Scaling NAS with adaptive resource switches.

Adaptive Resource Switches, used to virtualize global file data, can help organizations build more scalable, higher performance Network Attached Storage (NAS) infrastructures that are easier to manage. Whether it's a chip design process, the animation rendering for a movie, or a record company digitizing its music library for internet distribution, more and more companies today have mission critical digital work flow processes that depend on the efficient processing and storage of file data.

Today, many companies are struggling with 'device level' scale and performance issues caused by an entire business workflow being constrained by the capacity of a single NAS device. This case is often referred to as a "hot filer" problem, in which an overloaded NAS device causes a bottleneck in the production process. In addition to performance constraints, many of today's demanding business applications also have capacity requirements that exceed the size of individual file systems. In order to provision additional capacity to meet this demand, storage managers need to routinely stop the application, add capacity, update the application configuration to access the new storage and then resume the application. This process is time consuming, disruptive and often brings the critical production processes of these digital factories to a crawl.

Enter adaptive resource networking. By deploying adaptive resource switches in front of their existing NAS devices, companies can solve their performance and capacity problems while benefiting from a way to dramatically simplify the management of the NAS infrastructure.

The file virtualization capabilities of the switches allow companies to seamlessly distribute the load of their production applications across multiple NAS devices, yielding a more balanced and scalable use of these resources. The switches can adapt to changing load conditions by automatically balancing application I/O based on a file server's available capacity, or its' performance (latency), or even on a round robin basis, so that the application uses the most optimal set of resources available. Because the aggregate workload is balanced across multiple physical devices, storage tasks can be done in parallel, increasing the overall application performance. The net benefit to the customer is the elimination of the overloaded NAS bottleneck and significantly increased application throughput.

Many digital production processes are also limited because the capacity requirements of the applications exceed the maximum size of the actual file system and adding additional capacity--via additional file systems--is disruptive. Adaptive resource switches solve this problem by allowing customers to create larger workspaces--comprised of multiple physical file systems--to meet their application requirements. These larger workspaces have a single virtual mount point that provides a persistent client access to data and as a result requires no client reconfigurations. In addition, as more capacity is needed, it can be added to the storage pool online, without disruption to clients. The net benefit to customers is increased throughput of critical business applications and reduced operational overhead by eliminating time-consuming storage provisioning tasks.

Many companies with large NAS environments are also experiencing significant challenges in the on-going management of their file storage infrastructure. Today, most NAS devices are managed as discrete entities resulting in 'islands of storage'. Data movement and consolidation between these islands is a manual and disruptive process that results in on-going reconfiguration of NAS systems by storage managers.

Adaptive resource switches dramatically simplify the management of the NAS infrastructure. By implementing virtualization policy across multiple file systems, basic storage management tasks such as data migration, storage provisioning and consolidation are transparent to clients and do not require client reconfigurations. The switch also supports policies for data migration, including the ability to migrate data based on its age, type and usage characteristics. This migration is useful for tiered storage and archiving applications; for example, many storage managers are interested in moving 'aged' files from expensive production NAS to cheaper storage (eg. S-ATA). The switch solves this problem by allowing customers to automatically migrate data between these heterogeneous storage devices without disruption or client reconfigurations. The net benefit to customers is improved utilization of their existing NAS and a reduction in operational costs through the automation of storage management tasks.

For one major fortune 500 media and entertainment company, these products have had a dramatic impact on the throughput of its digital factory production process. In 2004, with the growing popularity of digital music and internet download sites, the company was experiencing dramatic growth in its digital music production process. Storage was continually being consumed at large rates which meant that a significant portion of the IT staff's time was spent manually migrating content between storage devices in order to reclaim unused capacity. In addition, the company's digital factory process was experiencing the 'hot filer' bottleneck which limited the number of songs that could be digitally produced in a given period.

The company deployed adaptive resource switches to virtualize several EMC Celerra NAS devices. By aggregating multiple physical file systems, the switches provided the company with the large workspace they needed to efficiently scale their digital factory and allowed them to manage their many systems as one. The company also implemented a load balancing policy on the switches that adaptively distributed the workload across all the NAS devices, leading to a 560 percent increase in the company's digital production process throughput. In addition, nearly all of the manual tasks associated with data migration have been automated, leading to a 20 percent reduction in storage management operational costs. There have been significant capital expenditure savings as well. The switches have increased the utilization of their existing NAS infrastructure, leading to an expected capital expenditure savings of more than 20 percent in the upcoming year.

A leading service provider in the electronic data discovery market has also experienced significant business benefit by utilizing adaptive resource switches. This company provides a service to its large enterprises customers for analyzing and converting massive amounts of data into uniform formats for the discovery phase of legal proceedings. The company was experiencing several challenges related to their data analysis, conversion and storage processes. Often the size of a particular customer data set would exceed the capacity of existing volumes on the production filers. This meant that IT staff had to create additional volumes to store the data, after which they had to update their applications to access these new volumes. This process was complex, time consuming and disruptive. In addition, when the company ran their production data analysis processes, all client systems accessed a single BlueArc server for the duration of the project, creating a bottleneck which slowed business workflow and increased the time to complete client projects.

The company deployed adaptive resource switches to virtualize their physical BlueArc file systems and create a larger workspace to accommodate large amounts of customer data. This reduced the management overhead by eliminating the time previously spent manually migrating data and provisioning new storage for the production process. In addition, the switches allowed the company to distribute their massive application load across multiple high performance BlueArc filers, significantly increasing the throughput of their data analysis process and improving the number of customer projects they are able to handle. The switches have also allowed the company to migrate data from older generation BlueArc filers to new BlueArc Titan series filers without disrupting their applications. Finally, the switch has allowed them to redeploy the older system disks with the newer filers, which should lead to a reduction in annual disk spend in 2005. By using the switches, this company was able to dramatically increase the throughput, utilization and scale of the digital factory operations. They can now process more projects faster with less expense, allowing them to expand their overall production capacity and keep the costs of their rapid growth under control.

Companies across many industries--financial services, media and entertainment, technology, healthcare and government--are now benefiting from the virtualization capabilities of the adaptive resource switches. For many companies, this often translates into real business value: increased revenues, more efficient processes, or faster time to market.

Brendon Howe is vice president of marketing and business development for Acopia Networks (Lowell, MA)

www.acopia.com