I have been working on Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) since before they coined the phrase. There were several break-out sessions on the third day at the [IBM System Storage Technical University 2011] related to new twists to ILM.
- The Intelligent Storage Service Catalog (ISSC) and Smarter ILM
Hans Ammitzboll, Solution Rep for IBM Global Technology Services (GTS), presented an approach to ILM focused on using different storage products for different tiers. Is this new? Not at all! The original use of the phrase "Information Lifecycle Management" was coined in the early 1990s by StorageTek to help sell automated tape libraries.
Unfortunately, disk-only vendors started using the term ILM to refer to disk-to-disk tiering inside the disk array. Hans feels it does not make sense to put the least expensive penny-per-GB 7200 RPM disk inside the most expense enterprise-class high-end disk arrays.
IBM GTS manages not only IBM's internal operations, but the IT operations of hundreds of other clients. To help manage all this storage, they developed software to supplement reporting, monitoring and movement of data from one tier to another.
The Intelligent Storage Service Catalog (ISSC) can save up to 80 percent of planning time for managing storage. What did people use before? Hans poked fun at chargeback and showback systems that "offer savings" but don't actually "impose savings". He referred to these as Name-and-Shame, where the top 10 offenders of storage usage.
His storage pyramid involves a variety of devices, with IBM DS8000, SVC and XIV for the high-end, midrange disk like Storwize V7000, and blended disk-and-tape solutions like SONAS and Information Archive (IA) for the lower tiers.
To help people understand these concepts, IBM developed the [Thinking Worlds Player] game.
- Managing your Data with Policies on SONAS
Mark Taylor, IBM Advanced Technical Services, presented the policy-driven automation of IBM's Scale-Out NAS (SONAS). A SONAS system can hold 1 to 256 file systems, and each file system is further divided into fileset containers. Think of fileset containers like 'tree branches' of the file system.es.
SONAS supports policies for file placement, file movement, and file deletion. These are SQL-like statements that are then applied to specific file systems in the SONAS. Input variables include date last modified, date last accessed, file name, file size, fileset container name, user id and group id. You can choose to have the rules be case-sensitive or case-insensitive. The rules support macros. A macro pre-processor can help simplify calculations and other definitions that are used repeatedly.
Each file system in SONAS consists of one or more storage pools. For file systems with multiple pools, file placement policies can determine which pool to place each file. Normally, when a set of files are in a specific sub-directory on other NAS systems, all the files will be on the same type of disk. With SONAS, some files can be placed on 15K RPM drives, and other files on slower 7200 RPM drives. This file virtualization separates the logical grouping of files from the physical placement of them.
Once files are placed, other policies can be written to migrate from one disk pool to another, migrate from disk to tape, or delete the file. Migrating from one disk pool to another is done by relocation. The next time the file is accessed, it will be accessed directly from the new pool. When migrating from disk to tape, a stub is left in the directory structure metadata, so that subsequent access will cause the file to be recalled automatically from tape, back to disk. Policies can determine which storage pool files are recalled to when this happens.
Migrating from disk to tape involves sending the data from SONAS to external storage pool manager, such as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) server connected to a tape library. SONAS supports pre-migration, which allows the data to be copied to tape, but left on disk, until space is needed to be freed up. For example, a policy with THRESHOLD(90,70,50) will kick in when the file system is 90 percent full, file will be migrated (moved) to tape until it reaches 70 percent, and then files will be pre-migrated (copied) to tape until it reaches 50 percent.
Policies to delete files can apply to both disk and tape pools. Files deleted on tape remove the stub from the directory structure metadata and notify the external storage pool manager to clean up its records for the tape data.
If this all sounds like a radically new way of managing data, it isn't. Many of these functions are based on IBM's Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem (DFSMS) for the mainframe. In effect, SONAS brings mainframe-class functionality to distributed systems.
- Understanding IBM SONAS Use Cases
For many, the concept of a scale-out NAS is new. Stephen Edel, IBM SONAS product offering manager, presented a variety of use cases where SONAS has been successful.
First, let's consider backup. IBM SONAS has built-in support for Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), as well as supporting the NDMP industry standard protocol, for use with Symantec NetBackup, Commvault Simpana, and EMC Legato Networker. While many NAS solutions support NDMP, IBM SONAS can support up to 128 session per interface node, and up to 30 interface nodes, for parallel processing. SONAS has a high-speed file scan to identify files to be backed up, and will pre-fetch the small files into cache to speed up the backup process. A SONAS system can support up to 256 systems, and each file system can be backed up on its own unique schedule if you like. Different file systems can be backed up to different backup servers.
SONAS also has anti-virus support, with your choice of Symantec or McAfee. An anti-virus scan can be run on demand, as needed, or as files are individually accessed. When a Windows client reads a file, SONAS will determine if it has been already scanned with the most recent anti-virus signatures, and if not, will scan before allowing the file to be read. SONAS will also scan new files created.
Successful SONAS deployments addressed the following workloads:
- content capture including video capture
- content distribution
- file production/rendering
- high performance computing, research and business analytics
- "Cheap and Deep" archive
- worldwide information exchange and geographically distant collaboration
- cloud hosting
SONAS is selling well in Government, Universities, Healthcare, and Media/Entertainment, but is not limited to these industries. It can be used for private cloud deployments and public cloud deployments. Having centralized management for Petabytes of data can be cost-effective either way.
IBM SONAS brings the latest techologies to bring a Smarter ILM to a variety of workloads and use cases.