File-Area Networking’s Early Adopters
By Connor, Deni
The 1,300 “citizens” of Colonial Williamsburg who work at the pre- Revolutionary War museum might be living in the past. But a modern- day challenge for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s IT department is the roughly 2TB of data and multimedia files they created last year to help serve tourists and history buffs.
“We could never get users to own up to doing any kind of lifecycle maintenance on their files . . . even though half of the data in their directions hadn’t been used in more than 180 days,” says Sean Maisey manager of IT operations and engineering. “If we just allowed users to save files and not manage it in any way we were on the road to needing another [2TB Network Appliance] FAS250 appliance every year”
Maisey last year began addressing the problem by installing a file-area network (FAN), a new-fangled counterpart to a storage area network (SAN). Whereas SANs handle block-level data, such as that from ROM database management systems, FANs deal with unstructured data, such as Word files, spreadsheets, digital images and PDF files.
As much as 80% of corporate networks’ data is unstructured, and traditional means of managing it have become inefficient and costly because companies have added individually managed network-attached storage (NAS) devices and file servers, Market watcher Enterprise Strategy Group says.
Brad O’Neill, senior analyst for the Taneja Group, says he coined the term FAN last year after finding “there was an increasing amount of confusion about which technology was available to solve the file- management problem.” EMC, Network Appliance and Brocade are among the vendors embracing the term.
What makes a FAN?
File-area networks can consist of a host of technologies, processes and products, including:
* NAS/SAN gateways, NAS devices and file servers.
* A method of presenting files using Unix/Linux Network File System or Microsoft Common Internet File System protocols.
* Management software for classification, virtualization and migration.
Some FANs involve new devices, such as file virtualization appliances. Colonial Williamsburg installed an Acopia ARX box in front of its Network Appliance and Windows file servers, enabling centralized file management and storage-capacity pooling. The setup allows for migrating less frequently accessed files to less- expensive storage systems.
“Maintenance was difficult with [separately managed filers],” Colonial Williamsburg’s Maisey says. “For example, with the Network Appliance filer, if we wanted to upgrade the operating system, we needed to rebuild all our volumes. We needed to use tape to move everything off and then on again – it was an onerous process that we avoided doing whenever possible.”
Early adopters
Maisey is using three 2TB Network Appliance FAS250 file servers to store home directories and shared departmental folders. Each server is mirrored to a Network Appliance NearStore R200 device located across Colonial Williamsburg’s campus.
Hubbard Benedict, systems engineer and team lead for storage services at digital media company Corbis in Seattle, has more than 100TB of images located on an array of storage devices. He deployed a FAN based on Brocade’s Tapestry StorageX software, Windows and Unix file servers, and EMC’s Celerra NAS array. Together they let him replicate and migrate data from one device to another.
“These images needed to be kept on appropriate storage platforms – what’s appropriate for one type of rendering isn’t necessarily appropriate for another,” Benedict says. “So pretty soon we had multiple vendors and storage platforms serving up different types of renderings of the same images, and managing that and moving it around has been tedious.”
Corbis has two levels of service and two distributed file systems for each level, Benedict says. “Some files that directly support the Web site or customer fulfillment have a higher level of availability. The raw scans, while being extremely important, are stored on a different type of storage.”
Jim Poehlman, chief information technologist for wireless network processor and software company Ubicom in Sunnyvale, Calif., says moving to a FAN has been driven largely by the need to keep storage systems up and running. He used to have to take parts of the network down for as long as six hours to migrate data from one array to another.
“It was critical that I extend the disk space without impacting any of the users or the jobs they were working on,” Poehlman says. “Any downtime would have cost us anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million and a potential revenue loss if we could not deliver products on time.”
Many products Poehlman reviewed required that client software be placed on each server or NAS appliance, but he didn’t want staff spending time on that. Ubicom opted for a NeoPath Networks appliance to virtualize disk space across arrays.
“It took me a half-hour to install and migrate data,” Poehlman says. “Users were online at the time writing and reading files; they didn’t see any hit in performance or any problems at all.”
Copyright Network World Inc. Mar 19, 2007
(c) 2007 Network World. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.