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FILE AREA 11 things you should expect from

NETWORK your file virtualization solution
As organizations struggle to cope with the exponential growth of data, especially in
the unstructured and decentralized file space, the urgency to gain better control,
visibility and transparency of file data also grows. By implementing a FAN (File
Area Network), it is possible to apply a methodical approach to managing file data
and simplifying routine administrative tasks, which ultimately leads to improved
efficiencies and reduced storage costs, to the benefit of users, administrators
and company cost structure alike. FAN is a rapidly emerging concept which has
the backing of many vendors and is quickly gaining acceptance by customers and
across the IT industry.

At the heart of a File Area Network, lies a virtualization engine which has as its
foundation some form of namespace providing an abstraction layer between the
users and physical storage. Virtualisation is no longer an over-hyped buzzword,
but it is having a positive impact on how organizations manage their infrastructure.
To put it simply, it provides location-transparency across distributed and
heterogeneous filesystems. Users would then be able to access their data logically,
without having to remember the physical location of those files, very similar
to how users access web pages on the Internet today. Once the namespace is
implemented, the administrators are free to move any data behind the scene, in
order to optimize, centrally manage, archive or simply migrate, without causing any
disruption to users.

From a business perspective, virtualization in the file space allows for immense
saving opportunities by centralized management, better storage utilization, easy
migration, information lifecycle management, remote office consolidation and/or
optimization and various other functionalities.

Now as any File Area Networking solution needs proper planning and changes the
way how an organization organizes and manages their unstructured file data, it is
imperative to carefully consider various aspects of a file virtualization solution.
 1. Ease of use and implementation
Any solution must be simple to implement, with no overheads and pose no risk to the
production environment. Companies would think twice about implementing a solution if it
required reconfiguring the network or changing the security model or changing the way users
access their data today. It should also offer an administrator-friendly and intuitive GUI to
simplify everyday storage management tasks.

2. Scalability
As organizations grow, the namespace must be able to scale almost infinitely. If there are
any restrictions, in hardware or software, that limits this growth, then the solution would
not be viable in a large enterprise environment. Also from a performance standpoint, as the
number of transactions grows, the namespace should not become a choking point. This is
particularly true if a hardware device is inserted in the data path, ie between users and data.

3. Resiliency
As all access to data goes through the namespace, its resilience is of paramount importance.
This can be achieved in various ways, depending on the solution. If this is an in-band
solution, clustering the devices is critical. Careful consideration must be given to protecting
the enterprise against a site disaster where the whole cluster could be out of action. In an
out-of-band solution where the resilience is typically achieved through replication within
the enterprise directory services (eg Active Directory), clustering would not be necessary,
instead administrators must guarantee directory replication is happening at
specified intervals.

4. Namespace Management
The solution must offer features in order to create, populate, maintain, audit and protect
the namespace. If for any reason, the namespace changes, it is crucial that this is not only
recorded, but the administrator is able to restore a last known good version with speed
and ease. This is especially true with systems where the metadata resides on
proprietary hardware.

As the namespace is a core enabling technology, the ability to manage it is absolutely key. For
instance, the namespace should be synchronized with the changes in the physical storage
and for better protection, the logical structure should be reproducible on another platform,
if this cannot be done through directory services.

5. No Vendor Tie-in
The solution must not tie users to specific platforms. Companies often complain about
being tied to one storage vendor and the complexity of moving away from that platform often
means that the organization’s data is in effect held hostage. The virtualization solution
must work with all industry-standard platforms and protocols and must allow for freedom of
movement to and away from any storage platform. More importantly there should be no tie-in
to the namespace provider and provision must be made for the ability to access the
storage without

6. Non-disruptive Data Migration

Constant changes in technology coupled with an insatiable appetite for data forces
companies to continually migrate or consolidate data. This is often a big challenge, as
it is almost always accompanied by downtime and disruption. There are clear benefits
if administrators are able to move data, with minimal disruption and at the same time
guaranteeing the integrity of the data.

The virtualization solution should be able to move data by integrating tightly with the
namespace, so that users are automatically redirected to the new target, hence avoiding any
disruption or need to remap. Also, easy-to-use management tools for data migration projects
are a key requirement.


7. Remote Data Consolidation
Maintaining multiple remote sites is not only costly and complex, but also reduces user
productivity, as there is often a slow WAN link that users need to go across in order to access
their data. Using a combination of namespace and WAFS technologies, it is possible to
centralize the data, therefore removing infrastructure servers from the branches and at the
same time offer a LAN-like performance to users across a WAN link. Customers should think
about considering a vendor that offers not only the File-Virtualization technology in the data
center, but also extensions to consolidate and optimise across geographical borders and slow
WAN links.

8. Business Continuity
In today’s business environment, it is critical to ensure data is always available. As
enterprises have to be fully prepared to deal with planned and unplanned outages, it is
critical to consider not only how the data is protected, but also, in the event of a disaster, how
quickly users would be able to gain access to that data.

In the event of a disaster, the whole process of failing over to a DR location must be as
simple and seamless as possible. This is not the time for companies to discover that the
script they had prepared for the failover needs to be modified for it to work. Therefore, the
solution must offer a quick, cost-effective and transparent means of switching users over to
the DR site, either automatically or at a press of a button

9. Data Classification
Organisations often need to profile their data in order to assess its importance to the
business. This is often the first step towards creating an ILM strategy where the data is
aligned to the right platform. This is also a critical step if the organization has deployed a
chargeback model and is therefore required to produce department-specific reports on usage
of data, as well as capacity planning.

It is important that the reporting capability is at a logical level, rather than physical, as a
department’s data may be spread across several physical locations and the process of
collating multiple reports can be quite laborious.

10. Storage Tiering

Implementing a tiered storage architecture enables organizations to move less frequently
accessed data to less expensive storage, maintaining the same user access model. The
virtualization solution should offer policies which automates this process based on various
criteria relevant to the organization.

11. Storage Optimisation

Statistics suggest that open systems storage devices have a utilization rate averaging 40%.
The responsibility of identifying this imbalance often falls on the administrators’ shoulders
and of course the ensuing task of redressing the balance and driving efficiencies.

The virtualization solution should be able to automatically identify utilization levels and load-
balance across multiple devices, without impact to users.

George Mobargha, File Solutions Architect, Brocade Communications


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