ApplyIT

PowerMax and Malware Protection

PowerMax arrays have great security and data safety features. That does not prevent malware within a server from writing encrypted/garbled data on top of good data. Enhanced processes, procedures, and tools for malware recovery are critical to business operations. PowerMax snapshots can help with rapid recovery after such a malware attack, providing many point-in-time options for business restoration.

Space Recovery

When migrating data from an old array to a new one, there are many tools to help. EMC VMAX provides a built-in tool called Open Replicator for Symmetrix (ORS), which can push and pull data to and from other arrays. This is a quick review of the benefits one customer has seen using ORS.

Moving Data

ORS makes the VMAX host ports look like a Windows server to other arrays in the SAN (EMC or not). The VMAX needs to be granted zoning access to the original devices on the source array.

Once the VMAX has proper access, the data can be pulled into new devices. The new VMAX devices are usually Virtually Provisioned (thin) devices, as VP devices are much simpler to manage both for capacity and performance reasons.

Recovering Space

As a part of the migration, the VMAX can look for empty areas on the source device. Since VMAX VP volumes allocate space in 768k extents, any aligned 768k of data that is all zeros does not need to be saved on disk, since reads from unallocated space always report zeros. By activating the zero detection with ORS, these extents of all zero data are never written to disk. The use of this relatively small extent size allows for a much finer-grained recovery than some other systems.

Customer Example

I have a customer that has been using ORS for a while to perform migrations. However, they were reluctant to use the zero detection. There was a concern that this was somehow not compatible with all operating systems (it is, always), or that it would otherwise present a risk to their systems. They did some testing in the lab, and became comfortable with the process. Then they tried it in production. Now they can’t get enough of this technology.

Here are their results. For the next 25 servers that they migrated, there was 20.4TB of capacity on the LUNs they were moving. By using the ORS with zero detection, at the end of their move they had 11.7TB of data written on disk – and they had just saved over 8.8TB of capacity that had been all zeros. The graphic here shows the 3 largest systems (each over 2TB of source capacity) and the savings, as well as the overall results. In the end, they averaged over 43% savings by using the zero detection in their data migration.

What did I just buy?

When a company looks to build a major new IT system, they have a set of business goals in mind.  Mapping those goals to specific pieces of technology to acquire is not always the easiest thing to do.  This is a discussion of how EMC worked with one customer to take some of the questions out of what they were getting and increase the customer confidence in the final solution at the same time.

The Problem

This customer deals with continuous data feeds, both coming in and going out.  They need to have the data integrated into their overall information framework within very specific time windows.  They know how much data they need to be able to move - after all, they are in the information business.  But how does that translate into a storage solution?

They mapped their performance needs to a set of hardware requirements.  They took these requirements to multiple vendors, and they got very different solutions from each.  They have enough relationship with their vendors to know that all of the solutions would eventually meet the need.  However, it was possible that some were not going to support the full (planned) production workload with only the gear being proposed.  Price was the major factor in the purchase decision between workable solutions, and the vendors were well aware of this.  Might some be planning to fix things later with upgrades, or hoping that the planned workload would never appear?  (Customers have to consider this possibility, even if only causes them to do enough checking to 'trust but verify' - thus the pictured fake news clipping)

Better Oracle Performance in a Flash

Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) have made a big splash in the storage world over the past 2 years.  Many customers are interested in how they might apply this new technology to speed up applications.  And given a cost of roughly 20 times that of the same size 15K Fibre Channel (FC) drive, they want to be sure they can get a good return on their investment.  Finding the right targets to make that happen can be fairly simple.

The Problem

A retail customer purchased a set of 8 EFDs with a new array.  They had a few systems that were critical to their overall operations that they were hoping to improve.  The business would get the most value from an improvement in the PeopleSoft HR batch runs, ensuring that payroll computations were completed on time.  They had upgraded to new HP-UX servers, and found that they were now usually waiting for disk I/O.

The systems had been running on a CLARiiON CX3 array with dedicated groups of 15K FC drives.  They were to be moved to a new Symmetrix DMX-4 which had the EFDs.  The natural discussion was what data to place on this valuable EFD space.

Big Warehouse, Small Backup

This customer has a data warehouse that drives internal research and is sold to external customers.  The data needs to be accurate and available at all times.  Their goal was a new storage architecture to maximize availability and data protection while optimizing operational complexity and cost.  We were able to help them meet those goals.

The Problem

The starting size of the data warehouse was 25 TB, which would increase by about 10% per year.  This was for 2 years of retained data.  Some data was available to load throughout the day, while other sources would provide bulk feeds during the night.  With 2 years of retention, the change rate for the database was under 2% per week.  In general, backups every few days were OK, since there was a separate record of all data imported into the system and the ‘current’ image could be recreated from even a few day old copy within a matter of hours.

The business required that the data be available, and that backups be able to restore the system to a point in time up to 1 year old (there had been times of some small feeds of errant data that were corrected weeks later, so prudence dictated that extended recovery be possible).  Given the value of the operational system, there needed to be space to perform a full restore while continuing production operations.  This would also provide for space to conduct quarterly testing of the restore processes.

Given the value of the data, the business was interested in the option of having two full images of the data.  This would allow for quick resumption of production operations should there be an environmental or other event at the primary location.  This was, however, a desire with limited funding, and would only be included if it could be accomplished without greatly increasing the cost of the solution.

Looking to the future, there would be business value in being able to extend the data retention period from 2 years to 5 or even 7 years.  The more the solution is able to scale at reasonable cost and without driving up complexity, the sooner it would be cost effective to keep the data active in the warehouse for a longer period of time.

Enterprise Business Restart

Recovering a single system after a disaster can be difficult.  Recovering hundreds is a mess.  Recovering them in a consistent fashion, so that their data dependencies are all correct, is a huge task.  And what if they run different operating systems?  There is an effective answer.

The Problem

This customer has over 1,000 separate systems that are critical to ongoing operations and are located in a core data center.  The systems are a combination of Mainframe, UNIX variations (AIX, HP-UX, LINUX, etc.), and Windows.  They use SAN and NAS storage (the Mainframe CKD over FICON I include in the SAN), with over half a Petabyte of unique data and various additional copies.  They have SAP and other systems that have data flowing between different them, often with different operating systems, with no easy way to perform data isolation (picture an interaction of web services, shipping, billing, and warehouse data and you get the general idea).  The customer wanted to implement business restart, with clear business requirements.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

There is value in having the data during any site recovery be as current as possible.  These are not public finance systems, so the value of a minute of data was not measured in millions of dollars, but it has real corporate value.  The goal was set to lose less than 5 minutes of data.

The Fastest I/O

The fastest I/O is the one you never do. By applying optimization, customers can dramatically cut the number of disk I/Os needed to run a database query. This is the story of one customer’s results from a 4-day EMC Oracle Assessment, and how they were able to avoid over 1 billion I/Os per day on a single database.

The Problem

The customer is a transportation company. They perform large nightly database updates. These updates have critical timelines for completion, so that the results are ready for use when other processes kick off in the morning. The updated data relates directly to the profitability of ongoing operations. 

The application had been running OK, though it used a lot of hardware (Sun E10K servers and a pair of DMX-4 arrays, duplicated for DR and linked with SRDF). Since the application was purchased from an outside vendor, the tuning options were limited. The customer had worked with the vendor on several occasions to optimize the nightly batch processing. Benchmarks were conducted. Extensive examination was done of the data model. It appeared that the database and application were about as tuned as they could be, and more hardware was going to be the only path to keep up with growth.