White. Paper. EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise. July, 2012

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1 White Paper EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise By Terri McClure, Senior Analyst July, 2012 This ESG White Paper was commissioned by EMC and is distributed under license from ESG. 2012, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

2 White Paper: EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise 2 Contents Containing Storage Costs and Managing Data Growth Continue to Challenge IT... 3 Scale-out Storage: Creating a Virtualized Storage Architecture for Efficiency and Agility... 4 Scale-out Isilon s Scale-out Approach... 6 How Virtualized Storage Enables Business Agility... 7 The Bigger Truth... 9 All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at

3 White Paper: EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise 3 Containing Storage Costs and Managing Data Growth Continue to Challenge IT Many companies are selling scale-out storage solutions. In fact, scale-out architectures have become pretty mainstream in enterprise IT shops, but the approaches vendors are taking with their scale-out offerings vary drastically. Some systems were designed from the ground up to be scale-out architectures and are truly scalable and virtualized, abstracting physical hardware resources with an overlying file system that provides a single sharable storage volume that spans and utilizes the resources of many physical nodes. Other vendors offer systems that tightly couple hardware and software, porting many scale-up attributes to scale-out storage, like hard mapping of volumes to specific nodes, and creating, managing, and allocating volumes and LUNs. There are a number of benefits to a truly virtualized scale-out approach that abstracts resources and removes the hard mapping of volumes and file systems to hardware nodes: this approach allows users to drive down both capital and operational costs with efficient resource utilization and low management overhead. These attributes are important in that respondents to an ESG research survey report that the top challenge associated with scaling their storage environment is operational costs, followed by rapid growth in unstructured data. In the top ten challenges, we also see that users are challenged with keeping down hardware costs and the management, optimization, and automation of data placement. 1 Figure 1. Top 10 Storage Environment Scaling Challenges In general, what would you say are your organization s biggest challenges in terms of scaling your storage environment to support your applications? Which would you characterize as the primary challenge for your organization? (Percent of respondents, N=30 Operational costs 11% 31% Rapid growth and management of unstructured data 11% 20% Data protection Hardware costs 10% 9% 28% 32% Primary storage challenge Need to support growing virtual server environments 9% 20% All storage challenges Data migration 8% 21% Management, optimization and automation of data placement 6% 17% Capacity balancing 5% 17% Running out of physical space Maintaining up-to-date information on infrastructure inventory and configurations 4% 4% 11% 15% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010.

4 White Paper: EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise 4 Scale-out storage systems can truly help users better cope with managing the data torrent that they are faced with, and can also help them overcome a number of the top challenges that they face when scaling their storage environment to meet application requirements. But when users are evaluating scale-out systems, it is critical for them to understand the differences in vendor implementations. The management overhead, automation, ease-ofuse, and overall footprint and utilization can vary widely depending on which approach is taken one that is a truly virtual shared resource pool or one that maintains tightly coupled relationships between file placement, physical drives, and nodes. Scale-out Storage: Creating a Virtualized Storage Architecture for Efficiency and Agility Scale-out 101 Scale-out storage really started in the NAS space users needed systems that could support the massive throughput requirements of high performance computing (HPC) and media and entertainment. Adoption slowly spread to other markets that had applications that required the advanced levels of throughput these systems can deliver, like medical and geographic imaging applications. Now, the need for some of the other benefits associated with scale-out storage systems is driving adoption in enterprise IT for everything from general purpose file sharing to private cloud foundations to virtual server storage farms. Why? Scale-out NAS systems can independently scale throughput and capacity by adding nodes that work in parallel to support throughput requirements yet are managed within a single namespace as a single volume, maintaining a single volume as new storage nodes (processor or capacity) are added. This allows users to create a massively scalable shared storage pool and drives storage efficiency. There are inherent benefits in scale-out platforms that give a path to reduction in operational costs. System scalability provides an ideal platform for consolidation. Scale-out systems help IT reduce management costs and footprint, which reduces floor space and power and cooling costs. And because of the consolidation onto a shared resource, utilization rates are much higher, so users get more bang for their storage buck. 2 Initially, scale-out systems were designed for specific, high throughput use cases and were developed with a limited feature set tuned for those highly sequential, big-data environments. Today, we re seeing advances in scale-out platforms that bring broader functionality and ease-of-use directly in line with enterprise IT environments basically a mashup of enterprise unified storage functionality and scale-out architecture. These systems are protocol-agnostic and support consolidation efforts for both block and file data, tiering across nodes with different price/performance profiles, and pooled storage that allows IT to manage storage as a shared IT resource along with features such as remote replication, thin provisioning, and snapshots. We ve also seen advances in ease-of-use and automation that enable IT to truly create a dynamic, responsive storage infrastructure with minimal administrative overhead. These platforms deliver the benefits of traditional enterprise-class storage systems plus the efficiency and scalability of scale-out systems. These systems: Truly virtualize the underlying hardware nodes, uncoupling the need for manually allocating and mapping data volumes, reducing management overhead. Autotune storage performance by utilizing system resources no matter which node within the pool has available capacity. Automatically absorb and load balance across new nodes as they are added. Provide secure, separate storage pools with varying price/performance/availability profiles. 2 For more information see ESG Brief, Scale-Out Storage, June 2010.

5 White Paper: EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise 5 Provide a flexible platform that supports application virtualization and aggregation. Scale from terabytes to petabytes, growing with user requirements, instead of ahead of them, optimizing the cost equation. Scale dynamically, always on, in any direction. Are protocol-agnostic, supporting multiple data access protocols and unifying the storage environment. Virtualize the storage environment in such a way that users have an always-on architecture that provides data access in the event of everything from a component outage to a lease rollover. Support enterprise-class storage features that are quickly becoming jacks-or-better requirements, such as thin provisioning, read-only snaps, and remote copy. What does this mean for IT? These are scale-out platforms without compromise that provide the ability to deploy a dynamic storage infrastructure that is flexible and grows with users, that supports the transition from lots of fixed, stovepiped storage systems to a shared, services-oriented information storage infrastructure. In this kind of infrastructure, capacity can be quickly provisioned, shared, and managed with fewer resources to give IT increased levels of agility and support new heights of storage scalability, efficiency, and agility. That s scale-out without compromise: a dynamic, unified storage architecture that provides simplicity at scale. The benefits that users report from deploying scale-out platforms are far reaching (see Figure 2) starting with improved scalability, the core benefit of scale-out platforms, and improved performance and availability. 3 But users report a number of benefits that translate right into cost savings and the bottom line. Nearly a third of those users surveyed report they improved utilization, while more than one in four reported reduced operational expense, one in four reported they could manage more capacity with fewer people, and almost one in five reported reduction in capital expenditures. The financial impact can really add up. 3 Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010.

6 White Paper: EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise 6 Figure 2. Scale-out Storage Benefits Which of the following benefits has your organization realized as the result of deploying scale-out storage? (Percent of respondents, N=56, multiple responses accepted) Improved scalability 57% Improved performance (I/Os) 45% Improved performance (throughput) Improved data availability Faster deployments/provisioning times 36% 34% 39% Improved storage hardware utilization Reduced operational expenditures Ability to more effectively support specific applications Improved data management Ability to manage more storage capacity with fewer administrator resources Reduced capital expenditures Reduced training time/costs 14% 18% 29% 27% 27% 27% 25% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, Isilon s Scale-out Approach Isilon has long been known as a pioneer in delivering commercial scale-out storage systems. It started out delivering systems designed for massive scale and supporting the unique streaming performance requirements associated with large files common to media and entertainment, manufacturing design, and bioinformatics. A number of clustered systems on the market were designed to tackle those challenges, and many of these clustered systems gained a reputation for management complexity, but Isilon, in commercializing its solution, created a scalable multi-node cluster that is actually easy to use, propelling broader adoption. Isilon s OneFS operating environment does not require hard mapping of hardware nodes to storage volumes it is a virtualized and automated solution, which makes it scalable and easy to manage. Because it is virtualized, OneFS provides users: Push button provisioning. When new capacity is added, users just need to push a button on the front panel of the hardware node to join it to the cluster. OneFS takes care of the rest, automatically absorbing the new capacity and resources, and load balancing data traffic to meet performance demands. No need to manually migrate data to load balance. A single volume to manage no matter how many hardware nodes (up to 144 as of this publication). The system is virtual and provides one mount point, so there is very little administrative overhead required.

7 White Paper: EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise 7 SmartPools virtual storage pools, combined with storage nodes that have different performance characteristics, so that users can align storage performance and cost. Leveraging the X-series for bandwidth-intensive applications, the S-series for I/O-intensive applications, and the NL-series for long term retention of archive data, provides users with broad general application support that can map to a variety of use cases yet maintain one physical system to manage. OneFS also has features commonly found in enterprise environments like snapshots, remote replication, and multiprotocol support (NFS, CIFS, iscsi, and next generation protocols like HFDS for Hadoop business analytics). But it is the fact that it is a truly virtualized cluster that really provides the management ease and efficiency that users need to minimize operating overhead. How Virtualized Storage Enables Business Agility Server virtualization deployment is broad, meaning many companies have deployed server virtualization. However, the same cannot be said of its depth, or just how many of the server workloads have been virtualized in the average user s environment. This is demonstrated by research ESG conducted in the fall of In that survey, a whopping 74% of North American enterprise and large midmarket organizations reported current use of server virtualization. But most of these organizations, a full 58% of them, had virtualized less than a third of the servers that they consider their potential virtualization targets. 4 Virtualized storage is well matched to today s increasingly virtualized server environments. Physically bound storage infrastructures can inhibit widespread server virtualization which makes sense when storage is hard wired in its configuration and the server is fluid. Virtual server environments are dynamic by nature virtual machines and new applications can be spun up in minutes, moved from physical machine to physical machine, and retired. As users come to expect fast provisioning and deployment of new applications, they will become less and less tolerant of delays and interruptions. Storage cannot continue to inhibit the widespread deployment of server virtualization. In fact, when ESG asked users what storage-specific enhancements needed to take place in order to enable more widespread server virtualization usage, 28% of the respondents said faster provisioning, and 25% said storage virtualization tied with better migration and a more scalable storage infrastructure. And while there are many ways to define storage virtualization (including external systems that virtualize heterogeneous systems), virtualizing across physical storage nodes, such as the approach Isilon OneFS takes to clustering, is certainly a valid homogenous approach. 4 Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.

8 White Paper: EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise 8 Figure 3. Storage-Specific Factors that Would Enable Broader Virtualization Usage From a storage infrastructure perspective, which of the following developments do you believe need to take place in order to enable more widespread server virtualization usage in your organization? (Percent of respondents, N=190, multiple responses accep Additional training for IT staff 33% Faster storage provisioning 28% More scalable storage infrastructure to support rapid virtual machine growth Increased use of storage virtualization 25% 25% Better storage migration tools 25% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, The unpredictable nature of virtualized environments means that there can be significant workload variation servers can be spun up quickly, and the storage infrastructure might be called on to support small files with high I/O activity, large files with streaming characteristics, or a mix. And as data ages and is accessed less frequently (which characterizes the bulk of data typical to any data center), it needs to be migrated to a cost-effective platform for long term retention. This is another area where Isilon s OneFS and SmartPools can have a major impact. Storage nodes can be added quickly and easily to expand capacity and then assigned to a pool with specific performance characteristics. As new applications are spun up, they can be pointed to the I/O-tuned pool, the throughput-tuned pool, or the dense, high capacity pool. As data ages, it can be migrated to the capacity optimized pool for costeffective retention. The system is policy-based. There are no manual migrations (such as those that would be required for a hard-mapped, physically bound system).

9 The Bigger Truth White Paper: EMC Isilon Scale-out Without Compromise 9 There are a lot of scale-out storage solutions on the market today but the approaches that vendors take can vary dramatically. There are two approaches to scale-out those that maintain hard mapping of data to LUNS, volumes and nodes, which are more focused on storage management, and those that automate data layout and management and are virtualized these systems allow users to focus on information management rather than storage management. Understanding which approach a vendor has taken, and how their approaches can affect things like overall management overhead, utilization (and the areas where poor utilization has ripple effects, like floorspace, and power and cooling), provisioning time, and ease-of-use, is critical. It is simply a question of where IT wants its managers to spend their time. In some cases, IT may want the greater control that can be obtained by maintaining a hard mapped environment but there are trade-offs to be made in terms of management overhead, scalability, utilization, ease-of-use, and provisioning time. Oftentimes, the ability to create virtual pools is enough to meet most users needs if they want some level of control and isolation. Either way users need to be aware that not all scale-out solutions are created equal, and evaluate the trade-offs accordingly.

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