NetApp gives MetroCluster a good going-over

NetApp has updated its MetroCluster software to support storage array failover to remote site storage in VMware environments.
MetroCluster is software that, using replication, synchronously mirrors data writes from a primary NetApp FAS array to one in a remote site, across a campus or metro area, up to 100km away. It runs in the NetApp array controller and will failover user access to the remote site if a component in the array, below the controller, fails. The NetApp arrays in the primary and secondary sites form a high-availability cluster and are seen as a single resource by accessing servers.
NetApp says that, as a result of integration testing with VMware, the MetroCluster product now offers continuous data availability in VMware environments with failover accomplished in seconds. No update to NetApp's Data ONTAP operating system is involved.
It also facilitates transparent (to the users) software and hardware upgrades of a NetApp storage array with user data accesses re-directed to the remote site during the upgrade process and then returned to the primary array. Additionally the MetroCluster software has been integrated with NetApp's ASIS deduplication to reduce the amount of stored data.
The software works with VMware's ESX server and any storage array failover is transparent to ESX except in the situation where the array controller itself fails. In that case it cannot carry out its failover duties which have to be performed manually.
NetApp's SnapMirror software can be used to extend data availability across distances longer than 100km by using asynchronous mirroring.

What's next for NetApp hardware?

NetApp has confirmed it is working on new hardware platforms.
Rich Clifton, a senior VP at NetApp, provided a glimpse of NetApp's hardware direction this week at VMworld, as The Register sought to determine what storage OEMS would want with a PCIe switch.
Clifton said there would be phased ONTAP G announcements, suggesting that functionality could be delivered in stages. ONTAP 8 delivers clustering to the NetApp world and is the merger of the existing 7G and GX ONTAP variants, ONTAP being the operating system for the bulk of NetApp's storage products.
The senior VP said he knew nothing about PCIe use by NetApp but did say that any interconnect is chosen first on three parameters: bandwidth, latency, and cost. He said that current FAS 6000 clustered pair products use an InfiniBand point-to-point link between the two storage processors. In fact, NetApp is a significant shipper of InfiniBand links because of this.
Virtensys, another operation we spoke to at VMWorld, makes a VMX-5000 switch that connects to X86/PCIe servers by external PCIe cables. This lets them share network adapters (such as FC, IB, and Ethernet) as well as storage mounted in the switch. The attached servers each see virtual adapters and virtual direct-attached storage and think it's all local.
Marek Piekarski, chief technical officer for VirtenSys, says it's talking to potential server and storage OEMs. It's understood one server OEM has provisionally signed up. After NetApp was introduced into the conversation, he said that we could think of a scheme of storage processors in a matrix connected by PCIe. He didn't actually say they were talking to NetApp though, so what follows is supposition.
There's no need for a VirtensSys switch product in this environment unless the storage processors connect to the switch and share the I/O cards in it and/or use the switch to simplify a mess of point-to-point links, meaning more than two storage processors, Perhaps much more than two, heading towards five or more.
Piekarski said they were working on a second generation of the switch technology to add inter-processor communications capability so it would have InfiniBand-like low latency.
This nets out to a possible high-end NetApp FAS-bigger-than-6000 box which has a cluster of five or more storage processors linked by a low-latency PCIe cloud. All would talk to the outside world via a VirtenSys gen 2 switch providing the IPC capability, and there would be shared adapter use so that the box could talk FC, FCoE, iSCSI, or NAS to connected servers.
Each storage processor would, logically, have its own storage enclosures with, potentially, fast disk, slow disk, and perhaps solid state drives in them. Some storage processors might, though, be doing storage management things and not actually manage their own local storage.How about that for an ONTAP 8 box?
If NetApp were to vary the HW specs of the storage processors, it has an obvious way to have faster/slower versions.
Getting back to VMworld, such a new box would have VMware vStorage API interface code added to it, so that it could play well in VMware's shiny new vSphere data centre environment.
The net net of this mental Lego construction exercise is that a FAS 7000 or 8000 with clustered storage processors could be announced in the 2009/2010 timeframe. It would be modular storage but go way beyond the classic dual-controller arrays we have gotten used to and take NetApp up into the Symmetrix area and/or into the Data Direct/Isilon product area of very fast clustered storage.
Take this with a pinch of salt though. VirtenSys could be talking to other storage OEMs instead of or as well as NetApp.

Sectors - The feud continues: NetApp slams EMC's dedupe plans

The brawling has moved the Ruptured Monkey blog to assign wrestler-stye names for some of the loudest bloggers, as you can read here.
If you are tired of the feuding and fighting and want some actual information about EMC, check out this post about RecoverPoint objectives from virtualtacit.
Another post comes from a blogger we have wanted to feature for a while: the Lone Sysadmin. We imagine this blogger high in the saddle, rounding up lost servers out on the prairie. Or maybe not: this post sees him explore the murky world of file deletion.
If you feel that HP is the new IBM – colossal, competent, charmless – its storage blogs won't change your mind. Check out this mild effort on storage virtualisation.
We wanted to finish this week with some HDS blogs, but something is badly borked with its site: posts that appear in our RSS reader die once we hit Hitachi's site. Sigh .... we need to point to a press release instead to tell you about the executive reshuffle there and straight to the IDC document about replicated storage being a bigger problem than new unstructured data that is the subject of a Hu Yoshida post. Actually, we may not need to bother with that one: the analysts told us about this one a couple of years back.