios:
| • | Additional information about Windows Server 2003, including the latest updates, can be found at the following URL: |
| • | Specific information on storage services in Windows Server 2003 is available at the following URL: |
| • | For additional information on the Brocade SAN Fabric components see the following URL: |
| • | For additional information on the EMC SAN storage components see the following URL: |
Blueprint
The storage technology designs presented in this blueprint provide a high-level overview of storage technologies that can serve as a starting point for designing a storage architecture to support your business requirements in the real world. The WSSRA used some of these storage components in the test labs. Solution designers need to carefully weigh the tradeoffs involved in meeting the storage requirements for different enterprise applications. Lower TCO, higher availability, strong security, superior scalability, and simplified management can be achieved through a proper mix of DAS, NAS, and SAN technologies.
| • | Service design |
| • | Logical design |
| • | Physical design |
Planning Guide
This guide provided a detailed breakdown of the various storage solutions used in our scenarios. For completeness, sections for the SBO scenario have been included to explain the fact that the scenario consisted of workstations only and did not require a server-based solution at the local site.The CDC scenario required both DAS and SAN solutions. To explain the SAN solution, the overall system was broken down into the following constituent components:
| • | SAN Fabric |
| • | SAN Enterprise Storage |
| • | SAN Data Center Storage |
To meet all SAN fabric requirements, each fabric in the SAN was built with eight Brocade SilkWorm 3800 switches in a core-edge topology. This design allowed growth to 72 user ports per fabric (totaling to 144 user ports) without using additional switches to meet the scalability requirement. Fabrics A and B were resilient, containing 4 Gbps trunk groups to meet both the SAN availability and performance requirements on a price per port basis. The SAN host nodes consisted of File servers, Print servers, DHCP/WINS servers, and clustered SQL Server 2000 hosts running Windows Server 2003. The HP eva5000 was selected to provide storage for each of the enterprise services designated in the CDC infrastructure. The eva5000 provided continuous service during each of the test passes, and the centralized management functions of the SAN appliance proved to be invaluable for storage management. Each server was configured with dual redundant HBAs running HP Secure Path software, which provided fault tolerance and high availability. This solution was easy to configure and reconfigure with each test pass; it also satisfied all of the requirements for the CDC design. The SAN data center storage design used two EMC CLARiiON CX600s and EMC Navisphere and PowerPath software for storage management. This configuration resulted in highly available, fully redundant, and dynamic data center storage with no single point of failure, ensuring that the SQL Server data was secure and constantly available.
Finally, an HP ESL 9326DX HP was used to provide LAN-free backups of Snapshot LUNs for these SAN-based services.
Build Guide
For an enterprise-class storage solution there is likely to be a large number of technologies used to provide the required functionality and storage volumes. For WSSRA, Microsoft, Brocade, HP and EMC have all worked together to provide storage solutions that demonstrate the power and flexibility available in modern storage solutions. It is likely that organizations will use differing storage architectures and technologies, as most organizations will already have solutions in place. However, it is important to establish standard storage architectures and a standard approach to the varying storage technologies to ensure the maximum business benefit is obtained. The guidance provided in this guide is for implementing the storage solutions used in the test labs. The test team used this guidance themselves to create the lab environment prior to running the storage devices and services tests.
Operations Guide
This guide helps readers understand the extent of operations guidance that is available for the storage devices discussed in WSSRA. This guidance has been tested in a WSSRA environment and the project team deferred to this guidance as the authoritative source of operations content.