Strengthening iSCSI storage

The weather and sudden power blackouts are taking their toll all over the States in these torrid summer weeks. Case in point: the July 26 post of fellow blogger and Hitachi Data Systems CTO Hu Yoshida, which has the revealing title, “Sitting in the dark”.

Unfortunately, when the electric grid fails there is little that we can do to remain productive. Even if you equip your company with generators, the electricity those machines provide is limited and can support only critical circuits — and only for a short time, until the power comes back or the generator burns all the available fuel, whichever comes first.

If a blackout creates life-threatening situations (such as in a hospital), having adequate power backup systems is a priority. Otherwise, companies that want to maintain service during a blackout may find that having a backup site at a different location and linked to a different segment of the grid can be a more affordable and practical alternative to building a humongous private power plant.

Maintaining a remote site presents many challenges to keeping data and OSes in synch. Technologies such as mirroring, volume image copy, and remote boot can help. In fact, winBoot/i — a new product just released (or should I say re-released) last week by emBoot — can make preparing a remote boot environment for an iSCSI network easier and less expensive. More details on winBoot/i are here.

In short, the product makes it possible to boot a Windows server from an image stored on iSCSI volumes using plain-vanilla GbE NICs and Microsoft iSCSI initiator software.

Why is this important? Because it removes the need to install expensive HBAs just to take advantage of their built-in capability to hook up a remote SAN volume and load the OS. By contrast, winBoot/i offers those features at a moderate additional cost and bundles in tools to create a volume image from existing boot drives, which should ease your migration to the new system.

Think of the flexibility that a networked boot volume offers — and don’t overlook the benefits of reducing power demand, vibration, and heat in confined environments such as blade server racks. Not to mention that a drive is still one of the most vulnerable components in a server, and virtualizing the boot volume removes a significant point of failure from your systems.

In the future, we should be able to install the OS directly to an iSCSI LUN, and I hear that Microsoft is evaluating the possibility of booting different servers from a single OS image (obviously preserving the licensing requirements along the way).

From EqualLogic comes another interesting piece of news for those who have or plan to install iSCSI storage. This week, the company announced a new high capacity array, the PS400E, which mounts 14 Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB drives. It packs 10.5TB in just 3U of space.

Impressive? Yes, but we’ll get used to these new capacity numbers as the large drives become more popular. Perhaps more interesting is that at the same time, EqualLogic is announcing version 3.0 of its network operating system (they call it firmware) that brings a new level of abstraction from the hardware.

“[In this release] we added automatic online storage pools, tiering, and multivolume snapshot,” explains John Joseph, vice president of marketing at EqualLogic. 

“Customers can organize their arrays in a group and subdivide that group into individual pools and connect each pool to a different application, physical location, or organizational unit,” Joseph adds.

Moreover, the new firmware allows customers to assign storage to different pools on the fly, without disrupting applications and from a single console, Joseph says. 

Solutions like EqualLogic’s offer a unique combination of hardware and software focused on clustered iSCSI networks, but a new release from Microsoft could make this pliable protocol even more popular.

You may remember that Microsoft recently acquired String Bean Software and its Wintarget application. Last week, Microsoft made that technology available to OEMs as the iSCSI Software Target Application Pack.

What does this mean? It means that you and I won’t be able to order that feature, but companies such as HP will get that option as part of Windows Storage Server 2003 R2. Expect to see HP and other vendors of Windows-based NAS systems offering an iSCSI target soon.

I don’t think those products will compete with EqualLogic’s, but having them in your datacenter sure makes a nice complement to winBoot/i. Do you agree?

Join me on The Storage Network with questions or comments.