Improved
Storage Management for Central Servers - NAS Solution
By
John Chan
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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:
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.
