Ilja Coolen \ ICSS

I wasn’t aware of all the stuff F5 does, so I am glad to have been part of this, because the things they showed us were quite impressive. The online vMotion of a virtual machine between data centers is what really made the biggest impression if you ask me.

Not all live demo’s done by presenters go without flaw. That’s the biggest danger of doing live demo’s in front of an IT crowd. If something should go wrong, the IT crowd is sure to notice it. You might end up looking like a fool. But not here at the F5 Tech Field Day session. F5 could proudly rely on their own equipment and knowledge to pull of their demo without a problem.

For all the stuff we got to see, the data was hosted on a NFS share, so these demo’s certainly do not apply to all VMware installations. F5 strengths are not in the Fibre channel arena, but in the IP arena. In there, they are able to kick some serious IP ass.

I was shown some impressive network (WAN) optimization products like the BIG-IP  Local Traffic Managers and Global Traffic Managers. Load balancing and IP fail-over, all done, all working. I am not a networking guy, so I was actually more into the ARX series device. If you are more of IP guy or gall, try some of the other Tech Field Day blog posts.

ARX Series.

This device is a NAS virtualization product, a technology F5  acquired by buying Acopia in 2007. You can put this in front of one or more file serving devices, either CIFS or NFS based, and have all of this virtualized.

The applications and users in your environment will talk to the ARX device, which in turn will serve your data from it’s backend NAS devices like NetApp, HP PolyServ, Dell NX series or regular file servers.

With the ARX device you can define a whole bung of policies which control the management of your file data. Based on age, file extensions, or what ever policy you might want to set, the data can get moved to another file storage tier in your environment. You could move all your employees mp3 files to a low cost SATA array with no protection for instance. Many scenarios are possible, only limited by your imagination and wallet I guess.

Some additional features you would probably like to have in your environment, like virus scanning, is not available. You will still be relying on the methods in place on the file serving gear you are already using. Data protection of the files you are storing is also not a feature provided by the ARX. It is what it is. File virtualization. If you want data protection, you still would want to use the features your NAS devices provides, or rely on the more traditional methods like file based backup or NDMP. This product can help in reducing your backup volume though, by moving unused (or almost never used) data off to a tier that has different backup schemes, or maybe no backup at all (not my recommendation though).

The next step in tiering your data would be to put it into the ” cloud ” (here’s that term again) so you would no longer have to operationally manage this data in your infrastructure, including backup handling. The ARX has several API interfaces to the currently biggest cloud storage vendors ready to go. F5 showed us another successful demo in which they were able to show us just how seamless the integration works. From an end-user perspective there was no difference noticeable as to where the file was actually stored. With large files, you might experience some delay however. This was not shown in the demo, because it could take up a lot of our precious time.

The file will remain in the cloud, even if it is updated. The update of a file will not result in the file being stored on a local tier. This can cause some delay in the file manipulation transaction. Only new files will be matched to a policy to store it on a local tier. I have some reservations whether or not this is a good way to work. I would think storing the updated file locally would be the better way to go. I might be missing some detailed information on the policy options here. That’s because the session wasn’t long enough to go into it in that much detail. Feel free to comment on this post if you can offer more detailed info on the policies or have any other remark on this post.

The ARX box comes in three sizes.

1. ARX500
   1. Entry level, single power supply.
   2. 800 Mbps throughput.
   3. 2 x 1Gb/s.
   4. Supporting up to 600 users.
2. ARX2000
   1. A redundantly powered device.
   2. 4Gbps throughput.
   3. 12 x 1Gb/s.
   4. Supporting up to 6000 users.
3. ARX4000
   1. Like the ARX2000, a redundantly powered device.
   2. 12Gbps throughput.
   3. 2 x 10Gb/s.
   4. 12 x 1Gb/s.
   5. Supporting up to 12000 users.

There is a question I have about the maximum number of users it supports. The numbers are very high obviously, but are they based on -1- active session per user, or not? It is very rare for a user to have just -1- active session to a file server.

The device in itself is a single point of failure, no matter how robust the hardware and software is. If you want a high-availability solution, your should buy at least two, and put them in a cluster configuration. I wasn’t able to determine whether or not you could make it a stretched cluster to span two data centers to provide availability and disaster tolerance.

Data Manager

In case you might be curious on how much file data you have and how much of it is actually used, you could go discover your file data using the F5 Data Manager. You can try it for free for 90 days. That’s actually quite a long trial period.
Data Manager gives you some elaborate reports on your file data and profiles.

More on Data Manager…

The last couple of days were a blast. It deserves a special note that the organisation of the “Seattle 2010 Tech Field Day” was
phenomenal. Everything was taken care of. The delegates had nothing to worry about, except maybe trying to look good on camera. After a while you actually didn’t notice the camera crew anymore and you wouldn’t worry about your appearance anymore.

We gathered at the Cedarbrook Lodge (which was a stunningly beautiful place to stay at actually) and had a welcoming dinner on Wednesday. This dinner was intended to get to know each other a bit better. There were a couple of newbies (like me) among the delegates, so this was quite a nice way to get introduced.

A shuttle bus took us from one conference location to the other. The schedule was tight, but given the live discussion we had during the sessions, this was actually a good thing, otherwise this conference would take a week. The locations were absolutely great. We get to spend some time at the “Microsoft Partner Center” two days in a row, and we went to the Microsoft on campus shop. Some of you who know me, would probably think “what the heck is he doing in a Microsoft shop”, but I would actually have bought a outdoor type jacket. The dumb thing however was, there was no clothing in my size. Most of the stuff was in 2XL to 6XL (US size charts), were I am only an XL in the European size chart. This is somewhere like a US medium size . Hey, I am just saying….

We also visited the F5 Networks HQ, and the NEC America site in Seattle. We were welcomed and treated with much hospitality everywhere we went. NEC might not have the most fancy office interior, their presentation to me was actually one of the best. I can’t explain why exactly I feel like that, but I think it has something to do with the way Gideon Senderov (NEC Director, Product Management & Technical Marketing of Advanced Storage Products) showed his knowledge of the NEC gear we went to see. His in depth knowledge was absolutely astounding. I don’t mean to say the other vendor’s presenters didn’t know their stuff, the absolutely did, but Gideon rose way above them. NEC, like F5, Compellent, Veeam and NimbleStorage did some live demo’s on their gear. They made it all happen, not a single glitch. Another impression I had during the NEC session, was they were a bit more open and honest about what their gear could and could not do. Most other vendors try to avoid answering questions that lead to an answer that points out that their gear cannot do a specific thing. Mostly it’s not a big deal.

The launch of the Nimble Storage company and their product introduction was also a very great experience. I think it takes  courage to launch a product in front of a bunch of tech analysts and critics. But Nimble pulled it of just great, and the product made a great impression.

Looking back on those days, there is absolutely nothing negative to say about the organisation and effort that was put into this event by the organizers, Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett) and Claire Chaplais (@-I-Dont-Twitter) and the sponsors. It was a great experience and a big thank you is in order. It was great meeting you all and thank you for making me part of it.

TIP: For all you guys that read this blog, if you ever get to go to Seattle WA, make sure you take the Seattle Underground tour to get to know the Seattle history a little better. It costs about $15 (US) and takes some 90minutes, but this is so worth it. You’ll love. Be sure to leave a comment if you do though.

During these past presentations at Tech Field Day, the overall notion I got was that all (new) storage vendors announcing new products are putting the focus of connectivity at IP based storage primarily. Some are still putting in Fibre Channel as a method of connectivity, it isn’t their most important one anymore.
You can definitely notice the adoption of CEE (Converged Enhanced Ethernet) or DCB (Data Center Bridging) and it might still enable vendors to put in the FC protocol, but iSCSI and NFS/CIFS is actually getting much more attention than I would have anticipated. In the list of products we have discussed the last two days, there’s actually just one that has FC on board.

• NEC HYDRAstor (CIFS/NFS)
• Compellent, iSCSI and FC (Series 20, 30 and 40)
• Compellent NAS head
• NimbleStorage CS Series (iSCSI)
• F5 Networks (actually only file service virtualization as a storage product, but definitely IP based)

I know there’s way more vendors out there, but I just wanted to illustrate my observations of the last couple of days. For a complete list, I might be putting up a new post.

The 10Gb Ethernet is definitely changing the arena here, and FC might lose the dominance in the data-center after a renewal cycle or two.