xiotech redefining storage value

Xiotech Corporation — Proprietary

Business-Savvy StorageStrategy in ChallengingEconomic Times

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» Jon Toigo, Principal of Toigo Partners International» Roger Kelly, Principal Storage Architect, Xiotech Corportation

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Redefining Storage Value:Business-Savvy StorageStrategy in ChallengingEconomic Times

Rob PeglarVP, TechnologyXiotech Corporation


Redefining Storage Value Q: Why? … A: Economy!

The Old Cliché’:

You can have Performance, Reliability or Cost, Performance, or Low Cost—Pick Any Two!

Over the past 25 years the storage foundation has been fundamentally unchanged.

Q:Q: A:A:


Redefining Storage Value Q: How?

Focus on the Fundamentals

• Cost efficiencies• Performance efficiencies• Reliability efficiencies

Intelligent Storage Element (ISE)

Q:


Redefining Storage ValueStorage Fundamentals

Storage Fundamentals Translate to:

Cost Efficiency % Usable Capacity; Manageability

Performance Efficiency $ per IOPS and GB/sec;W per IOPS and GB/sec

Reliability Efficiency Self Healing Technology and Warranty


Cost Efficiency


• Conventional RAID done at the drive level Partly due to potential for drive to change location A single component failure in a hard drive results in failure of the entire

drive.» Requires rebuilding data, including empty space, from parity

Requires wasted space, power, and cooling in hot spare drives Worked fine when drives were small. Today? Not so much.

» Large drives can take days on a busy system!!!

Redefining Storage ValueCost Efficiency?


Redefining Storage ValueCost Efficiency?

• Conventional SAN vendors typically “hold back” capacity for their own use. Can be due to features such as snapshot

reserve capacity May be an effort to keep you from getting too close to the end of

your physical capacity when “thin provisioning” May be because of current or future software options they want

to sell you Might be because performance takes a hit if you fill drives too

full “Hold back” ranges from 20%-70% of capacity after RAID Point is, capacity you paid for isn’t available for your use. Good

deal if you’re a storage vendor.


• ISE is architecturally different!• Stripes at the drive-head level

Eliminates “hot-spare drives” in favor of “hot-spare heads.”

All drives used for data storage

Redefining Storage ValueReal Cost Efficiency

• DataPac holds 10-3.5” drives or 20-2.5” drives (x2 per ISE) User purchases eight drives, Xiotech adds two drives (16 heads)

8 drive capacity is striped over all 10 drives (80 heads) 20% of each drive is reserved to equal 2 added drives = (16 of 80 heads) Purchased capacity (8 drives) can reach 100% usable capacity (after RAID)

without a performance hit partly because 10 physical drives are only 80% full

• No required “feature holdback” allows ISE to reclaim of 20%-70% wasted space over conventional storage More usable capacity = less cost per usable TB


ICON Manager uses Web Services to manage hardware and interact with applications

• Perform most common storage tasks quickly and accurately using wizards.

• Create volumes and assign them to servers and VMs with just a few clicks – from a single pane.

• All built on open standards

• XML, SOAP, WSDL

Redefining Storage ValueReal Cost Efficiency Through Web Services


Performance Efficiency


Conventional Storage:

• An inverse relationship between performance and drive utilization for most systems

• Performance suffers as drive utilization increases

• Leads to buying more drives to achieve performance target

Redefining Storage ValuePerformance Efficiency?


• ISE utilizes a patented process of striping data.

• One of two methods of striping can be employed For extreme performance, active data can be

constrained to outer perimeter whereas less active or inactive data retained on inner platter. Drive is 100% full but benefits of “short stroking” are available for active data

All areas of the platter can be used for all data. Performance stays constant regardless of whether the drive is 1% full or 100% full» Method used for SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmarking

Redefining Storage ValueTrue Performance Efficiency


• Each ISE has two Active-Active RAID controllers

• Each ISE has 1GB cache

• Performance scales linearly Two ISEs perform twice as fast as one, three, three times as fast,

etc.

• 6,000 Very Heavy Exchange 2007 users on 20 spindles

• Can be virtualized under Xiotech controllers or numerous third party Virtualized Storage Controllers

• Striping method gives user 10 hard drive spindles for the price of eight

Redefining Storage ValueTrue Performance Efficiency


Reliability Efficiency


• ISE monitors Seagate proprietary drive telemetry. If a drive “sneezes” it becomes subject to advanced diagnostics

The drive may be reset or power cycled multiple times. If that fails to clear the problem:» Data is copied non-disruptively from each head to other heads in the

array» Once the drive is empty it is subjected to remanufacture process:

– Reload drive firmware– Refresh Servos and Tracks– Reformat drive– Rewrite Servos and Tracks

» If a head or heads are determined to be unsalvageable the head(s) are deactivated, the drive Geometry is reset to a smaller drive, lost capacity is replaced from reserve area.

Redefining Storage ValueTrue Reliability Efficiency


• Drive vibration and heat issues have been resolved

• Each drive in the ISE has redundant paths to a backend fabric.

• Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop has been eliminated in favor of switched fabric.


• ISE is capable of self-healing drives in place. Does not mean it cannot fail.Does mean that most common reasons for drive failures can be dealt with without disrupting user environment.Result is 114x more reliable than conventional drive enclosure


ISE carries the industry’s ONLY five-yearhardware warranty. • Xiotech’s exclusive five-year warranty can save tens of thousands of

dollars over other storage systems.

• Other vendors also may use shorter warranties and expensive maintenance renewals to force you into a new storage system before you really need it.



Storage Value – the Value Equation

V = C x P x R / $• Based on public SPC-1 results – not marketing BS

• C = tested capacity in TB over which I/O was actually performed – not raw space

• P = measured performance in IOPS

• R = warranty period in years

• $ = tested unit price

Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.Victor Hugo

xiotech redefining storage value

Technology

storage value q

storage foundation

storage vendor

storage valuecost efficiency

principal storage architect

physical capacity

entire drive

drive level