Hybrid Storage in Virtualized Environments

As Hedrick Gardner increasingly moved to a virtual infrastructure, it reached the capacity limits with its existing HP/LeftHand iSCSI SAN arrays, encompassing 4TB of capacity across two arrays in a RAID 10 configuration, requiring 50% capacity overhead for the RAID redundancy on expensive Tier 1 storage. HP storage offered no option to increase capacity via data compression or deduplication, forcing my team to carve out some additional capacity by creating VMware Virtual Storage Appliances on server-attached storage but injecting performance degradation for the virtual machines with production applications running on slow Tier 2 SATA storage.

HP's upgrade path for its iSCSI storage was simply to keep adding paired appliances to the SAN to maintain the RAID 10 protection, an option that I found wholly inadequate. I had to add another 4 TB appliance and would only gain another 2 TB of storage capacity because of the way the appliances are striped. So for an additional 2 TB with the HP system it was around $20,000, which really didn't make sense financially because we needed an additional 6 TB. To go with that same storage system to get the capacity we needed, when it didn't have compression, it didn't have dedupe ' and that doesn't even address the issues we would have seen in disaster recovery (DR) ' we were well on our way to a completely new solution. Their upgrade path ultimately failed us price-wise.

Virtualizing Desktops

With an eye toward further virtualizing Hedrick Gardner's IT operations with virtualized desktops, we embarked on a project to evaluate solid state storage systems from Network Appliance as well as hybrid SAN arrays from Tintri, Nimble Storage and the Zebi arrays from Tegile Systems. Tintri was quickly eliminated from consideration as it only supported the NFS protocol, didn't provide any remote replication, while Nimble was pure iSCSI with no support for NFS or CIFS file storage protocols.

NetApp met all of our requirements for protocol support but the licensing complexity issues made it cost prohibitive. When we looked at the NetApp devices and saw different modules, we realized that while everything's possible, it started raising the cost whenever you needed a feature.

Ultimately, I decided on the Zebi HA2100 array from Tegile, a total solution that includes compression, deduplication and remote replication as standard features along with the most comprehensive unified storage protocol support ' including Fibre Channel SANs ' of any hybrid storage array.

Hybrid Storage

Hybrid storage arrays balance high performance, high capacity, features and the right price, making them the ideal solution for a wide range of industries and applications. Hybrid arrays are faster than hard disk drive (HDD) based arrays and less expensive than solid state disk (SSD) based arrays. Tegile's data reduction technology gives users a capacity that's greater than their raw capacity. A no-single-point-of-failure architecture, automated snapshot and thin replication features make them more reliable. Hybrid arrays are the better solution for applications such as desktop virtualization, server virtualization, database hosting and file services.

I saw Tegile as a sort of Swiss Army knife for the technology. The technology portfolio that the Tegile devices have was paramount to our decision in this process. Tegile's approach to the technology is “here's the device and you can pretty much do anything you want.”

Hedrick Gardner has installed two Zebi HA2100 arrays, currently consuming 7 TB of capacity. The main Zebi array in Charlotte is replicated to an identical array for disaster recovery protection at the Raleigh office. The built-in replication was another factor that weighed heavily in the decision to go with Tegile. That was a huge consideration in the purchase decision because Tegile was able to come in at the dollar mark we needed with a replication technology that was bundled into the price. It greatly enhanced the DR that we were looking for. In the past, we used storage in Raleigh for DR that was actually much slower than the production storage that we were using in Charlotte, so when we went to perform a DR test, it would take 10 times as long. Tegile eliminated that storage bottleneck.

Results

As soon as the Tegile storage was installed, it instantly proved to be the right choice. We immediately saw improved response times and we were able to consolidate all of our data on the Zebi appliance, instead of having to cross multiple appliances as we were doing in the previous environment. The Zebi integrated snapshot functionality also gave the company an instant backup mechanism that it previously lacked with the HP storage. The backup capabilities with the snapshotting has affected our entire backup strategy. We are now no longer looking to external products for instant restores, but to utilize snapshots to create a staging area to extract the data.

Despite the superior performance, comprehensive product offering and cost advantages, Hedrick Gardner still had a concern about trusting its production storage environment to relatively new hybrid technology before committing to purchase the Zebi arrays. To alleviate this concern, my boss at Hedrick Gardner got on the phone to speak directly with Tegile Chief Executive Officer Rohit Kshetrapal. That conversation about Kshetrapal's vision for Tegile and the company's fanatical commitment to customer support convinced Hedrick Gardner and sealed the deal for Tegile. That information helped consummate the deal probably more than anything else did. It was a very good security blanket for the purchase as well as just getting first-hand experience with support and seeing how proactive they were as well as how quickly they reacted when we submitted tickets.

Now after living with the Zebi arrays as the production storage for a few months, Tegile has delivered exactly as promised and then some. Along with the superior IOPS performance, elimination of storage bottlenecks, the capacity-saving bene- tfits of integrated data compression and deduplication, and simple and fast replication, I foresee an additional cost saving from Tegile as the company moves its IT equipment in a colocation site. One of the things it did was to take about 20u of rack space down to about 4u. We regained a lot of rack space by consolidating everything into that one device. For colocation purposes, that's huge.

Jeremy DeHart is the Information Technology Manager at Hedrick Gardner Kincheloe & Garofalo LLP. Since 2011 he has been involved in managing an IT team supporting VMWare, Citrix, HP SAN, Cisco Networking, Wireless, Firewalls, Telecom, Client Profiles, AD and Hardware Support.

Hedrick Gardner Kincheloe & Garofalo LLP is a regional law firm based in Charlotte, NC serving the needs of the business community. With over 100 attorneys located in four offices across two states, Hedrick Gardner focuses on conflict prevention, conflict management and conflict resolution for clients ranging from small and medium size businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

The Setup

We host our servers and storage onsite in the company headquarters in Charlotte, providing services to our other offices in Raleigh and Wilmington, NC and Columbia, SC. The firm is planning to move its IT equipment offsite to a colocation data center and has consolidated its production servers down to three Dell PowerEdge R620 servers running VMware Infrastructure 3 and ESX. Hedrick Gardner has also virtualized its application delivery via the Citrix Flexcast Delivery Portfolio. The law firm operates largely as a Microsoft shop and uses Aderant Holdings' Total Office software, a comprehensive legal office management application, including financial databases and case file management system, as a key critical application

As Hedrick Gardner increasingly moved to a virtual infrastructure, it reached the capacity limits with its existing HP/LeftHand iSCSI SAN arrays, encompassing 4TB of capacity across two arrays in a RAID 10 configuration, requiring 50% capacity overhead for the RAID redundancy on expensive Tier 1 storage. HP storage offered no option to increase capacity via data compression or deduplication, forcing my team to carve out some additional capacity by creating VMware Virtual Storage Appliances on server-attached storage but injecting performance degradation for the virtual machines with production applications running on slow Tier 2 SATA storage.

HP's upgrade path for its iSCSI storage was simply to keep adding paired appliances to the SAN to maintain the RAID 10 protection, an option that I found wholly inadequate. I had to add another 4 TB appliance and would only gain another 2 TB of storage capacity because of the way the appliances are striped. So for an additional 2 TB with the HP system it was around $20,000, which really didn't make sense financially because we needed an additional 6 TB. To go with that same storage system to get the capacity we needed, when it didn't have compression, it didn't have dedupe ' and that doesn't even address the issues we would have seen in disaster recovery (DR) ' we were well on our way to a completely new solution. Their upgrade path ultimately failed us price-wise.

Virtualizing Desktops

With an eye toward further virtualizing Hedrick Gardner's IT operations with virtualized desktops, we embarked on a project to evaluate solid state storage systems from Network Appliance as well as hybrid SAN arrays from Tintri, Nimble Storage and the Zebi arrays from Tegile Systems. Tintri was quickly eliminated from consideration as it only supported the NFS protocol, didn't provide any remote replication, while Nimble was pure iSCSI with no support for NFS or CIFS file storage protocols.

NetApp met all of our requirements for protocol support but the licensing complexity issues made it cost prohibitive. When we looked at the NetApp devices and saw different modules, we realized that while everything's possible, it started raising the cost whenever you needed a feature.

Ultimately, I decided on the Zebi HA2100 array from Tegile, a total solution that includes compression, deduplication and remote replication as standard features along with the most comprehensive unified storage protocol support ' including Fibre Channel SANs ' of any hybrid storage array.

Hybrid Storage

Hybrid storage arrays balance high performance, high capacity, features and the right price, making them the ideal solution for a wide range of industries and applications. Hybrid arrays are faster than hard disk drive (HDD) based arrays and less expensive than solid state disk (SSD) based arrays. Tegile's data reduction technology gives users a capacity that's greater than their raw capacity. A no-single-point-of-failure architecture, automated snapshot and thin replication features make them more reliable. Hybrid arrays are the better solution for applications such as desktop virtualization, server virtualization, database hosting and file services.

I saw Tegile as a sort of Swiss Army knife for the technology. The technology portfolio that the Tegile devices have was paramount to our decision in this process. Tegile's approach to the technology is “here's the device and you can pretty much do anything you want.”

Hedrick Gardner has installed two Zebi HA2100 arrays, currently consuming 7 TB of capacity. The main Zebi array in Charlotte is replicated to an identical array for disaster recovery protection at the Raleigh office. The built-in replication was another factor that weighed heavily in the decision to go with Tegile. That was a huge consideration in the purchase decision because Tegile was able to come in at the dollar mark we needed with a replication technology that was bundled into the price. It greatly enhanced the DR that we were looking for. In the past, we used storage in Raleigh for DR that was actually much slower than the production storage that we were using in Charlotte, so when we went to perform a DR test, it would take 10 times as long. Tegile eliminated that storage bottleneck.

Results

As soon as the Tegile storage was installed, it instantly proved to be the right choice. We immediately saw improved response times and we were able to consolidate all of our data on the Zebi appliance, instead of having to cross multiple appliances as we were doing in the previous environment. The Zebi integrated snapshot functionality also gave the company an instant backup mechanism that it previously lacked with the HP storage. The backup capabilities with the snapshotting has affected our entire backup strategy. We are now no longer looking to external products for instant restores, but to utilize snapshots to create a staging area to extract the data.

Despite the superior performance, comprehensive product offering and cost advantages, Hedrick Gardner still had a concern about trusting its production storage environment to relatively new hybrid technology before committing to purchase the Zebi arrays. To alleviate this concern, my boss at Hedrick Gardner got on the phone to speak directly with Tegile Chief Executive Officer Rohit Kshetrapal. That conversation about Kshetrapal's vision for Tegile and the company's fanatical commitment to customer support convinced Hedrick Gardner and sealed the deal for Tegile. That information helped consummate the deal probably more than anything else did. It was a very good security blanket for the purchase as well as just getting first-hand experience with support and seeing how proactive they were as well as how quickly they reacted when we submitted tickets.

Now after living with the Zebi arrays as the production storage for a few months, Tegile has delivered exactly as promised and then some. Along with the superior IOPS performance, elimination of storage bottlenecks, the capacity-saving bene- tfits of integrated data compression and deduplication, and simple and fast replication, I foresee an additional cost saving from Tegile as the company moves its IT equipment in a colocation site. One of the things it did was to take about 20u of rack space down to about 4u. We regained a lot of rack space by consolidating everything into that one device. For colocation purposes, that's huge.

Jeremy DeHart is the Information Technology Manager at Hedrick Gardner Kincheloe & Garofalo LLP. Since 2011 he has been involved in managing an IT team supporting VMWare, Citrix, HP SAN, Cisco Networking, Wireless, Firewalls, Telecom, Client Profiles, AD and Hardware Support.