As the need for disaster recovery continues to move downmarket from the enterprise to medium and small businesses, the number of IT shops replicating their data to an offsite location is increasing. Array based replication was once a feature reserved for the big budgets of the Fortune 1000. Today, array based replication is a feature that is available on most midrange storage devices (and even some of the entry level products).

This increase in replication deployments has created a new challenge for IT. The most common replication solutions move the data over the IP network. That data puts a significant load on the IP network infrastructure. The LAN infrastructure is almost always up to the task, but the WAN is often not able to handle this new burden. While the prices of network infrastructure have come down over the years, big pipes are still an expensive monthly outlay. So, how do we get that data offsite without driving up those WAN costs? WAN optimization technology provides a potential solution.

Not every workload or protocol can benefit from today’s WAN optimization technology, but replication is one that usually gets a big boost. I gathered some data from a client who is using NetApp SnapMirror to replicate to a remote datacenter and deployed  WAN optimization to prevent a major WAN upgrade.

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Interested in learning how Sun leveraged Open Solaris as the core technology of the Sun 7000 storage array? I will be presenting on the Sun 7000 at the January 28th meeting of the Open Solaris User Group (NEOSUG). The plan is to have a system there for demonstration and for everyone to check out in person.

Solaris Ambassador Jeff Victor will be presenting the latest features in Solaris 10 10/08. This list will include ‘ZFS Boot’ – the ability to install Solaris using only ZFS file systems.

Here is a link to the detailed agenda and registration information on the opensolaris.org website. I hope to see you there.

Sometimes I think the only people who read technology blogs are people who write other technology blogs. I have no way to figure out if this is true or not, but it is an interesting topic to ponder. Do IT end users actually read technology blogs? If they are reading, they do not seem to comment very frequently. Much more often comments come from other bloggers or competing vendors.

That said, I am going to talk about an issue that some of the storage bloggers seem to be caught up in at the moment. The issue of ‘emulated FC’ vs ‘real FC.’ Let me start off by sharing a few recent posts from other blogs:

Chuck Hollis at EMC writes about the EMC/Dell relationship and takes the opportunity to compare EMC to NetApp. In this case, he is comparing the EMC NX4 to the NetApp FAS2020. The comment in the post that certainly aggravated NetApp is that EMC does “real deal FC that isn’t emulated.” The obvious implications being that EMC FC is not emulated, NetApp FC is emulated, and FC emulation is bad. (This is not a new debate between EMC and NetApp. Look back through the blogs at both companies and you will find plenty of back and forth on the topic.

Kostadis Russos at NetApp has a post explaining why he, not surprisingly, completely disagrees with Chuck.

Stephen Foskett, a storage consultant, posts what I think is an excellent overview of the issues. He cuts through the marketing spin and asks the right questions. His coverage of the topic is so complete, I almost decided not to write about the topic. I will try not to retrace all the issues he covered. I will hit a couple of his high level points in case you have not had a chance to read his post (I highly recommend it though, it is very good.) In summary:

• All enterprise storage arrays “emulate” Fibre Channel drives to one extent or another
• NetApp is emulating Fibre Channel drives
• All modern storage arrays emulate SCSI drives
• Using the wrong tool for the job will always lead to trouble
• Which is more important to you, integration, performance, or features?

So, why am I writing about it? I am writing about it because Chuck posted a very good blog entry about benchmarking a few days later that, to me, contradicts the importance he gave to ‘real FC’ on 12/9. I have never meet Chuck or Stephen, but they both seem to be very technically adept from their postings.

Without trying to put words in his mouth (text on his blog?), the overall theme of Chuck’s post is to make sure you use meaningful tests if you want meaningful results from a storage product benchmark. He is absolutely correct. I could not agree more. How many times have we seen benchmarks performed that were completely irrelevant to the workload the array would see in production?

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