Juno Taps SANs For Capacity
MITCH WAGNER
Earlier this year, free Internet service provider Juno Online Services was close to hitting the limit on its conventional server-attached storage. It turned to a storage area network to give itself more room and flexibility.
Juno, with 3.05 million active users, began using server-attached storage about three years ago. This year, it found that at 1 terabyte of data, storage capacity was just about maxed out, said Alex Sarafian, Juno's senior vice president.
"That solution served us well, but as we continued to grow and had to manage growing volumes of information, we found we were outgrowing what we had both from a performance standpoint and a capacity standpoint," Sarafian said.
Each storage chassis had a RAID controller with a limit on the number of disks it could manage. After that limit was reached, adding storage meant Juno had to shut down the storage subsystem and either add a new controller or buy an additional RAID subsystem.
Adding subsystems is more expensive than just adding disks, and it would also prevent Juno from enjoying the benefits of RAID. Through a process known as striping, a RAID subsystem can appear to an application server as a single, large disk. However, data cannot be striped across multiple subsystems.
Moving to a SAN provided Juno with fast performance and flexibility. The data on a SAN is accessible on multiple servers, while server-attached storage localizes accessibility to the server the subsystem is attached to, Sarafian said.
"If I wanted to cut over an application from one machine to another, we wouldn't have to copy data from one server to another. Both servers would have access to the same pool of data on the SAN," he said.
That capability to share storage between servers makes SANs popular among service providers and e-businesses, said Dave Hill, an analyst with Aberdeen Group. Companies doing business on the Internet will use big farms of identical small servers, all accessing the same data.
"The servers at the front end act like processing switches," Hill said. "They are commodities. You take one out and plug in a new one, and if you do it right, it shouldn't affect the storage. You shouldn't even have to reboot."
After comparison-shopping with EMC, Juno bought a Vivant system from MTI Technology Corp. because it was more cost-effective, Sarafian said, although he declined to provide specifics.
The company uses the MTI systems for 5 terabytes of data, including billing, advertising data, user demographics and trouble tickets. There are subsystems in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, each of which carry a subset of the overall company data.
While the company is best known for its free, advertiser-supported Internet service, Juno also offers for-pay dial-up services, DSL services through a partnership with Covad and cable connectivity in partnership with AT&T.
Juno uses Sun Microsystems servers running an Oracle database for billing and Sybase to track ad data.
VENDORS SAY INFINIBAND IS NO PIPE DREAM
Terry Sweeney
Crank it up to Petabit Ethernet-that's 1,000 trillion, or a quadrillion bits per second. But high-speed networking standards won't fully deliver on the promised cascades of bandwidth if the bus in the workstation, or worse, the server, isn't upgraded in parallel.
A vendor-led initiative, the InfiniBand Trade Association, envisions a redesigned motherboard to run at 2.5 Gbps. Companies like Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are working on a spec that would transform memory, processors and I/O subsystems, which now max out at about 500 megabytes per second.
Many vendors and OEMs are already investing in InfiniBand, Ethernet and other high-speed technologies. "I think 2001 will be a year of intense vendor interest and activity," says Jonathan Eunice, research director at Illuminata Inc. "But since there's not a 1.0 version of the standard yet, I think we're looking at 2002 for products from a user perspective."
InfiniBand, born of the merger between Intel's Next Generation I/O plan and Future I/O devised by Compaq, HP and IBM, describes the technology as a network approach to I/O. Channel adapters pass messages to the end points and handle transmission protocols, while the InfiniBand switching function inside the bus ensures information gets to its appropriate destination.
Workstations and servers used to be speedier than the underlying network infrastructure, but the infrastructure has surpassed the end devices as it enters the gigabit threshold. "InfiniBand has the potential of turning that around," says Marshall Eisenberg, director of product marketing at Foundry Networks Inc. "Some say that desktops can't take advantage of all the bandwidth because the motherboard is constrained."
And in the era of downloadable music, it's not too much of a stretch to anticipate DVDs that can be downloaded and stored, or streaming video and other myriad networking functions in the home or office-100 Mbps Ethernet, multiple voice channels and fax server access for starters. It's like trying to drink from the proverbial firehose.
Still, InfiniBand is not primarily about the TV set top, desktop or personal computer. "InfiniBand is less client focused," says Eunice. "It's an issue of how computers, racks and servers are constructed underneath the covers."
Some InfiniBand critics believe that the emerging PCI-X specification will be sufficient to connect server clusters, storage systems and the Internet. Others say Gigabit Ethernet or storage standard Fibre Channel are optimal interfaces to improve throughput.
But in an industry where marketers are rarely hesitant to paint black and white scenarios, networks inhabit a gray area. Vendors and their customers won't be backed into a corner, regardless of which bus technology they buy or build.
"If InfiniBand is successful it doesn't mean that other forms of networking like Gigabit Ethernet will be pushed aside," Eunice says.
"Ethernet is familiar and it's got great commodity status that InfiniBand and Fibre Channel can't touch."
Stay tuned to see which sector attains petabit status first.
internetwk.com
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September 11, 2000, Issue: 803
Section: TOP OF THE WEEK
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Network Appliance Enters Enterprise Storage Market -- SYSTEM STORES 12 TERABYTES OF DATA; MULTIPLE APPLIANCES CAN BE CLUSTERED FOR FAILOVER
MARTIN J. GARVEY
Network Appliance Inc. makes its entry into the enterprise storage market this week with a system it says will provide the infrastructure companies need to move and manage information. But according to analysts, the network-attached storage vendor isn't quite ready to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Compaq, Data Systems, EMC, Hitachi, and IBM.
Network Appliance's F840c appliance is big enough and functional enough to compete with the large systems of its rivals. It can store as much as 12 terabytes of data, and multiple appliances can be clustered for failover purposes. With a new operating system-Data ONTAP 6.0-the F840c delivers the latest storage intelligence available. Customers can take point-in-time snapshots of file systems, have instant recovery of information in case of an outage, and replicate data for remote mirroring. Network Appliance also markets a line of Web-caching devices that work with the F840c.
Still, William Hurley, program manager at the Yankee Group, says the leading network-attached storage vendor may not be right for an entire storage infrastructure. Hurley says storage systems that read blocks of data, such as those from EMC and IBM, perform better than appliances that read files when it comes to backing up large databases. "Discrete reads of rich data in a block architecture can occur more rapidly than accessing, opening, locking, writing to, unlocking, and closing a file on every record update," Hurley says.
Yahoo Inc.'s communications services group in Santa Clara, Calif., already relies on Network Appliance products for scalability. Geoff Ralston, the group's VP and general manager, says the company uses multiple appliances, including the F840c, for its E-mail service. Last quarter, Yahoo had more than 150 million users, many of whom were E-mail users, and Ralston says Network Appliance devices perform well. "We now have tens of terabytes on Network Appliance," Ralston says, "and we expect to scale to hundreds of terabytes."
The F840c, which operates over IP networks, is priced at $318,900, or about 10 cents per megabyte. Competing high-end storage systems cost 15 to 60 cents per megabyte. Network Appliance also sells a lower-end F840c appliance priced at $110,700. Both are available now.
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