SolidFire and AltaVault

Transcription

1 Technical Report SolidFire and AltaVault Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault Mike Braden, NetApp August 2016 TR-4542 Abstract Effectively using storage at scale is how organizations are addressing the current challenges with IT. Challenges include offering services that are easy to consume, that scale up or down with business needs, and that evolve quickly as the organization evolves. Building a modern IT infrastructure that integrates easily with existing enterprise infrastructure components is what enables the flexibility to take advantage of current business markets. The combined solution of NetApp SolidFire and AltaVault technology provides the infrastructure that is needed to leverage highly flexible services.

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Solution Overview SolidFire Overview AltaVault Overview Solution Description Reporting Capabilities SolidFire Reports AltaVault Reports Summary Version History LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1) Example architecture Figure 2) AltaVault ecosystem Figure 3) Tested configuration Figure 4) NetBackup Storage Lifecycle Policy Figure 5) NetBackup job details Figure 6) SolidFire main administration view... 8 Figure 7) SolidFire volume statistics Figure 8) AltaVault main administration view Figure 9) AltaVault storage optimization report Figure 10) Front-end throughput Figure 11) Replication report Figure 12) Cloud operations report Figure 13) CPU utilization report Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

3 1 Solution Overview NetApp SolidFire all-flash arrays provide a scale-out storage solution that offers ease of management with a predictable workload performance. To offer a broad range of storage classes to best fit the workloads, modern data centers are combining the latest storage technologies based on flash, NL-SAS, and object storage. All-flash arrays address the need for the performance workloads that applications demand. Cloud object storage can offer several types of service levels to meet various requirements for maintaining backup copies of primary data for long retention periods. This guide describes the use of NetApp AltaVault to back up data to the cloud from SolidFire primary storage. The overall solution addresses a wide range of needs by using scale-out flash-based primary storage for performance workloads while leveraging cloud economics and scale for efficient backup data storage. As an example of an architecture that can be designed, Figure 1 illustrates the use of a cluster of SolidFire all-flash arrays to provide storage for database servers, application servers, and virtual server clusters. By using an enterprise backup application, such as Veritas NetBackup, it s possible to back up server data to one or more AltaVault appliances. AltaVault optimizes the backup data with variable segment deduplication and compression. The data can be stored in a wide range of cloud storage solutions, including NetApp StorageGRID Webscale for a private cloud solution. Typically, the SolidFire and AltaVault systems are close to the infrastructure servers. AltaVault replicates across a WAN to a cloud object storage. For increased protection against site failures, StorageGRID Webscale, as illustrated in Figure 1, can be a single grid across multiple sites. Figure 1) Example architecture. 1.1 SolidFire Overview NetApp SolidFire provides all-flash storage that offers scale-out capacity and predictable performance without data migration. SolidFire SF-Series nodes include the Element OS software, a storage operating system that is built from the ground up to enable the next-generation data center. Key features of SolidFire include the ability to respond to changing demands rapidly and with greater agility than ever before. These features include: 3 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

4 Linear scale of both performance and capacity On-demand expansion or reduction of storage resources as needs dictate Mixed-node compatibility for future-proofed storage investments that eliminate forklift upgrades and storage migrations Quality of service that provides the ability to support application SLAs for multitenant workloads that demand minimum performance guarantees 1.2 AltaVault Overview NetApp AltaVault delivers enterprise-class data protection and storage at up to 90% less cost than onpremises solutions do. Organizations can benefit from the flexibility and economics of cloud and can cut management costs and complexity. An existing data storage infrastructure can be augmented with AltaVault, which is: Efficient: Uses inline deduplication and compression for up to 30:1 data-reduction ratios Open: Integrates easily into your existing backup architecture and favorite cloud provider Secure: Offers end-to-end security for data at rest and in flight by using FIPS Level 1 validated encryption Simple: Takes you from zero to protected in less than 30 minutes through an intuitive management console AltaVault appliances are available as software-only virtual appliances or as cloud-based appliances, or for more demanding performance and capacity environments, they are available as physical appliances. The physical appliances offer the highest throughput and offer expandable capacity by the addition of disk shelves. AltaVault provides off-site and disaster recovery features from cloud storage. This recovery could be at an alternate or a disaster recovery site, or it could be recovery to a cloud-based disaster recovery solution. Figure 2) AltaVault ecosystem. AltaVault provides a secure means to use public cloud for storage of backup data. All data that is backed up to AltaVault is stored in encrypted format both at rest and in flight to cloud storage. AltaVault provides FIPS level security and can store encryption keys and credentials locally for easy management of a small number of appliances. For larger infrastructures that use centralized key management servers, AltaVault provides the ability to store encryption keys and credentials locally or in the central key server by using the industry-standard Key Management Interoperability Protocol. 4 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

5 AltaVault is designed to allow the most recent backup data to remain locally cached. All data is replicated to cloud storage. Cloud storage can consist of a private object storage solution for replication between sites of data that cannot be stored in a public cloud. The advantages of using AltaVault for backup to the cloud include its open ability to work with one or more backup applications or built-in database backup products. This feature allows a flexible infrastructure in which one or more applications can move the data to a single AltaVault appliance. 2 Solution Description The solution tested in this guide consisted of a NetApp SolidFire cluster that provided iscsi LUNs to Windows 2008 R2 servers. NetBackup was used and leveraged the NetApp AltaVault OpenStorage (OST) integration. The AltaVault OST plug-in was installed on a media server. AltaVault was configured to replicate data to a private cloud storage system that was provided by NetApp StorageGRID Webscale object storage. Configuration components (Figure 3) included: SolidFire all-flash cluster AltaVault AVA-v2 virtual appliance Windows 2008 R2 server NetBackup 7.7 with NetApp AltaVault OST plug-in The network connections that were used for moving data were 10Gb Ethernet. SolidFire and AltaVault provided multiple 10Gb Ethernet ports for redundancy. To support disaster recovery in case of a site failure, the StorageGRID Webscale was configured as a grid in a separate data center from the primary data. Options for performing disaster recover include the use of a virtual AltaVault appliance at the second data center. An administrator can export a configuration file from AltaVault and import that file into a second virtual appliance and provide access to the data for restoration. After the initial restores for the disaster recovery of the NetBackup server, the primary application servers can be restored and brought back into operation. At that point, it s possible to continue backups to the DR AltaVault and reverse the process when the primary data center is back online. Figure 3) Tested configuration. NetBackup was configured to use Storage Lifecycle Policies. This feature of NetBackup works together with OST integration with AltaVault to provide NetBackup with catalog visibility. NetBackup gains visibility both into the local backup to the AltaVault cache and into the replication of the image data to cloud storage. 5 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

6 From the AltaVault appliance, two OST shares were configured to represent the local copy and the remote cloud copy of the backup images. A NetBackup policy was configured to back up the data from the iscsi LUN that was hosted on a SolidFire volume. The policy links the backup client, the data source, and the OST storage units with a Storage Lifecycle Policy, as shown in Figure 4. The completed backup job is shown in Figure 5. Figure 4) NetBackup Storage Lifecycle Policy. The Storage Lifecycle Policy shows the operations that NetBackup should do with the data. The first operation is to back up the data from the iscsi LUN to the AltaVault regular OST share. The next operation is for NetBackup to inform the AltaVault appliance to perform an optimized duplication of the backup images. The operation occurs on the AltaVault appliance so that NetBackup has two copies of the data but has to move the data only one time. The optimized duplication operation completes when all the data from the backup has been replicated to the cloud storage. 6 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

7 Figure 5) NetBackup job details. 3 Reporting Capabilities 3.1 SolidFire Reports NetApp SolidFire provides graphical reporting capabilities in the administration webpage (Figure 6). This webpage shows the overall cluster capacity utilization as well as bandwidth and performance information. 7 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

8 Figure 6) SolidFire main administration view. Additional reports provide detailed information about the performance of volumes. Bandwidth and latency are represented as graphs over time, and counters for current, average, and peak values are included (Figure 7). 8 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

9 Figure 7) SolidFire volume statistics. 3.2 AltaVault Reports AltaVault provides graphical reports in the administration webpage (Figure 8). The home page for the AltaVault GUI gives an overview of the appliance health and configuration. Capacity and replication information is provided to show an overall appliance status. 9 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

10 Figure 8) AltaVault main administration view. AltaVault provides additional graphs that are accessible from the Reports menu. The available reports include: Storage optimization Front-end throughput Back-end throughput Eviction Replication Cloud operations CPU utilization Memory, disk, and network interface counter statistics are also available The storage optimization report (Figure 9) shows details about how much data has been written to the AltaVault appliance over time. It shows details about the capacity of the appliance. The expanded data size is the raw data size that is written by the backup application. The deduplicated data size shows how much capacity is used for the data after it has been deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted. 10 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

11 Figure 9) AltaVault storage optimization report. The front-end throughput report (Figure 10) shows the performance of the data as it is being written by NetBackup. For AltaVault, throughput is typically on the data interfaces. With an OST share, data is sent to the AltaVault by using the OST protocol rather than a more typical SMB or NFS share. Figure 10) Front-end throughput. 11 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

12 The replication report (Figure 11) shows the new unique data and metadata that are being asynchronously replicated to the cloud object storage service. Figure 11) Replication report. The cloud operations report (Figure 12) is helpful when trying to understand the operations that are occurring for a cloud service provider. Often cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, charge for their storage service with a combination of operations and capacity used. Figure 13 shows a CPU utilization report. Figure 12) Cloud operations report. 12 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

13 Figure 13) CPU utilization report. 4 Summary NetApp SolidFire and AltaVault provide a highly flexible and scalable solution to address the common challenges that IT organizations face. SolidFire is a market leader in all-flash storage systems that are built for the next-generation data center. By leveraging the SolidFire all-flash architecture, with volume-level quality-of-service controls, customers now can obtain predictable storage performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. Because the resources of all SolidFire nodes are aggregated, capacity and performance scale with the addition of each node to the system. The result is a single, high-performance storage solution that enables large-scale infrastructures to scale efficiently, on demand, and without downtime or impact to application performance. SolidFire enables administrators to deploy new applications and capabilities faster and with greater agility to increase application performance and predictability while also raising operational efficiency and reducing cost. The SolidFire API further enables automation of every aspect of storage provisioning, management, monitoring, and reporting. With SolidFire, administrators can reduce or eliminate their disparate islands of storage by confidently deploying a storage system that is purpose-built to power large-scale infrastructure and fuel workload consolidation. From a backup standpoint, AltaVault offers flexibility with a local appliance that provides the remote copy of backup data for off-site backups without requiring moving tapes from libraries to trucks and back. AltaVault provides investment protection with cloud storage by enabling a very high level of data reduction, specifically designed for backup applications. Achieving superior optimization both lowers the cost of storing the data in a cloud service and greatly enhances data replication efficiency. Further investment protection is provided by the AltaVault cloud agility feature. As relationships change with cloud service providers or as other changes require data to be moved from private to public cloud services, AltaVault can migrate the backup data transparently to the backup application. 13 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

14 Both AltaVault and SolidFire provide web-based administration interfaces for simplified remote management. This feature is important to organizations with teams that are dispersed geographically or that are based in remote locations. The combined solution of SolidFire and AltaVault leverages all the modern features to provide the ability to scale up or down as business needs change, enabling a dynamic IT infrastructure to match a dynamic market. 14 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

15 Version History Version Date Document Version History Version 1.0 August 2016 Initial release. 15 Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

16 Refer to the Interoperability Matrix Tool (IMT) on the NetApp Support site to validate that the exact product and feature versions described in this document are supported for your specific environment. The NetApp IMT defines the product components and versions that can be used to construct configurations that are supported by NetApp. Specific results depend on each customer s installation in accordance with published specifications. Copyright Information Copyright NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S. No part of this document covered by copyright may be reproduced in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or storage in an electronic retrieval system without prior written permission of the copyright owner. Software derived from copyrighted NetApp material is subject to the following license and disclaimer: THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY NETAPP AS IS AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WHICH ARE HEREBY DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL NETAPP BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. NetApp reserves the right to change any products described herein at any time, and without notice. NetApp assumes no responsibility or liability arising from the use of products described herein, except as expressly agreed to in writing by NetApp. The use or purchase of this product does not convey a license under any patent rights, trademark rights, or any other intellectual property rights of NetApp. The product described in this manual may be protected by one or more U.S. patents, foreign patents, or pending applications. RESTRICTED RIGHTS LEGEND: Use, duplication, or disclosure by the government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS (October 1988) and FAR (June 1987). Trademark Information NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go Further, Faster, AltaVault, ASUP, AutoSupport, Campaign Express, Cloud ONTAP, Clustered Data ONTAP, Customer Fitness, Data ONTAP, DataMotion, Flash Accel, Flash Cache, Flash Pool, FlashRay, FlexArray, FlexCache, FlexClone, FlexPod, FlexScale, FlexShare, FlexVol, FPolicy, GetSuccessful, LockVault, Manage ONTAP, Mars, MetroCluster, MultiStore, NetApp Fitness, NetApp Insight, OnCommand, ONTAP, ONTAPI, RAID DP, RAID-TEC, SANshare, SANtricity, SecureShare, Simplicity, Simulate ONTAP, SnapCenter, SnapCopy, Snap Creator, SnapDrive, SnapIntegrator, SnapLock, SnapManager, SnapMirror, SnapMover, SnapProtect, SnapRestore, Snapshot, SnapValidator, SnapVault, SolidFire, StorageGRID, Tech OnTap, Unbound Cloud, WAFL, and other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. A current list of NetApp trademarks is available on the web at TR Back Up SolidFire Storage to the Cloud by Using AltaVault 2016 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.