I found some very good post over the internet, you can refer the URL below for more information about the new update provided in Firmware 1.4

Unified Computing Blog

M. Sean McGee

What is unified storage?

A single platform support multi-protocol such as FC, ISCSI, NFS, CIFS, FCoE and etc. It also support file, volume and block level data access.

You will able to get the unified box from either Netapp, EMC and HDS in the market now.

Well, seems like all the major storage players are aligned and agreed with the Unified Storage architecture now. Let’s share some of my personal experiences here. For my pass experience as an end users, I had met up with numbers of Storage experts from different principle. I often received those comments as Unified storage will slow down the performance, not efficient and they are not block base solution from multiple experts. No right or wrong for what they had commented, but with the storage trend today, they may need to reconsider the statements they had put in front to the customers previously.

Personal opinion, the storage transformation majority are caused by Virtualization and cloud computing as you could easily decide the protocol or methodology for different deployment, which had forced the storage vendor to re-consider their approach for SAN offer to support unified protocol in single platform.

As I know EMC have EMC Storage Viewer, EMC Celera SRM Failback Tool & EMC Celera SRM Failback Tool and NetApp have Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU), Virtual Storage Console (VSC), SnapManager® for Virtual Infrastructure & SANScreen® VMInsight vCenter Plugin. I’m not going to discuss about the vCenter plugin features here.

Does vSphere admin really need VMware vCenter Storage Plugin?

For most of the company, they have many IT teams such as network team, storage team, server team or vSphere team. Imagine if you were part of the vSphere or Storage admin team, do you think vSphere admin team should overwrite storage guy job? Frankly speaking, these kinds of politics already happen in many companies today. VMware did a good job by having VAAI API enable. The storage guys should focus on their storage and vSphere admin should focus on their VM environment.

Personally I’m not familiar with most of the VMware vCenter Storage Plugin. Do you think VMware vCenter Storage related plugins is a must? What is the benefit or advantage? Do you think storage vendor should keep working on this? What do you think?

General de-duplication solution:

1. Primary SAN de-duplication
2. Appliance target base de-duplication
3. Host base de-duplication
4. Software base de-duplication

I may had missed out some of them, but these should cover majority of the de-deduplication solution in the market today.

Primary SAN de-duplication allow dedupe happens on the primary SAN,  where most of the active data were stored. This should be the highest cost / GB that running in your environment.  Primary SAN de-dupe happen on Netapp and EMC storage today. While both claim they are doing de-duplication, you may need to take note the block base de-dedupe and file base de-dupe are different approach.

Primary SAN de-dupe allow you to achieve disk space saving up to 50% or more, especially in virtualization environment. As we all are familiar with the virtual machine deployment, most of the virtual machines are usually cloned or deploy from the standard template, which will contains numbers of duplicated block data on the primary storage. De-duplication allow administrator to re-claim more space from the primary SAN, and reduce the TCO of overall virtualization strategy. I will suggest de-dupe to be enable for virtualization deployment and exclude the volume or LUN that require high I/O performance especially for Databases.

Appliance base de-deuplication – example Data Domain VTL, Quantum VTL and etc. These solution will be more specified to backup and recovery. As an example, it allows users to perform daily full backup with minimal disk space consumption with de-deduplication on virtual tape library. This is not on primary SAN as your VTL are not the primary SAN where the data are stored

Host base de-duplication – Avamar. This is another great solution in the market; allow data to be de-dupe before process over for local or remote backup. As an example, it will allow users to minimize the bandwidth requirement for remote office or location, and centralize manage the backup and recovery on primary data center.

Software base de-duplication which allows users to convert direct attach, NAS, tape or SAN attach storage, to be target base deduplication machine. This is heavily relying on the management software to perform the data de-duplication and not the hardware appliance itself.

No right or wrong, just to share the different in general how you should consider about de-duplication solution today in the market. Each of them has the unique position in the market for different perspective.

I further checked the virtual machines been power on in the ESX servers, which show all the VM were continue running without system crash or rebooted. Now I realize that the failure on SAN switch may not necessary result system crash or hung, in fact it may allow you resume the system state once the SAN switch are back online, of course, this is no guarantee assumption, just some surprise finding experienced yesterday would like to share here.

Beside unified storage, we are looking forward for unified computing system for the server compute platform too. Cisco had moved ahead of their competitor to bring this to the world and it is 1 fo the great platform that get attraction and adoption worldwide. Cisco UCS or Nexus 5000 both provide the unified I/O capabilities and allow us to transform the data center architecture today. Beside consolidating LAN and SAN into 1 with FCoE, the more interesting capabilities that get attention by us are the switching capacity.

The Nexus 5000 or UCS 6140 switches supported up to 1.14 Tbits/s and this number are more than enough to consolidate all the necessary traffic it need to be delivered by the LAN & SAN. If you have this solution in place today and well integrated with the unified storage as well as the core networking environment, you can easily choose to run NAS, ISCSI or FC through the same Unified frabics and Unified Storage you have. As everyone know, there are no perfect solution or protocol for every scenario, but now, you will able to choose the right protocol for every different computing system, application and database requirement without implementing separate ISCSI, NFS or FC physical infrastructure.

This is a nice picture to summarize the description about Unified Platform which I get it from http://viewyonder.com

You can have a full view about the VCN alliance details from here.

If you are netapp existing customers, you can download the software from here

Below is the summary I link from Netapp official blog site

Summary of supported functionality in the 1.0 release includes:

• Support for ESX 4.0 and ESXi 4.0 hosts.
• Limited support for ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 hosts (listed and details provided, but setting not set – requires using EHU for host settings)
• Viewing the status of storage controllers from a SAN (FC, iSCSI) perspective.
• Viewing the status of storage controllers from a NAS (NFS) perspective.
• Viewing the status of ESX hosts, including ESX version and overall status.
• Checking at a glance whether the following are configured correctly, and if not, automatically setting the correct values without needing to access the ESX console. You can select multiple ESX hosts and update settings for all hosts with a single command.
• Storage adapter timeouts
• Multipathing settings
• NFS settings
• Collecting diagnostic information from the ESX hosts, storage controllers, and Fibre Channel switches.
• Tools to identify and correct misaligned disk partitions (MBR Tools)
• Tools to set proper guest operating system disk timeout values

Each server above will be connected to Nexus 5000 through CNA (Converge Network Adaptor) which provide FCoE and 10GE at the single connection. The Netapp FAS 3140 are connected to Nexus 5000 with FCoE interfaces which provide end to end solution from servers to switches, switches to storage. FC switch are not required to be in placed to allow servers communication to storage in this architecture. You can choose either NFS, FCoE or ISCSI in this configuration. The above picture is for reference and do not meant in very details as I am rush up the drawing about this post. EMC will soon officially launch the storage to support FCoE. I believe this will be the future strategy for Data Center & Storage solution. In Cisco UCS, you will still require FC switch in place as the UCS 6100 interconnect does not meant the full capable FCoE switch as Nexus 5000 did. I think the new architecture are suitable for new and clean deployment and large scale virtualization. It help to reduce the massive cabling, and achieve the throughput requirements needed by the virtualization.

Picture above is Traditional Network and SAN environment VS FCoE for reference purpose

NetApp Data Motion – NetApp’s new data motion technology allows enterprises to move data nondisruptively across storage systems with zero application downtime. Now customers can eliminate the impact of planned maintenance outages in virtualized multi-tenant environments. NetApp Data Motion is the first solution of its kind in the storage industry and builds upon the NetApp unified storage architecture to greatly enhance availability for both internal and external cloud customers.
Performance Acceleration Module II – The second-generation Performance Acceleration Module, a family of flash technology-based catching modules, provides an innovation, alternative use of flash/SSD technology rather than using SSds in disk shelves. Customers can cost-effectively improve performance across a broader set of workloads without straining their existing infrastructure. Tests conducted by NetApp with an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workload show that customers can cost-effectively increase I/O throughput by approximately 78% and speed response time by approximately 30%. These gains were achieved using less than 1% more power and no additional rack space.

NetApp Dynamic Data Center (NDDC) Solution – The NetApp dynamic data center solution is comprised of three components to provide customers with a proven and tested solution for delivering ITaaS. The first component is a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) that leverages NetApp’s industry-leading technologies. The standardized architecture allows customers to consume and deploy storage, network, and compute resources in a repeatable manner to reduce costs and increase service levels. NetApp offers these shared resources through a service catalog to deliver infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to end users. A second component includes a service management framework that provides processes and best practices to help manage the infrastructure and reduce fixed costs wherever possible. The last component is a delivery methodology that leverages NetApp Professional Services and NetApp systems integrator partners to deploy ITaaS infrastructures efficiently and with the least risk to customers.