As organizations formulate their future IT strategies, service availability, reliability and performance need to be considered. For large, distributed enterprises they must define which applications are required to maintain key services at the edge – where the enterprise meets the customer. Then factor in the latencies and downtime the applications can tolerate without significantly impacting the business or customer experience, as well as network performance, legacy applications and compliancy regulations. Typically after comprehensive due diligence is complete some applications will be centralized and/or integrated with the “cloud” whilst the remaining applications are left to run at the edge, being managed from a central location.
This whitepaper discusses a typical edge site’s requirements and identifies the challenges and pain points that are common in these environments. Combining the best in class solutions of Microsoft Server 2012 and StorMagic SvSAN this paper provides solutions to these challenges.
Typical Edge Site
StorMagic has found that a typical edge IT infrastructure consists of 6 to 8 business applications requiring a small amount of servers and storage. The amount of data being managed at the edge tends to be kept to a minimum, but when the applications being run in these environments are business critical this data must always be available.
Ideally, organizations would only deploy the minimal amount of hardware to each site, minimizing the capital costs associated with hardware acquisition and to reduce the ongoing operational costs related to power and cooling. Server virtualization allows companies to achieve this, but shared storage is required to provide high availability for these crucial applications.
Organizations with a large number of remote locations span multiple market segments including retail, government, manufacturing, distribution, financial services, education, hospitality, energy and healthcare. However, their edge requirements and subsequently challenges are similar.
Challenges faced at the Edge
There are a number of challenges and pain points faced by organizations when running business critical applications at remote locations, these are common to all distributed enterprises and include:
• Ensuring application uptime
• Delivering application performance
• Maximizing server and storage utilization
• Reducing cost and complexity
• Minimizing deployment time
• Providing hardware independence
• Ensuring data security
• Simplifying and centralizing management
Each of the challenges are discussed in more detail, alongside solutions using a combination of StorMagic SvSAN and Microsoft Server 2012 functionality.
StorMagic SvSAN
SvSAN is a software solution that enables enterprises to eliminate downtime of business critical applications at the edge, where this disruption directly equates to a loss in service and revenue. SvSAN ensures high availability through a virtualized shared storage platform, so that these business critical edge applications remain operational. This is achieved by leveraging the direct attached or internal, cost effective server storage and presenting it as a virtual SAN.
Microsoft Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 delivers an enterprise-class, multi-tenant operating system that is equally suited to data center and enterprise edge environments. With Windows Server 2012, cost-effective, scalable, and highly available solutions can be built, delivering first class server virtualization, security and disaster recovery features.
Challenge #1 - Ensure Application Uptime
Uptime of business critical applications is a primary concern of all organizations. IT failures can lead to applications, such as point of sale (POS), stock inventory systems, employee management (time recording) or back office applications (authentication, email, etc.) becoming unavailable. This results in loss of revenue, staff productivity and in some circumstances credibility, affecting share prices and future revenue.
Solution
To ensure application uptime the edge infrastructure must be highly available and have no single points of failure. This requires a minimum of two servers and shared storage per location and can be achieved using Microsoft Server 2012 and StorMagic SvSAN standard built-in functionality.
SvSAN:
• Delivers highly available shared storage utilizing internal direct attached disk devices, which are used by Microsoft clusters
• Offers flexible deployment options (remote quorum , local quorum, no quorum) enabling a two server configuration, keeping the infrastructure to a minimum whilst mitigating against split-brain scenarios
• Eliminates planned and unplanned downtime; hardware replacement and upgrades can take place during office hours if required
Microsoft Server 2012:
• Delivers local data protection through software RAID via the Storage Spaces feature. Minimizing the impact of a failed hard disk
• Failover Clustering manages and automates application failover between servers, in the event of a server outage
• Hyper-V Live Migration feature enables running virtual machines to be moved between Hyper-V servers. This improves application uptime and aids server maintenance as workloads can be moved to other available servers dynamically
Challenge #2 - Deliver Application Performance
In addition to uptime, application performance is key. Poor performance associated with accessing data over a slow network link could lead to unacceptable processing delays, contributing to a poor customer experience. Locating the data at the edge, closer to the users or customers would eradicate issues arising from poor, unreliable network performance. Application performance is also greatly improved by placing the data as close to the compute resources as possible.
Solution
To deliver the required application performance the remote office IT solution should be able to use internal server storage, ensuring the data is accessed using fast internal server connections. Solid-state disks (SSDs) can also be used to cache frequently accessed data, accelerating I/O requests.
SvSAN:
• Active-active clustering ensures that all nodes participate in serving I/O, significantly improving performance
• Scale-out cluster allows many SvSAN nodes to be aggregated into a single storage pool
• Leverages the Storage Spaces tiering and caching capabilities Microsoft Server 2012:
• Storage Spaces includes caching and tiering, using SSD to provide a high performance read and write cache to slower, high capacity hard disks
Challenge # 3 - Maximize Server and Storage Utilization
With IT budgets being squeezed organizations are looking to achieve more with less infrastructure and need to ensure that their IT infrastructure is being utilized effectively to achieve the best return on investment (ROI).
Maximizing server and storage utilization is especially important in edge environments where a minimal amount of IT infrastructure needs to support multiple disparate workloads.
Solution
Server virtualization has been used to improve CPU utilization. To increase storage utilization, techniques such as data deduplication and compression are used allowing more data to be stored in physically less space.
SvSAN:
• Active-active clustering permits all servers to contribute to concurrently deliver I/O. This means that all nodes are always working, unlike active-passive solutions where standby nodes remain idle, only being used when there is a failure of the active node
Microsoft Server 2012:
• The Hyper-V role delivers a robust fully functional hypervisor providing a platform where multiple workloads can coexist, eliminating the requirement for a server per application
• The Hyper-V Dynamic Optimization feature continuously evaluates the state of the virtual servers and intelligently allocates available resources (CPU/Memory) by automatically migrating virtual machines, balancing the computing capacity and aligning resources with the business requirements
• Data deduplication has been added to Windows Server 2012. This increases the effective usable capacity through efficient storage techniques allowing more data to be stored in the same physical disk space
Challenge #4 - Reduce Cost and Complexity
Enterprise organizations that have tens, hundreds or even thousands of edge locations, are concerned with keeping the IT infrastructure footprint to a minimum. A small change to the infrastructure design can have a significant impact on the overall capital and operational costs as they are multiplied by the number of locations.
The relatively low storage capacities at the edge also mean that an external SAN or NAS array is excessive and introduces unnecessary complexity.
Solution
The edge IT solution should be simple, ideally consisting of two servers requiring minimal server resources whilst providing shared storage needed for high availability.
SvSAN:
• Simple design with flexible deployment options (remote quorum, local quorum, no quorum) enabling the two server configuration at the edge site. Reducing both capital and operation costs
• Turns direct attached internal server storage into highly available shared storage that can be used in clusters and support advanced Hyper-V functionality (Live Migration, Dynamic Optimization)
• Low system requirements (CPU, memory, disk), allowing more resources to be used for business applications.
Microsoft Server 2012: • Hyper-V Server 2012 is a fully functional enterprise ready hypervisor that has a minimal installation footprint • Hyper-V Server 2012 is free
Challenge #5 - Minimize Deployment Time
Time to deploy an IT solution is an important factor when developing a solution for the edge locations. Implementation time is directly related to a number of factors, such as:
• Number of sites – more sites equates to longer deployment times
• Solution complexity – complex solutions take more time to configure
• Site locality – remote sites or ones with difficult access will increase deployment time of a physical solution
Solution
The solution should be simple, repeatable making it quick and easy to deploy. The ability to script software deployments or upgrades from a central management location is preferable as this automates the deployment process and eliminates human error.
SvSAN:
• As a software solution, SvSAN can be installed and configured in a matter of minutes, unlike an equivalent hardware based storage solution
• Provides an extensive command-line interface (CLI) enabling scriptable installations from a central location, reducing the time to deploy
Challenge #6 - Provide Hardware Independence
Hardware independence enables choice when selecting a server or storage vendor.
Many organizations now employ multi-vendor purchasing policies, ensuring that vendors offer competitive prices.
Solution
The edge solution should be capable of using any x86 server or storage, preventing vendor lock-in or reliance on specific hardware features or functionality.
SvSAN:
• Deployable onto any x86 server from any vendor running Microsoft Hyper-V 2012
• Cluster configurations do not have to be symmetrical making it possible to use different server vendors within the same cluster • Can use any available storage internal or external to the server, including SSD and PCIe flash
Microsoft Server 2012:
• Can be installed onto any x86 server that is listed on the hardware compatibility list
• Storage Spaces removes the need for RAID cards, providing local disk protection using software RAID
Challenge #7 - Ensure Data Security
Data security is an important consideration for all organizations. However, it is of particular interest to environments with many remote sites, as by their nature each location contains business information. This data is more vulnerable to unauthorized access, as generally these locations do not normally have the same levels of security as data center environments, therefore are at higher risk of break-ins and equipment thefts.
Solution
To ensure data security and protect it from unauthorized access, business critical data should have the ability of being encrypted or replicated to another location.
Microsoft Server 2012:
• Supports data encryption at rest using the BitLocker Drive Encryption feature that is integrated into the operating system
• The Hyper-V Replica feature allows virtual machines to be asynchronously replicated to another location over a low bandwidth, high latency network, creating a copy of the virtual machine (VM) which can be used for disaster recovery
Challenge #8 - Simplify and Centralize Management
Multi-site organizations normally do not have any skilled IT employees at the edge locations, preferring to centralize this function at the head office or data center. Monitoring and management becomes more difficult as the number of sites increase.
Solution
The ideal management solution should be simple, intuitive and provided though a “single pane of glass” using industry standard management tools and techniques.
SvSAN:
• Has multiple monitoring and management interfaces, including a WebGUI and extensive command line to perform administrative tasks
• Provides an SNMP agent
Microsoft Server 2012:
• Centralized management and monitoring with System Center Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager
Conclusion’’’
For multi-site organizations there is often a compelling architectural need to keep certain key applications running at the edge yet with centralized management capability. This brings its challenges, but as demonstrated throughout this white paper, using StorMagic SvSAN with Microsoft Server 2012, it is possible to build robust and highly available solutions that address all the requirements of the edge.
Both products deliver best-in-class features that complement and enhance one another, allowing solutions to address the challenges and pain points associated with running business critical applications at remote sites.
Written by - Sonny Bennett - StorMagic Product Manager