europe SNIA
Moving SAN workloads to NAS The answer is simple: take traditional SAN workloads and put them on NAS. Managing fi les versus LUNs allows for easier data mobility and granular management. You can move data around, restore single VMs and databases (or groups of them), and little technical knowledge is required. Confi guration, troubleshooting, and upgrades are all simplifi ed. The market validates this trend, too. If Ethernet usage is trending up as a whole, NAS fi le protocol usage (SMB/CIFS, NFS) is skyrocketing.
In addition to the data-entropy theory and continued growth in traditional fi le sharing, the success of fi le-based storage protocols is also because major applications, databases, and hypervisors moved to support them. Software companies saw the benefi ts of fi le storage and wanted their products to be at the forefront. Oracle and VMware have supported NFS for several years, and with the advent of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, customers have great options for their Windows environments thanks to the new SMB 3.0 protocol. There are also workloads where structured applications manage unstructured data, and Microsoft SharePoint is the poster child; SharePoint can also run over SMB. Given the direction of fi le-based storage as well as Microsoft’s investment in their applications and protocol stack, there should be no doubt that SMB 3 is the future of storage protocols for Windows Environments.
A new look at SMB
Some reading this may be thinking, “SMB? As in...(gasp)
...CIFS??” Yes. We have come a long way since the days of slow and chatty CIFS/SMB 1, and SMB 3 has both the technology and capability to support today’s demanding and critical workloads.
S6
www.sn seurope.info I Winter 2013
SMB 3 will have different impacts to your environment depending on how you use it, but Hyper-V is generating the most excitement at the moment. Quick provisioning - either via Hyper-V Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager,
SMB 3 delivers SAN-level availability and resilience, allowing workloads like mission critical VMs and databases to run over it with high availability. It also delivers SAN- level performance with features like SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), and scales very well when compared to Fibre Channel. SMB Multichannel enables bandwidth aggregation with multiple NICs and automatic session failover, whereas SMB Direct leverages the RDMA transport to reduce latency and CPU overhead. Other key features include Remote VSS, which allows integrated data protection for applications stored on a SMB share; Optimized Data Transfer (ODX), which enables server-side copies; SMB Encryption, which enhances security with encryption over the wire; and Management improvements with PowerShell and SMI-S.
Since SMB 3 was designed for high availability and non-disruptiveness, it makes the most sense to use it with two or more nodes on the server side for failover handling. This way, the continuously available (CA) shares providing data will always be online and available to SMB 3 clients. CA shares are enabled by updating another server node with a client’s state changes. In the event of a failure, the surviving server node has the client’s state information and can recover the connection with no error returned to the application or user. The Cluster Client Failover feature achieves a similar effect on the client side, allowing for failover between two client nodes running the same application.
or PowerShell - is a huge boon to storage administrators who can spend days pushing out golden VM images on LUNs or via client- side copy. Thanks to tie-ins with ODX, with SMB 3, you can simply copy and paste the golden VM (or database, etc.) as many times as you want, with no CPU utilization or data transfer through your laptop.
Additionally, VMs (or databases, etc.) show up as normal fi les that you can browse in Windows explorer, enabling greater transparency. Beyond the impressive features, ease of management, performance, and resiliency, SMB 3 will also enable a more fl exible IT environment, reducing complexity and offering additional design options. Service providers or corporations will have the ability to create different offerings based on storage backend if they prefer. Larger companies will be able to reduce operational costs with heterogeneous datacenters (i.e. one DC is block-based, another is fi le-based), and data transfer between them via ODX will be seamless.
Although SMB 3 has the technology and capability to support its upward trajectory as a data storage protocol, it is not just theoretical, it is real and ready. SMB 3 offers a new way of thinking for your datacenter and application storage designs. Just as Ethernet has dominated the physical transport layer, SMB 3 is set for success as a fi rst-class fi le-based storage protocol, and offers many unique and compelling features for Windows environments.
Recently SNIA’s Ethernet Storage Forum delivered a webcast on this same subject. If you are interested in downloading the webcast entitled SMB 3.0 - New Opportunities for Windows Environments, please visit:
https://www.brighttalk.com/ webcasts?q=SNIA
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