Improved Storage Management for Central Servers - NAS Solution
If you have been following the issues on how we have been doing to improve the Storage Management for Central Servers, we have mentioned the implementations of the SAN and EDM Backup solutions, and how they can help to improve our storage management. In this issue, we continue our discussion by focusing on the inclusion of the NAS solution as another part of our storage improvement project.
Benefits of NAS
File service for staff in their departmental LAN is currently provided by the implementation of departmental server. Normally, each department will have its own departmental server, with a few exceptions where a single server will be allocated for a mixture of departments and units within the same faculty. These servers, which amount to over 60, consist of a mixture of Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 Server systems. At present, all data is stored in individual storage directly attached to each server. Apart from the network performance problems, to manage effectively this number of servers and such vast volume of data scattered among these servers has always been a challenging and difficult task. However, with the adoption of the Network Storage System technology (NSS) as the base for providing central storage for all centrally supported servers, and the implementation of the Storage Area Network (SAN) storage being in place, this task will be made easier by the acquisition of the Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. This NAS system will act as an extension to the existing SAN for the storage consolidation of the departmental servers mentioned above.
The implementation of such a university wide shared facility will have the following advantages:
- The solution will increase productivity, reliability, availability, and serviceability of the departmental storage systems.
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The solution will allow dynamic allocation of storage. Hence, flexibility of storage arrangements to each department and of special needs will be greatly increased.
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The solution is highly scalable. Additional capacity can be increased with ease to cater for the dynamic needs of each department as well as for the provisions of additional departments.
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The solution is highly scalable. Additional capacity can be increased with ease to cater for the dynamic needs of each department as well as for the provisions of additional departments.
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The solution will greatly reduce the footprints for the provision of the departmental storage systems inside the central computer room.
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System administrative work will be centralized and the support will be provided more efficiently.
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The implementation of the NAS solution will reduce the maintenance and management costs of the various servers and their storage for File Service to various departments.
SAN and NAS are different network storage architectures but products are now available to merge the two. For readers who are interested in the difference between SAN and NAS, please visit the following Web pages:
http://www.nas-san.com/differ.html
or
http://cgi.appliedcaecouk.force9.co.uk/cgi-bin/group/e-Man/sannas.php
For the trend of the convergence of the two architectures, please visit:
http://www.nwfusion.com/storage/2002/0527nassan.html
The Solution
The solution proposed by EMC Computer Systems Ltd. was recommended and products are acquired by the CSC in April 2002. We expect that all the necessary hardware and software will be delivered around July, and that the CSC and the EMC will jointly work together on the implementation of the solution.
The EMC solution consists of the acquisition of the Celerra File server. This server, together with the existing SAN storage, will form the framework for the provision of all of the departmental storages. Initially, the Celerra File server will have four Data Movers for serving existing departments, and can be expanded to twelve. 1.3TB of disk storage will be initially distributed among existing departments, and can be expanded if necessary. The Celerra File server will make use of the existing Central Backup EDM solution for data backups.
The EMC solution is the only product that is well balanced in all aspects of the NAS and SAN architectures, with no performance bottleneck, and can integrate easily with the existing SAN infrastructure. The solution also has the least management and support effort, and has the least service interruption to the users during the system migration.
Implementation Schedule
Once the framework is installed, the NAS service will be ready for deployment for each department. Existing data on these departmental servers will be migrated to this new storage by phases starting this September. In order to minimize the migration impact, the migration process is expected to extend to the end of January 2003. The CSC will provide a detailed schedule to each department on the exact migration plan for them. Apart from slight service interruption, the migration is basically user transparent as far as file path is concerned.