Originally posted by: TonyPearson
This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. This is the last day, so it ends early for people who want to get home to their datacenters (er.. families) for the weekend.
- How Real-Time Compression Can Maximize Storage Efficiency for Production Applications
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This was a split session with two speakers. First, Ian Rimmer, Senior IT Engineer and Architect at iBurst, presented their experience with the IBM Real-Time Compression Appliance in front of NetApp NAS storage arrays. Second, Jerry Haigh, IBM offering manager for IBM System Storage, presented the new Real-Time compression feature announced this week on IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and Storwize V7000.
iBurst is the #1 Wireless Telecom for South Africa. The also offer cable broadband and VOIP. They have 200 employees servicing 120,000 subscriber/households. They need to keep five years' worth of text files, and have chosen real-time compression of their NAS storage. This was before IBM acquired the Storwize company, as they have been using it for the past six years.
The monetary savings from compression was used to purchase Performance Accelerator Modules (PAM) cards for their NetApp NAS gear, which benefit from the compression (more data stored in SSD to improve performance).
For backup, they use NDMP with Symantec NetBackup that keeps data in its compressed form as it is written to tape. They have an IBM TS3100 library with LTO tape as the backup repository.
Jerry Haigh presented Real-Time compression for primary disk data. Unlike the competition, this is designed to be used with primary data, including databases, and does this real-time, not post-process. In some performance tests, DB2 compressed on 48 drives out-performed the same data uncompressed on 96 drives. In another test focused on VMware Vmark benchmark, the compressed data was able to be same or better performance as uncompressed. In a third test with SVC virtualizing XIV running Oracle ORION test, the Oracle databases compressed 50 to 64 percent, and had better performance.
For those who already have SVC or Storwize V7000, consider a 45-day trial to check out compression for yourself.
- NAS File Systems: Access and Authentication
Mark Taylor, IBM Technical Specialist for SONAS, N series and Storwize V7000 Unified, presented the nuances of authentication and authorization for NAS file systems. The differences between these two are:
- Authentication - Yes, you are who you are.
- Authorization - Yes, you are permitted to do what you are trying to do
(Prior to working with SONAS, my only experience with access and authentication in NAS was setting up my LAN at home, which I have connecting my Mac, Linux and Windows machines. I have both N series and SONAS at the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson, Arizona, so I know first-hand how complicated NAS access and authentication systems can be.
A few months ago, I taught "Intro to NAS" as one of my topics at the Top Gun class in Argentina and Brazil. Several of the students had mentioned they thought they knew NAS solutions but had not realized all the technical issues with access and authentication that I discussed in my presentation.)
Mark explained the differences between Windows NTFS-style System identifiers (SID), versus UNIX-style user and group identifiers (UID, GID). For NAS solutions that support both CIFS and NFS, there are four options:
- Microsoft Active Director (AD) extended with Identity Management for UNIX, formerly known as Services for UNIX (SFU). AD servers normally store SID information, but the extensions add extra columns to hold UID/GID mappings.
- AD with Network Information Service (NIS) server. The problem with this approach is that AD and NIS are separate databases, and you need to coordinate updates to them, and their backups.
- Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) with SAMBA extensions. LDAP holds UID/GID information, and the SAMBA extensions adds extra columns to hold SID mapping.
- Local mapping. The dangerous part of local mapping is that the storage admin is also the security admin, and you may want different people doing these roles.
Of these four methods, Mark recommends the first and third as best practices for multi-protocol authentication.
| Device | CIFS | Mixed | NFS |
| N series | NTFS-style | SID-to-UID mapping,
UID-to-SID mapping | UNIX-style |
| SONAS and Storwize V7000 | SID-to-UID/GID mapping, NFS v4 ACLs | NFS v4 ACLs |
Mark then explained how NFS v4 ACLs work, basically an ordered collection of "Access Control Elements" or ACEs. Each ACE on the ACL may "allow" or "deny" the request. You want to avoid "Inheritance" as that can cause problems and unxpected results.
That's it folks. Next week, I am spending time with my research buddies at the Almaden Research Center near San Jose, California, and then it is off to Moscow, Russia to kick off a series of IBM events called "Edge Comes to You" (ECTY).
The ECTY conferences will be a smaller subset of the Edge conference here in Orlando, but offered in other countries for those who were unable to travel to the United States.
technorati tags: IBM, Edge2012, Real-Time Compression, NetApp, SVC, Storwize V7000, iBurst, PAM, NDMP, SONAS, Active Directory, NIS, LDAP, SAMBA, Acess Control Lists, NFS, CIFS, ECTY