Good primer on ESN (?=NAS) and SAN attached below. Telcom bent. Been trying to understand the role of RMBS in Fiber Channel switching (and thus network storage). Key to RMBS earnings growth. Still Greek to me. Interesting article, tho':
Storing up for the future
How enterprise storage can help telecom network managers.
By Rich Stewart, Kay Benaroch, Norm Champaigny & Phil Tsihlis
americasnetwork.com
Today, the telecommunications industry is in a global race to add differentiated services. Customers expect instant connectivity and information on demand as part of their daily lives. Accordingly, communications service providers are teaming up with content, applications and technology suppliers to leverage the latest IT breakthroughs and shorten the time to market for new services that build customer loyalty. Managing, storing and accessing business information is a critical aspect of that "winning combination" IT infrastructure.
Market intelligence says that the first mover for any new service wins the majority market share. So telecommunications developers and carriers that choose ? in the short term ? best-of-breed IT partners to deliver financial, operational and business benefits are best poised to succeed. Selecting the right enterprise storage partner greatly boosts companies as they race to bring new service offerings to the public in an effort to capture first-mover advantages within their license territory.
Innovative enterprise storage software products with management capabilities give service providers constant access to mission-critical corporate information. Such products ensure business continuity to meet the high expectations of today?s customers.
What is Enterprise Storage?
IT departments are rejecting the notion of storage as a CPU add-on or peripheral and searching for a higher category of storage. Storage must be a strategic element of an IT infrastructure, bridging the gaps between disparate platforms so that information can be leveraged in powerful new ways. Beyond simply "holding," this storage allows companies to manage, protect, provide access to and efficiently plan the growth of enormous amounts of information previously dispersed on multiple servers and mainframes.
Unlike server-based storage, enterprise storage connects to, stores and retrieves data from all major computing platforms in both mainframe and open systems environments (see Figure 1). It also connects to networks, file servers, Web servers and management interfaces. Based on enterprise connectivity, enterprise storage allows for the consolidation of data so managers can leverage this information from throughout the enterprise into central locations.
For example, the sales and marketing departments of a telecommunications carrier can utilize bill processing information to examine recent subscriber calling patterns before determining when and to whom they wish to target a new service plan. Without consolidated, shared information (such as most the recent call detail records), a company cannot reap the full benefit of the data it collects during the normal course of business.
Shareable ESNs may eventually extend to WANs and Internet environments.
Enterprise storage is also cascadable ? meaning that it can perform multiple tasks, such as information management, data migration, information sharing and information protection. It is a reusable, nonobsolete resource, ensuring that information lives on even when applications are discarded and replaced.
The enterprise storage network (ESN) provides a single infrastructure that exploits the power of information, regardless of its location. ESN comprises a dedicated, high-speed network that uses standard network-attached storage capabilities (e.g., Internet Protocol) and standard channel technology (e.g., ESCON, fiber channel, SCSI and others), enabling customers to weave together heterogeneous storage, switches, hubs and servers into a single, easily managed, centralized information infrastructure. ESNs consolidate distributed information from departments and business units throughout the enterprise and from remote locations over local or wide area networks.
ESNs are designed to meet and surpass the reliability and availability needs of corporate enterprises and service businesses that require 7 x 24 x 365 continuity of IT infrastructures. The availability features are designed to provide continuous operation similar to the network switches and routers that telephony networks depend upon. Protection choices might include disk mirroring (RAID 1 ? redundant array of integrated disks), remote mirroring software, hardware redundancy and nondisruptive microcode and component replacement.
The ESN architecture ensures data integrity during each step of the data transfer process, verifying data from host to cache to disk and back, using the same data verification codes, which are generated once at the entry point. Disk mirroring provides the highest data availability and system performance for mission-critical applications by creating two copies of data on separate disk drives.
Remote mirroring software further extends information protection solutions by maintaining mirrored copies of data on physically separated storage hardware systems to ensure continuous business operations in the event of planned or unplanned system or data center outages. For example, some telecommunications companies have linked data centers with remote mirroring software as a disaster recovery and business continuity measure to protect against the loss of calling transaction records and other critical network management data.
Because any outage, even planned, can cause a business to lose valuable time, nondisruptive microcode update loading helps ensure the longevity of capital investments in ESN hardware. While enhanced capabilities are being added to an existing frame, the business remains online and unaffected. Finally, just as telecommunications networks hardware is configured with redundant power supplies, ESN systems feature a full-system battery, which guarantees no lost writes and also ensures orderly transitions or shutdowns during power outages. Extensive proactive and predictive intelligent maintenance features, such as cache and disk scrubbing and an integrated remote maintenance processor (RMP), add to ESN?s information protection and continuous operations features.
ESN vs. DASD and SAN
Recent trends in the networking industry bolster the need for an ENS-based infrastructure versus continuing with traditional direct attached storage devices (DASDs) or constraining information connectivity via storage area networks (SANs).
DASD is a pipeline solution designed to fit independent support requirements but lacking enterprise access to the information. Despite the advent of client/servers in the early ?90s, enterprises found that the cost to manage these distributed environments rose dramatically and did not deliver the key business benefits of continuous availability and simplified operations. In 1998, consolidation of storage devices, networks, data centers and subsystems into increasingly larger arrays was the dominant storage theme.
SANs evolved as a dedicated bandwidth solution to answer the increased server connectivity distance needs of fiber technology IT environments. This was accomplished by connecting servers to a dedicated switch fabric. Such a configuration decreased the needs for server connectivity to the storage device and leveraged the value of the fiber switch with increased server connectivity. However, there are two issues limiting SANs. First, although a number of servers may be connected to a fiber switch, they all need to be compatible with the same platform ? thus limiting SANs to a homogeneous environment. Second, SAN environments cannot be engineered with storage management software that helps manage the flow of data when and where business demands it across the SAN topology.
ESNs allow a greater number of users to store and access data.
ESN is arguably the most advanced enterprise storage offering available today. ESNs consolidate information management and access functions, including backup/restore, disaster recovery, migration and information sharing into a single enterprise storage system. By consolidating storage capacity for multiple servers either over fiber channel networks or via network attached storage (NAS) devices using standard network topologies, ESNs offer an efficient way to manage large amounts of information and multiple systems configurations. Powerful storage management software provides a graphical-user-interface-based tool that puts disk volume management at the fingertips of IT personnel.
As ESNs advance and develop, the technologies are embracing connectivity. The technology is reaching beyond local area networks to wide area networks and Internet environments to provide centralized, shareable ESNs. These centralized ESNs will deliver "universal data tone," or access to information wherever and whenever it?s needed. ESNs start with heterogeneous server connectivity provided by industry-standard interface connections, such as fiber channel, ultra SCSI and fast-wide-differential (FWD) SCSI channels. Fiber channel, with its fast 100 Mbps bandwidth, supports the development of cost-effective, high-availability, scalable storage systems for bandwidth-intensive applications such as multimedia content delivery.
In addition, ESN solutions that support fiber channel connectivity have a significant impact on distance, performance and connectivity limitations by increasing the distance limit between host and I/O subsystems to 1 km. ESN technology creates a virtual data center where servers can be located at the application sites and deployed or upgraded as needs evolve while information remains centralized, easily accessed, managed, protected and shared.
Data storage for telecom
Telecommunications carriers understand that to provide differentiation in the face of rising competition, they must be able to create competitive service products, price them attractively and offer superior customer service. The traditional stovepipes of customer and network data, maintained separately by lines of business (see Figure 2 ), don?t allow incumbent carriers to capitalize on their established relationships with customers.
However, consolidating customer information into a central repository, making use of it during customer interactions, and integrating service order and delivery systems into a seamless service-provisioning environment requires some painful changes. It often requires large-scale movement and sharing of current data stores. Organizations can then market new service products that have been fully tested to the segments most likely to buy them, and quickly interact with network operations systems so that service delivery takes place on time.
Such interactions mean that data must be constantly moved and shared between operations and business systems, wholesale and retail partners, and engineering and marketing. Consider the simple act of transferring data. Traditional methods using TCP/IP or Ethernet speeds only offer 10/100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. When up to 70% of a carriers? time is spent moving data, why not utilize the direct connection speeds of ESNs, which move data from mainframe to open systems at speed of 800 Mbps per channel, with multiple channels transferring data? The faster the information is in the hands of database architects, system planners or marketing departments, the faster the business can make use of it for competitive advantage.
Why are continuous 24 x 7 operations critical to telecommunications? In managing a telecommunications network operation, there is a single goal ? keep the network up and running. The goal must be attained not only in the face of unexpected crises, such as sudden storms or power outages, but also during planned enhancements, like system upgrades or network extensions. Network managers are expected to keep the systems operational, regardless of budgetary and personnel limitations.
ESNs have proven to be lower in overall ownership costs due to a number of factors. The primary reason is that ESNs allow a greater number of users to store and access huge volumes of data economically. A storage-centric viewpoint minimizes downtime because of increased reliability. Maintaining one set of storage devices reduces the costs of training expensive systems personnel to manage daily operations. High levels of availability and reliability ensure against production delays, incomplete customer service inquiries, lost sales, failure to deliver service, incomplete production tasks and other downtime-driven failures, which studies show can cost as much as half a million dollars per hour.
Finally, because of the ability to do on-line microcode updates and cascade systems for additional uses, the overall lifetime value of ESNs is considerably longer than traditional server-centric storage approaches.
Mergers and acquisitions
The increasing number of carrier mergers and acquisitions is a source of severe heartburn for telecom data managers. Take WorldCom?s recent acquisitions of MCI and MFS. What happens, for example, when an MFS sales rep receives an order for MCI long distance service? Since the companies have recently merged, the back office ordering, provisioning and billing systems are not yet merged, and the mechanisms to fulfill that order are not in place to efficiently handle that new order.
ESNs offer flexibility and scalability to withstand change.
To extract value from merged carrier operations, a carrier needs to fully integrate the systems of its many far-flung divisions. When mergers occur, the company must not only integrate two different data structures, but the people who operate those systems need to be retrained. Most telecom organizations spend a tremendous amount of money and time getting their users familiar with new systems.
Not surprisingly, systems integration is the most costly part of the process. And time to market pressure often obviates building the ideal solution. For example, if merging the two systems is time critical, service providers will normally develop "throw-away" systems just to get the integrated application up and running. The difference between success and failure with a corporate merger or acquisition is often the ability to integrate the two businesses? operations expeditiously and nondisruptively. This, in turn, depends on the ability to integrate information and systems.
If the business strategy of a company is "growth through market expansion" by rapidly incorporating acquired companies, enterprise storage must be at the heart of the computing infrastructure for the following reasons:
It offers immediate connectivity to the acquired company?s information assets.
It enables the flexible (either rapid or incremental) consolidation of two (or more) companies? information assets, including the migration of information without disrupting production systems? operations.
It can be scaled up to accommodate acquired companies? information.
It can be redeployed to other purposes after consolidation is complete (or after a divestiture).
Basic ESN capabilities of are the recurring themes in all of the above applications. These basic capabilities include: cross-platform connectivity; easy scalability (up or down) and redeployment; transparent and nonintrusive data migration; robust performance and reliability; and consistent and comprehensive data and technology administration. Substituting conventional storage technology in any of these situations means opting for lower performance in technology terms, business terms, or both.
ESNs make sense for telecommunications companies facing merger and acquisition prospects, as well as for carriers experiencing the effects of deregulation. Competition and pricing pressures require a resilient infrastructure that can shift to new business models, such as the Internet, Wireless Access Protocol and cable lines of business. Reliance on data, content delivery and management puts pressure on IT organizations to stay flexible and deliver the scalability necessary to succeed.
IT managers at telecommunications carriers are rethinking the importance of data storage. Being able to respond to rapid changes in technologies, license boundaries, software applications, shifts in sales and marketing, and market regulations often puts at risk the notion of stability in planning IT purchases. ESNs, which can offer much needed flexibility and scalability to withstand the forces of unknown change, are a welcome safeguard.
Organizations such as Bell Atlantic, Bell Sygma (now CGI), MCI/WorldCom and SNET are starting to realize the value of planning their systems around data-centric storage architectures versus planning for servers first and then worrying about data connectivity.
Rich Stewart is field manager, system engineering; Kay Benaroch is worldwide telecommunications field marketing representative; Norm Champaigny is enterprise storage consultant; and Phil Tsihlis is marketing manager, enterprise storage networks at EMC Corp. |
