TechEd 2013 Revelations for Storage Vendors as the Future of Storage lies With Windows 2012 R2

Imagine you’re a storage vendor until a few years ago. Racking in the big money with profit margins unseen by any other hardware in the past decade and living it up in dreams along the Las Vegas Boulevard like there is no tomorrow. To describe your days only a continuous “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” will suffice.

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Trying to make it through the economic recession with less Ferraris has been tough enough. Then in August 2012 Windows Server 2012 RTMs and introduces Storage Spaces, SMB 3.0 and Hyper-V Replica. You dismiss those as toy solutions while the demos of a few 100.000 to > million IOPS on the cheap with a couple of Windows boxes and some alternative storage configurations pop up left and right. Not even a year later Windows Server 2012 R2 is unveiled and guess what? The picture below is what your future dreams as a storage vendor could start to look like more and more every day while an ice cold voice sends shivers down your spine.

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“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

OK, the theatrics above got your attention I hope. If Microsoft keeps up this pace traditional OEM storage vendors will need to improve their value offerings. My advice to all OEMs is to embrace SMB3.0 & Storage Spaces. If you’re not going to help and deliver it to your customers, someone else will. Sure it might eat at the profit margins of some of your current offerings. But perhaps those are too expensive for what they need to deliver, but people buy them as there are no alternatives. Or perhaps they just don’t buy anything as the economics are out of whack. Well alternatives have arrived and more than that. This also paves the path for projects that were previously economically unfeasible. So that’s a whole new market to explore. Will the OEM vendors act & do what’s right? I hope so. They have the distribution & support channels already in place. It’s not a treat it’s an opportunity! Change is upon us.

What do we have in front of us today?

  • Read Cache? We got it, it’s called CSV Cache.
  • Write cache? We got it, shared SSDs in Storage spaces
  • Storage Tiering? We got it in Storage Spaces
  • Extremely great data protection even against bit rot and on the fly repairs of corrupt data without missing a beat. Let me introduce you to ReFS in combination with Storage Spaces now available for clustering & CSVs.
  • Affordable storage both in capacity and performance … again meet storage spaces.
  • UNMAP to the storage level. Storage Spaces has this already in Windows Server 2012
  • Controllers? Are there still SAN vendors not using SAS for storage connectivity between disk bays and controllers?
  • Host connectivity? RDMA baby. iWarp, RoCE, Infiniband. That PCI 3 slot better move on to 4 if it doesn’t want to melt under the IOPS …
  • Storage fabric? Hello 10Gbps (and better) at a fraction of the cost of ridiculously expensive Fiber Channel switches and at amazingly better performance.
  • Easy to provision and manage storage? SMB 3.0 shares.
  • Scale up & scale out? SMB 3.0 SOFS & the CSV network.
  • Protection against disk bay failure? Yes Storage Spaces has this & it’s not space inefficient either Smile. Heck some SAN vendors don’t even offer this.
  • Delegation capabilities of storage administration? Check!
  • Easy in guest clustering? Yes via SMB3.0 but now also shared VHDX! That’s a biggie people!
  • Hyper-V Replication = free, cheap, effective and easy
  • Total VM mobility in the data center so SAN based solutions become less important. We’ve broken out of the storage silo’s

You can’t seriously mean the “Windoze Server” can replace a custom designed SAN?

Let’s say that it’s true and it isn’t as optimized as a dedicated storage appliance. So what, add another 10 commodity SSD units at the cost of one OEM SSD and make your storage fly. Windows Server 2012 can handle the IOPS, the CPU cycles, memory demands in both capacity and speed together with a network performance that scales beyond what most people needs. I’ve talked about this before in Some Thoughts Buying State Of The Art Storage Solutions Anno 2012. The hardware is a commodity today. What if Windows can and does the software part? That will wake a storage vendor up in the morning!

Whilst not perfect yet, all Microsoft has to do is develop Hyper-V replica further. Together with developing snapshotting & replication capabilities in Storage Spaces this would make for a very cost effective and complete solution for backups & disaster recoveries. Cheaper & cheaper 10Gbps makes this feasible.  SAN vendors today have another bonus left, ODX. How long will that last? ASIC you say. Cool gear but at what cost when parallelism & x64 8 core CPUs are the standard and very cheap. My bet is that Microsoft will not stop here but come back to throw some dirt on a part of classic storage world’s coffin in vNext. Listen, I know about the fancy replication mechanisms but in a virtualized data center the mobility of VM over the network is a fact. 10Gbps, 40Gbps, RDMA & Multichannel in SMB 3.0 puts this in our hands. Next to that the application level replication is gaining more and more traction and many apps are providing high availability in a “shared nothing“ fashion (SQL/Exchange with their database availability groups, Hyper-V, R-DFS, …). The need for the storage to provide replication for many scenarios is diminishing. Alternatives are here. Less visible than Microsoft but there are others who know there are better economies to storage http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/ & http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/.

The days when storage vendors offered 85% discounts on hopelessly overpriced storage and still make a killing and a Las Vegas trip are ending. Partners and resellers who just grab 8% of that (and hence benefits from overselling as much a possible) will learn just like with servers and switches they can’t keep milking that cash cow forever. They need to add true and tangible value. I’ve said it before to many VARs have left out the VA for too long now. Hint: the more they state they are not box movers the bigger the risk that they are. True advisors are discussing solutions & designs. We need that money to invest in our dynamic “cloud” like data centers, where the ROI is better. Trust me no one will starve to death because of this, we’ll all still make a living. SANs are not dead. But their role & position is changing. The storage market is in flux right now and I’m very interested in what will happen over the next years.

Am I a consultant trying to sell Windows Server 2012 R2 & System Center? No, I’m a customer. The kind you can’t sell to that easily. It’s my money & livelihood on the line and I demand Windows Server 2012 (R2) solutions to get me the best bang for the buck. Will you deliver them and make money by adding value or do you want to stay in the denial phase? Ladies & Gentleman storage vendors, this is your wake-up call. If you really want to know for whom the bell is tolling, it tolls for thee. There will be a reckoning and either you’ll embrace these new technologies to serve your customers or they’ll get their needs served elsewhere. Banking on customers to be and remain clueless is risky. The interest in Storage Spaces is out there and it’s growing fast. I know several people actively working on solutions & projects.

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You like what you see? Sure IOPS are not the end game and a bit of a “simplistic” way to look at storage performance but that goes for all marketing spin from all vendors.

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Can anyone ruin this party? Yes Microsoft themselves perhaps, if they focus too much on delivering this technology only to the hosting and cloud providers. If on the other hand they make sure there are feasible, realistic and easy channels to get it into the hands of “on premise” customers all over the globe, it will work. Established OEMs could be that channel but by the looks of it they’re in denial and might cling to the past hoping thing won’t change. That would be a big mistake as embracing this trend will open up new opportunities, not just threaten existing models. The Asia Pacific is just one region that is full of eager businesses with no vested interests in keeping the status quo. Perhaps this is something to consider? And for the record I do buy and use SANs (high-end, mid-market, or simple shared storage). Why? It depends on the needs & the budget. Storage Spaces can help balance those even better.

Is this too risky? No, start small and gain experience with it. It won’t break the bank but might deliver great benefits. And if not .. there are a lot of storage options out there, don’t worry. So go on Winking smile

I’m Ready To Test Windows Server 2012 R2 Live Migration Over Multichannel & RDMA!

I’m so ready for the first Windows 2012 R2 preview bits. Yes that’s what our current setup looks like. Two RDMA capable NICs at the ready Winking smile … let the bits come. I’m pretty excited to test Live Migration over Multichannel & RDMA.

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We choose to get RDMA NICs for new servers and replace non RDMA card in host where there’s a clear benefit. By the way have you seen the news on the Mellanox ConnectX®-3 Pro Single/Dual-Port Adapters => NIC support for NVGRE is here people!

Still Need To Optimizing Power Settings On DELL 12th Generation Servers For Lightning Fast Hyper-V Live Migrations?

Do you remember my blog from 2011 on optimizing some system settings to get way better Live Migration performance with 10Gbps NICs?  It’s over here Optimizing Live Migrations with a 10Gbps Network in a Hyper-V Cluster. This advice still holds true, but the power optimization settings & interaction between DELL Generation 12 Server and with Windows Server 2012 has improved significantly. Where with Windows Server 2008 R2 we could hardly get above 16% bandwidth consumption out of the box with Live Migration over a 10Gbps NIC today this just works fine.

Don’t believe me?image You do now? A cool Winking smile

For overall peak system performance you might want to adjust your Windows configuration settings to run the High Performance preferred power plan, if that’s needed.image

You might do no longer need to dive into the BIOS. Of cause if you have issues because your hardware isn’t that intelligent and/or are still running Windows 2008 R2 you do want to there. As when it comes to speed we want it all and we want it now Smile and than you still want to dive into the BIOS and tweak it even on the DELL 12th Generation hardware. Test & confirm I’d say but you should notice a difference, all be it smaller than with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Well let’s revisit this again as we are now no longer working with Generation 10 or 11 servers with an “aged” BIOS. Now we have decommissioned the Generation 10 server,  upgrade the BIOS of our Generation 11 Servers and acquired Generation 12 servers. We also no use UEFI for our Hyper-V host installations. The time has come to become familiar with those and the benefits they bring. It also future proofs our host installations.

So where and how do I change the power configuration settings now? Let’s walk through one together. Reboot your server and during the boot cycle hit F2 to enter System Setup.image

Select System BIOSimage

Click on System Profile Settingsimage

The settings you want to adapt are:

  • CPU Power Management should be on Maximum Performance
  • Setting Memory Frequency to “Maximum Performance”
  • C1E states should be disabled
  • C states should be disabled

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That’s it. The below configuration has optimized your power settings on a DELL Generation 12 server like the R720.image

When don, click “Back” and than Finish. A warning will pop up and you need to confirm you want to safe your changes. Click “Yes” if you indeed want to do this.image

You’ll get a nice confirmation that your settings have been saved. Click “OK” and then click Finish.image

Confirm that you want to exit and reboot by clicking yes and voila, when the server comes back on it will be running a full speed at the cost of more power consumption, extra generated heat and cooling.image

Remember, if you don’t need to run at full power, don’t. And if you consider using  Dynamic Optimization and Power Optimization in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Save a penguin!

Shared Virtual Disks in Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Maximizes TCO/ROI

One of the great additions to Hyper-V in Windows Server 20012 R2 are shared virtual disks. TechEd 2013 is disclosing a lot of new and improved features and this is one of them!

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This single feature brings benefits to me I can use to solve business issues today:

Ease of guest clustering

How easy is it? Look at this:

New-VHD -Path C:ClusterStorageVolume1Shared.VHDX -Fixed -SizeBytes 30GB

Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName Node1 -Path C:ClusterStorageVolume1Shared.VHDX -ShareVirtualDisk

Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName Node2 -Path C:ClusterStorageVolume1Shared.VHDX –ShareVirtualDisk

That’s it, basically. No fabrics to extend to the guest, no vFC  needed. In simplicity it looks a lot like SMB 3.0. A major improvement.

To the guest the shared storage has become abstracted

With a shared VHDX I get mobility and flexibility I’m used to with VHDX files & virtualization. FC, iSCSI, SMB3.0, Storage Spaces, PCI Raid, Share SAS, it all doesn’t matter what happens to the underlying storage infrastructure when doing guest clustering in this way.That’s sweet!

Fast Backups

We have a lot of large size LUNs. 2-16TB. We want to virtualize all of these as the speed of backing up these large VHDX file  a LOT better than backing up a LUN with millions of smaller files. But when we need high availability we have to go for vFC, iSCSI and don’t get that benefit.  Yes we can also use SMB3.0 already gave us a helping hand (SQL Server guest clustering if you don’t or can’t do “Always On”) in some scenarios but it’s not the major storage deployment out there (not yet) AND we’re talking about file server workloads. Now with shared VHDX we can have our cookies and eat it to. Or better 2 cookies!

Conclusion

This just rocks. My live just got better and easier. So can yours. Moving to Windows Server 2012 (R2) is all that’s needed. For more information look here at Application Availability Strategies for the Private Cloud (Speakers: Jose Barreto, Steven Ekren)