One Solution For Almost Any Storage-Related Problem

Aberdeen AberSAN Z-Series & Its Web-Based GUI
Offer Simplified Hard Drive Management

In most cases, it’s safe to say that the more parts something has, the more complicated it is. This sentiment fits the world of mass storage solutions perfectly. It’s relatively easy to locate and manage one hard drive in a single desktop computer or even as many as eight hard drives in a larger storage platform, but the difficulty increases to new highs when dozens or hundreds of drives are involved. While current ZFS-based offerings allow you to alphabetize hard drives according to unique identifiers, there is no simple or intuitive way to know exactly where that drive is in the array.

“Adding, removing, or replacing a hard drive typically rearranges the list,” says Yuval Bymel, R&D engineer at Aberdeen. “These hard drive changes make it impossible to have a label on the system showing the correct order of the drives at any given time. Under ideal conditions, this may be an adequate solution. But when a drive fails, or if it completely disappears from that list, there is no easy way to identify the slot in which that drive resides.”

To help data center and IT managers overcome this hard drive hassle, Aberdeen built its Z-Series line of scalable storage products with its proprietary Web-based GUI that makes it easy to not only identify the hard drive, but also pinpoint its exact location in the array. This GUI goes above and beyond the traditional ZFS system to make hard drive swaps or fixes quicker and easier.

Scalable Storage Products

Aberdeen’s Z-Series is a line of scalable storage products designed to be customized to your needs. Whether you need to store a few terabytes of data or as much as a petabyte or more, the Z-Series platform can handle it. Aberdeen also made sure these solutions would be ready for future use and offers 10Gb Ethernet or 8Gb Fibre connectivity to the storage solutions as an optional add-on.

The GUI built into Aber-deen’s Z-Series line of solutions creates an accurate graphical representation of your entire array, letting you see the physical location of a server’s hard drives without manually searching through the array. When you click an individual drive, the GUI shows you its location on the server itself as well as its physical location within the array. And the GUI will also take any changes you’ve made into account. “You can rest assured the GUI matches the server’s hard drive slot label and retains that order no matter which drives you use, how many you have, or even if you have to replace a failed drive,” Bymel says.

The Z-Series GUI also lets you select which drive you want to replace while keeping all of your hard drives in the correct order. You can even rearrange the order at any given time or move your drives to another enclosure. Regardless of how you choose to arrange or manage your drives, the Z-Series GUI will keep up with you and provide the same identification and location information based on the new configuration.

Easier To Use

Aberdeen’s addition of the Web-based GUI serves to make the Z-Series even easier to use in the data center. The platform is scalable enough to support a wide range of storage needs and can scale to as much as a petabyte of storage or more because the GUI makes it easier to locate, swap out, or move hard drives.  Regardless of how large or small your storage needs, Aberdeen can help with a solution that will relieve your hard drive headaches. 

 

"Aberdeen’s Z-Series line of scalable storage solutions are built with a ZFS-based file management system as well as a helpful, Web-based GUI that makes it easy to identify and locate specific hard drives in an array."

The Means To Expand ~ Aberdeen Helps Enable Growth At G & G Squared Enterprises

One of the mission statements that Aberdeen displays prominently on its Web site (www.aberdeeninc.com) is “Perfecting the science of scalability. Because one size does not fit all.” Put another way, Aberdeen has the experience, personnel, and ability to assist any company with its individual server and storage needs regardless of its size.

It’s this capability that G & G Squared Enterprises (www.gdickinson.com) discovered when it set out to replace its existing bank of aging servers and open the company to the new market of virtual data centers, says G & G CEO George Dickinson II.

Going Virtual

Originally operating as a private Web hosting provider for individuals and select companies, G & G took its offerings public in 2005. Today, Dickinson describes G & G as providing customers a “place where small businesses are encouraged to develop their Web potential through the use of Web hosting technology” and establish a Web experience to increase their Web awareness and audiences.

Dickinson says the company’s customer base ranges “from the little mom-and-pop shops to medium-sized business.”

In early 2011, the company found itself in need of upgrading its servers. Before ultimately selecting products from Aberdeen to fill its needs, G & G conducted research that involved comparing servers and storage servers from several other well-known competitors. “When comparing all systems configured the same, Aberdeen was the lowest price,” Dickinson says. After speaking with Aberdeen and downloading all the spec sheets, the company purchased its equipment from Aberdeen in April 2011.

G & G purchased an AberNAS 167LX NAS from Aberdeen’s AberNAS 160LX Series, which includes models based on Intel’s quad-core Nehalem Xeon E5506 platform. The models also include 3GB of ECC DDR3 memory, four RAID-optimized (0, 1, 5, 6) and hot-swappable SATA 3Gbps drives, and a SAS expansion port that enables connecting to various Aberdeen XDAS storage models.

Suitable for small businesses on up to high-end IT environments, the 1U VMware-certified, Linux-based (64-bit, enterprise-class), and iSCSI/IP SAN ready AberNAS 160LX Series models range from 2TB to 12TB storage included.

G & G also purchased an Aberdeen Stirling 56T Mini 1U Rack, a SuperServer 6015V-MRB Mini-1U Rack Dual Xeon server based on Intel Nehalem processors and offering up to 16GB of ECC FBDIMM DDR2 memory.  Dickinson says the process from unboxing to implementing the new equipment only took about an hour and a half. And the products have “exceeded the planned project,” he says, something that has enabled G & G to open itself up for new projects in coming years.

A Warranty That Entices

Beyond Aberdeen’s experience, Dickinson says, he was also enticed by the standard five-year warranty Aberdeen offers, the off-the-shelf replacement parts provided, and its designation as a VMware-certified partner—all of which are offered at a “fraction of the cost of competitors,” Dickinson says. “After doing years’ worth of researching,” he says, Aberdeen was “exactly what the company needed” to complete its virtualization project.

It was the five-year warranty, however, that “was the first thing that enticed me,” Dickinson says. Aberdeen provides the warranty with all its fully configured rackmount servers, including preconfigured Stirling servers and custom-designed servers, warranting the models from the date they’re shipped to be free of material defects and covering workmanship defects for the product’s lifetime.

In addition, Dickinson says, “The support team is great. I have not had any issues with the equipment.” And, he says, G & G is “enjoying the added space and lowered utility bills” it has experienced since its purchase. 

Aberdeen AberNAS 167LX & Stirling 56T Mini 1U Rack

A customizable Linux-based, enterprise-class network-attached storage server built on an open storage platform and deployable in companies ranging from small startups to those with large IT environments. Featuring the Intel^®  Xeon^® Processor

Plan For & Perform A Server Upgrade ~ Know The Costs & Infrastructure Requirements Before You Dive In

First Things First

Mapping out short-and long-terms goals, along with corresponding strategies, is vital to a successful server upgrade. Mark Bowker, Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst says that because server upgrades often align with new IT projects, applications, or application upgrades, it’s important that “IT focus on both the lifecycle of the application and how it aligns with the expected life of the server and account for planned and unplanned scale.” IT should also know its options. Too often, Bowker says, IT purchases server with more capacity than needed, which provides the comfort of extra headroom but also incurs additional expense. “IT should understand what the latest processor chipset is on the market and what the stated roadmap of the chip manufacturers are,” he says. “This will help avoid buying into servers that are at the end of a product lifecycle.”

According to Max Haskvitz, knowing the enterprise’s hard- ware and networking platform is the most important aspect of a server upgrade, but having redundancy in place is also “beyond important, “he says. “Network and data migration are huge issues every enterprise has to deal with; however, if done with an eye for detail, it shouldn’t cause too many headaches. “Prior to an upgrade, he says, back up data and ensure that planned changes will work with the network and applications. “In general, I always would request that the vendor perform the upgrade, “he says. “That way it stays under warranty. If anything goes wrong, you have someone liable that’s outside the company, and you will get resolution in most cases quickly.”

Prep Work

Among the upgrade preparations that Charles Jansen, technical support manager at Aberdeen (www.aberdeeninc.com), suggests is meeting with decision makers to decide if an upgrade is really worthwhile, as “it may be more time and cost-effective to purchase a new server. “Additionally, schedule down- time to complete the upgrade, determine how long the server will be down—“It can take 24 to72 hours just to build a new RAID group using 1TB/2TB/3TB drives,” Jansen says—and make sure personnel will be avail-able during that timeframe. Also ensure that vendor support will be available, and gather and review device-related documentation to limit surprises, he says.

Jansen also suggests checking the server’s warranty status and whether it can be extended; double-checking and documenting specifications for the current BIOS, firmware, drivers, and internal components; and gathering server and component serial numbers in case support is required. If upgrading the CPU or memory, he says, “be certain that the system will support the additional components. Don’t mix CPU steppings, and don’t mix memory module ranks and speeds.”

If upgrading storage, he says, check that hard drives are compatible with the existing RAID controller; document all drive models, LBA, and firmware; avoid mixing within the same RAID group; and don’t use desktop-grade hard drives in RAID groups. If upgrading a RAID controller, ensure that the new controller is compatible with existing PCI-X o rPCI-E slots. “Most controllers designed to run on PCI-EGen 2 slots will not even be recognized on a PCI-E Gen 1 slot,” he says. If adding external storage, verify that there’s room for required storage host bus adapters, that a driver for the OS is available, and that all media and storage devices work properly, and test installation media on a test system to ensure reliability.

Test Your Work

Overall, Haskvitz advises to be prepared for anything to go wrong and take steps (clone drives, network maps, have a spare server ready, etc.) to avoid downtime. “Though some downtime will likely occur, “he says, “a well-prepared team and a network with redundancy has much more risk-avoidance than upgrading a mission-critical server with no backups [or] fall backs,” he says. Post-upgrade, test for throughput, bandwidth, stability, heat, and memory issues, he says. Good vendors will do this for you, he says, but IT should generally request that a 24-to 48-hourtesting suite be done on new machines and on memory, CPU, or hard drive upgrades.

For servers that have been in production several years, Jansen suggests using manufacturer utilities to test existing memory and hard drives before upgrading. “RAID consistency checks and CHKDSK should be performed to verify volume integrity,” he says, adding that these processes can be time-consuming on large data sets.

Bowker advises referring to hardware compatibility lists to ensure that the workload planned for the server is approved for that hardware. “Depending on the application, an extensive test of the application with a real- world workload should be [performed] on the system,” he says. In some large-scale environments, this may include significant vendor participation. For less-critical projects, IT can run its standard new-install checklist, he says.

Action Plan

■ Determine the time need- ed to perform upgrade.

■ Ensure personnel and vendor support will be available.

■ Gather  necessary warranty, installation, and support documentation.

■ Verify that the new components, stor- age, or oS are com- patible with system.

■ Verify that any external storage devices and backup media required work properly

■ Back up data on the server and test for recovery.

■ Perform  the upgrade.

■ Run desired reliability and performance test.

Get Started

 

Before you get started with a server upgrade or replacement, be sure to plan your budget carefully. Costs associated with a server upgrade can be staggering, says Charles Jansen, technical support manager at Aberdeen (www.aberdeeninc.com). Possible expenditures include those related to equip- ment, software licensing, labor, telco and power company services, facility improvements, vendor sup- port, and downtime. Additional costs related to supporting a new platform can include those for power, network cabling, cooling, rack space, and management personnel, he says. Enterprise Storage Group analyst Mark Bowker adds that most new servers now include server virtualization, and the addi- tional expense of server virtualization software can add up quickly if not planned for.

Top Tips

✔ Cover the basics. Factor in such basics as space requirements, power availability, and cooling and UPS capacity, says Mark Bowker, Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst. “It should establish a timeline from when they procure the server to when the application running on it goes live into production,” he says. this may require collabora- tion with network, security, storage, and application It teams.

✔ Ensure compatibility. Although seemingly obvious, make sure that upgrade compo- nents are compatible with the server. “Many times, I have seen memory just not work simply because its chipset doesn’t work with the board or the board doesn’t support any more memory,” says Max haskvitz.

✔ Are you qualified? only qualified personnel should be involved in an upgrade, says Charles Jansen, technical support manager at Aberdeen (www.aberdeeninc.com). this includes those “familiar with the server platform, operating system, and applications.” Bowker says an upgrade may involve numerous teams, particularly those involving mission-critical applications. “Each team may need to conduct a series of tests, and the time it takes to conduct these tests should be included in the project timeline,” he says. A data center operations manager will typically monitor the process, coordinate testing, and bring the server into production, he says.

Ref: Processor News Print