Tag Archives: san

Nexsan Announces Unity NV4000

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Nexsan recently announced the Nexsan Unity NV4000. I had the chance to speak to Vincent Phillips (CEO), Judy Kaldenberg (SVP Sales & Marketing), and Mircea Turcu (VP of Engineering) about it, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

What Is It?

[image courtesy of Nexsan]

I’ve said it before (a little over a year ago as it happens), and I’ll say it again … in the immortal words of Silicon Valley: “It’s a box“. And a reasonably powerful one at that, coming loaded with the following specifications.

Supported Protocols SAN (Fibre Channel, iSCSI), NAS (NFS, SMB 1.0 to 3.0, FTP), Object (S3)
Disk Bays | Rack U 24 | 4RU
Supported Expansion Systems N/A
Maximum Raw Capacity 576 TB Raw
System Memory (DRAM) per controller up to 128GB
FASTier 2.5″ SSD Drives (TB) 1.92 | 3.84 | 7.68 | 15.36
SAS SSDs (TB) 1.92 | 3.84 | 7.68 | 15.36 | 30.72
SAS HDDs (TB) 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 16| 18 | 20 | 22 | 24
Host Connectivity 16/32Gb FC | 10/25/40/100 GbE

It’s a dual-controller platform, with dual Intel Xeon Silver 4309Y CPUs (2.8 GHz CPU, 8 cores, 16 threads) per controller, and you get access to the following features included as part of the platform license:

  • Nexsan’s FASTier® Caching – Use solid-state to accelerate the performance of the underlying spinning disks
  • Nexsan Unity software version 7.2, with important enhancements to power, enterprise-class security, compliance, and ransomware protection
  • Enhanced Performance – Up to 1,000,000 IOPs
  • Third-Party Software Support – Windows VSS, VMware, VAAI, Commvault, Veeam Ready Repository, and more
  • Multi-Protocol Support – SAN (Fibre Channel, iSCSI), NAS (NFS, CIF, SMB1 to SMB3, FTP), Object (S3), 16/32GB FC, 10/25/40/100 GbE
  • High Availability – No single point-of-failure architecture with dual redundant storage controllers, redundant power supplies and RAID

 

Other Features (via Unity 7.2)

Along with the standard Unity features, with the release of Unity 7.2, you also get access the new Cloud Connector, offering bi-directional sync for files / directories with cloud storage solutions such as AWS S3, Azure Blob, and Unity Object store. As well as this, an SMB Access Audit capability has been introduced with the new version of Unity, given administrators the ability to view file access by user via the SMB protocol.

 

Use Cases

The Unity NV series of arrays is well suited to the following workloads:

  • Media and entertainment;
  • Hypervisor storage (primary and secondary);
  • Digital video surveillance; and
  • Backup and recovery storage.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I wrote about the NV6000 when it was announced in January last year. At the time I wondered, somewhat tongue in cheek, who really cared about storage array announcements in this age of hyperscaler storage solutions. But I think plenty of people should and do care that these kinds of products are out there in the market. As with the other Unity solutions, the NV4000 provides users some degree of flexibility when it comes to the protocols they want to use (SMB, NFS, iSCSI) and the transport mechanisms (FC, Ethernet). For every pundit pronouncing the death of fibre channel, there are any number of folks out in the field still running those networks from a bygone era, and quite happily to boot. The smaller footprint of the NV4000 may not be that exciting for those of us craving large scale storage capacities and high performance arrays to do the heavy lifting for our critical workloads, but these kinds of solutions are great at the edge or in places where you can’t simply roll in a full rack of storage. As well as this, in a society increasingly fascinated with surveillance, solutions like the NV4000 provide a robust solution for the storage of CCTV footage, and Nexsan also seems very focussed on solving this problem efficiently and cost-effectively.

Hybrid storage is still a real thing in the wild, because people are still looking for ways to store more and more data in a cost effective manner, and providing support for spinning disks in storage arrays, with some clever caching / storage tiering up front, is one way of doing that. Particularly when that storage needs to happen at the edge, or in places where clouds can’t be easily reached. While it seems like an odd concept for people working with data in places where big fibre runs exist to their hyperscaler of choice, there are plenty of places (like most of Australia) where moving large volumes of data between the cloud and local workloads still isn’t a terribly fast (or cheap) activity. Until that problem is somehow solved (and I know it’s being worked on by many companies) midrange, on-premises storage isn’t dead yet.

NetApp Enterprise Storage Announcements – February 2025

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NetApp recently made some announcements about enhancements to its enterprise storage line of products. I thought I’d share a few notes here.

 

ASA A-Series

If you’re unfamiliar with the ASA line of devices, it’s NetApp’s all-flash SAN solution. There are a few models already available (see the data sheet here) and now there are three more A-series models: the ASA A50, ASA A30, and ASA A20.

[image courtesy of NetApp]

Major Hardware Innovations

There’s an integrated compression offload engine with Intel® QAT®1 (this is not available with the ASA A20), delivering the following benefits:

  • Next generation CPU architecture provides increased performance for resource-intensive tasks and processing
  • Always-on enhanced storage efficiency without impacting performance
  • Up to 160Gb/s data compression

It takes advantage of PCIe Gen 5, as well as DDR 5 Memory. According to NetApp, this delivers twice the clock speed for faster memory access and 50% more throughput for large data transfers. Additionally, there’s support for 64Gb Fibre Channel and NVMe/FC, as well as 100GbE and NVMe/TCP support. They use Titanium power supplies with a 95% efficiency rating.

Storage efficiency

You also get access to “always on, inline, data reduction”. There’s no cold data policy to manage, nothing for customers to configure and, according to NetApp, it’s easy to meet Storage Efficiency Guarantee ratios. Thanks to QAT, you’ll never need to choose between performance or efficiency.

 

New FAS and EF-Series systems

FAS50

The FAS50 delivers quite a punch in a small 2U form factor, with:

  • Optimised I/O flexibility;
  • Improved price/performance value;
  • Enabled for future security hardware offload; and
  • Released with ONTAP 9.16.1 GA.

[image courtesy of NetApp]

EF Series

NetApp has also announced the availability of new EF-Series arrays – the EF300C and EF600C.

[image courtesy of NetApp]

A few things to note with the EF300C and EF600C:

  • The default configuration is a single Dynamic Disk Pool (DDP) which is automatically created using all available drives for simplicity in management
  • There is support for 30TB or 60TB capacities (but by default there is no mixing of capacities in a shelf)
  • There is only support for QLC NVMe SSDs (No mixing of QLC or TLC NVMe SSDs allowed)
  • Available with a minimum of 12x up to a maximum of 24x QLC NVMe SSDs (No expansion shelf capability)

 

Thoughts

It’s been a minute since I wrote about a storage company’s product announcement. The news from NetApp piqued my interest, however, as it seems like the portfolio of products and options has developed into something broader than what NetApp was traditionally known for (and I know there’s even more news that was announced that I haven’t covered here). Whilst I talk a lot about how useful the cloud is in my day job, it’s hard to dispute that I/O (and storage in general) can still have a massive impact on the performance and usability of critical and not so critical applications alike. Additionally, having options in terms of scalability, performance, and transport mechanisms, is key to delivering the right storage platforms to the applications (and end users) that need them. But while I’ve dumped a lot of speeds and feeds into this article, ultimately the success of a storage company like NetApp is more about how the platforms can be managed, integrated with other systems, and upgraded from one version to the next.

If you’re running everything in one of the hyperscalers (or more than one, for that matter). you’re not going to be terribly interested in what NetApp is selling. Despite the fact that NetApp is doing some cool stuff with hyperscalers as well (that I’ll cover in a separate post). But a large percentage of the world’s critical workloads are still hosted on what we might term “traditional” storage appliances hosted in data centres across the globe and accessed and managed in a similar fashion to the way they were 5 or 10 years ago. But that doesn’t mean that companies like NetApp aren’t innovating. Indeed, looking at some of the specs and numbers being touted here, it’s easy to see why companies are sticking with the likes of NetApp when it comes to hosting enterprise workloads on enterprise storage. I don’t think the end of traditional storage is here by any stretch, and I’m pretty sure there’s more innovation to come.

Random Short Take #14

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 14 – giddy-up!

EMC – naviseccli – checking your iSCSI ports are running at the correct speed

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It’s been a while since I wrote about naviseccli and I admit I’ve missed it. I once wrote about using naviseccli to identify MirrorView ports on a CLARiiON array. Normally the MirrorView port is consistently located, but in that example we’d upgraded from a CX3-80 to a Cx4-960 and it was in a different spot. Oh how we laughed when we realised what the problem was. Anyway, we’ve been doing some work on an ever so slightly more modern VNX5300 and needed to confirm that some newly installed iSCSI SLICs were operating at the correct speed. (Note that these commands were run from the Control Station).

The first step is to list the ports

=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~= PuTTY log 2016.09.07 08:59:37 =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=
[nasadmin@NAS001 ~]$ navicli -h A_VNXSP connection -getport

SP:  A
Port ID:  8
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a8
iSCSI Alias:  0017.a8
IP Address:  192.168.0.13
Subnet Mask:  255.255.255.0
Gateway Address:  192.168.0.254
Initiator Authentication:  false

SP:  A
Port ID:  9
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a9
iSCSI Alias:  0017.a9

SP:  A
Port ID:  10
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a10
iSCSI Alias:  017.a10

SP:  A
Port ID:  11
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a11
iSCSI Alias:  017.a11

SP:  B
Port ID:  8
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.b8
iSCSI Alias:  0017.b8
IP Address:  192.168.0.14
Subnet Mask:  255.255.255.0
Gateway Address:  192.168.0.254
Initiator Authentication:  false

SP:  B
Port ID:  9
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.b9
iSCSI Alias:  0017.b9

SP:  B
Port ID:  10
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.b10
iSCSI Alias:  017.b10

SP:  B
Port ID:  11
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.b11
iSCSI Alias:  017.b11

Once you’ve done that, you can list the port speed for a particular port

[nasadmin@NAS001 ~]$ navicli -h A_VNXSP connection -getport -sp a -portid 8 -speed
SP:  A
Port ID:  8
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a8
iSCSI Alias:  0017.a8
IP Address:  192.168.0.13
Subnet Mask:  255.255.255.0
Gateway Address:  192.168.0.254
Initiator Authentication:  false
Port Speed:  1000 Mb
Auto-Negotiate:  Yes
Available Speeds:  10 Mb
-               :  100 Mb
-               :  1000 Mb
-               :  Auto

If you have a lot of ports to check this may not be the most efficient way to do it (ioportconfig may be more sensible), but if your network team are reporting on one particular port being an issue – this is a great way to narrow it down.

EMC Elect 2016

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Elect2016-web

I am very pleased to say that I’ve been once again selected to participate in EMC Elect 2016. If you’re unfamiliar with it, EMC Elect is an EMC programme similar in style to Microsoft’s MVP programme and VMware’s vExpert recognition. You can read more about it here. There’s also a handy FAQ here. This is my third time in four years and I’m excited to be in again. The official list is here, and the people I know on it are all passionate about what they do. Jonathan has a write-up here, Jon has a post here and Rob has a post here.

EMC announces new VNXe

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EMC World is just around the corner and, as is their wont, EMC are kicking off early with a few cheeky product announcements. I don’t have a lot to say about the VNXe, as I don’t do much in that space, but a lot of people might find this recent announcement of interest. If press releases aren’t your thing, here is a marketing slide you might enjoy instead.

vnxe3200_1

The cool thing about this is that the baby is getting the features of the bigger model, namely the FAST Suite, thin provisioning, file dedupe and MCx. Additionally, a processor speed improvement will help with the overall performance of the device. There’s a demo simulator you can check out here.

EMC also announced a new feature for VNX called D@RE, or Data-At-Rest-Encryption. This should be available as an NDU in Q3 2014. I hope to have more info on that in the future.

Finally, Project Liberty was announced. This is basically EMC’s virtualised VNX, and I’ll have more on that in the near future.

And if half-arsed blog posts aren’t your thing, I urge you to check out Jason Gaudreau’s post covering the same announcement. It’s a lot more coherent and useful.

EMC – VNX: Splash Screen weirdness or How I spent my recent public holiday in a DC

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Here’s a picture you don’t see every day.

vnx_splash_cropped

 

I spent a recent public holiday assisting a client move some VNX5500s between racks in their data centre. Not terribly exciting, but it helped them out of a spot. Something that was done as part of the shift was a change in SP IP addresses. There’s an article on support.emc.com that refers to Primus ID emc274335 and some Java misconfiguration. I’m not entirely convinced though, because we observed that Unisphere would (eventually) come good, without us making any changes to the client settings. In any case, I thought it was something interesting. The arrays were running VNX OE R31 and R32.

EMC – VNX: USM reports an error “Assistance needed for upgrade”

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If you’re trying to do an OE upgrade on a VNX you might get the following error after you’ve run through the “Prepare for Installation” phase.

USM_error

Turns out you just need to upgrade USM to the latest version. You can do this manually or via USM. Further information on this error can be found on support.emc.com by searching for the following Primus ID: emc321171.

Incidentally, I’d just like to congratulate EMC on how much simpler it is upgrade FLARE / VNX OE nowadays than it was when I first started on FC and CX arrays. Sooo much nicer …

 

 

EMC – VNX / CX4 LUN Allocation Owner and Default Owner

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Mat’s been doing some useful scripting again. This time it’s a small PERL script that identifies the allocation owner and default owner of a pool LUN on a CX4 or VNX and lets you know whether the LUN is “non-optimal” or not. For those of you playing along at home, I found the following information on this (but can’t remember where I found it). “Allocation owner of a pool LUN is the SP that owns and maintains the metadata for that LUN. It is not advised to trespass the LUNs to an SP that is not the allocation owner. This introduces lag. The SP that provides the best performance for the pool LUN. The allocation owner SP is set by the system to match the default SP owner when you create the LUN. You cannot change the allocation owner after the LUN is created. If you change the default owner for the LUN, the software will display a warning that a performance penalty will occur if you continue.”

There’s a useful article by Jithin Nadukandathil on the ECN site, as well as a most excellent writeup by fellow EMC Elect member Jon Klaus here. In short, if you identify NonOptimal LUN ownership, your best option is to create a new LUN and migrate the data to that LUN via the LUN Migration tool. You can download a copy of the script here. Feel free to look at the other scripts that are on offer as well. Here’s what the output looks like.

 output1

 

 

Stormons Professional Edition Available

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Disclaimer: I don’t work for Stormons, and I’ve not been compensated for this post. I just think it’s a cool product that is worth checking out.

Didier from Stormons recently got in touch to let me know there’s now a Professional version of the software available now as part of a subscription deal. I’ve previously covered Stormons here and here and think it’s pretty good stuff – and definitely worth checking out – particularly if you have a large environment to work with. Apparently EMC in Bangalore are heavy users of the product as well. The Professional Edition is offered on a subscription basis, and they’re running a discounted rate until May to celebrate the release. Find out more about it here. You can also still access the free edition from the downloads page.