Flash Forward: The Next Generation Data Center for Public Sector Organizations

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FLASH FORWARD:

The Next Generation Data Center for Public Sector Organizations

Industry Perspective


Public-sector agencies are deploying virtualization and cloud services to speed up the performance and responsiveness of key business operations and to lower costs. Some agencies are rolling out virtual desktops to enable workers to be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time. Virtual servers, the cloud and virtual desktop environments, however, all present a challenge. These disruptive technologies scale successfully only when high performance storage input/ output (I/O) is available to support them. Flash storage can play a critical role for the public sector in making high performance storage I/O achievable and affordable.

Government agencies – federal, state and local – must keep pace with technology change while at the same time operate in tighter budget environments. They must strive to foster better communication and information-sharing among their workforce, meet the increasing connectivity demands of their constituents and transition to cloud offerings and shared services. What’s more, government data is growing exponentially, putting greater demands on agencies’ data storage capabilities at a time when security and data loss prevention have become national security issues. Government agencies at all levels are turning to solutions that are priced for performance and offer a dedicated high-performance storage platform to support workloads and databases that may be nonsequential. All-flash storage array solutions can help government leaders and IT managers address these demands successfully. In this Industry Perspective, GovLoop and NetApp, a market leader in flash storage, will discuss the ways in which those solutions can help agencies become more efficient, effective and better meet mission need.

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Industry Perspective


How Flash Storage Helps the Public Sector Flash can help agencies stay within budget while providing a higher level of storage performance, with the high Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), consistent sub-millisecond latency and bandwidth that are essential for applications such as databases, analytics, backup and cloud services.

Additionally, it uses electricity to store data in addressable locations on a fixed, thin layer of oxide, so data is retained even when the power is off. Some reports indicate that flash storage consumes as little as 20 percent of the power of a traditional spinning hard drive and reads as much as 100 times faster.

“There is a big inflection point happening in the marketplace now where a majority of acquisitions and procurements will either directly request all-flash array configurations or the solution will dictate the use of an all-flash array,” said Kirk Kern, Chief Technology Officer with NetApp U.S. Public Sector. Flash storage is at a point now where it offers a competitive advantage as well as a cost advantage, he said. “Before it was a trade-off between cost and performance, and now you get both. That makes it a forgone conclusion that if you have any sort of performance-based requirements you are going to use a flash device,” Kern said.

“One of the typical things people want to know is how their workloads can benefit from flash,” said Dan Giannascoli, Database Solutions Architect with NetApp. “Not all workloads are the same.”

Flash offers a dedicated high-performance capability without consuming excessive rack-unit space, so agencies save on all the additional capital expenditures that go along with that, including power usage and cooling requirements. An all-flash array is a solid state storage disk system that contains multiple flash memory drives instead of spinning hard disk drives. Flash memory, which has no moving parts, is a type of nonvolatile memory that can be erased and reprogrammed in units of memory called blocks.

The two biggest applications targeted for flash arrays are virtual desktops and databases, which both generate a lot of random reads. SSDs typically enhance performance. Many people are under the impression, however, that they can use two or three SSDs to replace 50 spinning disks, and in some situations that may be not the case, Giannascoli said. That’s why flash is important to consider – instead of two or three SSDs, a flash array can transfer data to and from these SSDs. “One of the big challenges in educating government customers is that even though SSD flash storage can absorb a lot of I/Os for many workloads, agencies may need more SSD disks than they actually thought, especially for sequential workloads,” Giannascoli said. Given that cost drivers for flash are coming down, agencies want to put all types of applications on them. So it’s important to understand what is being put on SSDs.

Flash storage is a variation of erasable, programmable, read-only memory (EEPROM), which got its name because the memory blocks can be erased in a single action or “flash.” A flash array can transfer data to and from solid state drives (SSDs) much faster than electromechanical disk drives.

“Before it was a tradeoff between cost and performance, and now you get both. That makes it a forgone conclusion that if you have any sort of performance-based requirements you are going to use a flash device.” Kirk Kern, Chief Technology Officer, NetApp U.S. Public Sector

FLASH FORWARD: The Next Generation Data Center for Public Sector Organizations

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Flash and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) can lower the cost of desktop computing, increase security and make the desktop more agile. That’s because virtual machines allow multiple users to maintain their own personal desktops while sharing the resources of a single computer or server located in a central location. But the shared resources model inherent in desktop virtualization can also cause challenges for organizations. VDI tends to be very “write”-intensive. If a large number of virtual desktop users are using the system in a normal way, performance and productivity can be impacted if storage resources are stretched. If storage is not properly deployed in virtualized environments, and organizations try to scale to thousands of desktops, or large number of desktop users log on at the same time, or if routine virus scanning or application patches take place, the processes can create huge bottlenecks. As VDI deployments are moved into production, unpredictable workloads can overwhelm storage devices and cause performance degradation during times of peak traffic. Flash technology is designed to cope with a high number of “reads and writes” and provides exceptional low-latency as well as consistent and stable performance to handle any peaks in demand. If the flash technology incorporates management software that can optimize “writes” for a flash profile, performance can be boosted even more.

Flash and Data Center Optimization Flash arrays can play a critical role in helping government IT managers consolidate and optimize data centers to meet future data storage demands. In March, the Office of Management and Budget shifted the focus of federal chief information officers from the consolidation of data centers to optimization under a new policy called the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI), which supersedes the government’s Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). In 2010, OMB launched FDCCI to promote the use of green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers. Other FDCCI objectives focused on reducing the cost of data center hardware, software and operations, increasing the overall IT security posture of the federal government and shifting IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies, according to OMB. The government should be able to save at least $8.1 billion in data center closures through 2019, according to the Government Accountability Office’s latest report on data center consolidation. To date, the government has closed 3,125 of its 11,000 data centers, leading to $2.8 billion in savings under FDCCI. The new direction under DCOI requires agencies to develop and report on data center strategies to consolidate inefficient infrastructure, optimize existing facilities, achieve cost-savings and transition to more efficient infrastructure, such as cloud services and interagency shared services. As such, flash arrays are a critical component for DCOI, Kern said. “By incorporating all flash array designs into the data center, it will require a migration of data onto that new solution,” he said. This offers IT managers a unique time to look more broadly at service design and automation and ultimately into the data center consolidation. “So all flash arrays can be used as a component to improve efficiency and lower cost in the data center. It can also be used as a forcing function to do bigger things in the data center.” At the same time, storage spending is increasingly being driven by cloud-based workloads. By 2019, market research firm IDC forecasts, 57.3 percent of all enterprise storage spending (both internal and external) will be driven by cloud workloads (both public and private), up from 46.4 percent today. It is IDC’s view that hybrid cloud is the future of business computing and that this new environment is already driving its own set of storage requirements.

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Industry Perspective


5 Value Propositions of Flash Storage You Should Consider Government IT managers considering flash arrays or in the throes of deploying them should focus on the value they offer. NetApp’s Kern offers five value propositions that government managers should consider: 1. Scalability. “In the past you would buy a particular array and it would come with dramatic capabilities. Even today we are seeing an increased need beyond what a single controller can deliver,” he said. So scalability is the first parameter. A government manager needs to examine if the particular workload needs a single high-availability array, or if the department can start small and grow into a clustering offering that will evolve as needs change. 2. Features. Most all-flash array solutions have deduplication, compression and provisioning capabilities. More advanced features like application integration with hypervisors or enterprise software may be important to some users. Integration with backup solutions also is key because agencies still have to protect against loss of arrays. Plus, there is the growing requirement for integration with cloud or service-delivery frameworks or third-party application suites. 3. Cost. The list price per gigabyte can be minimized if the government manager understands his or her workload performance, which then leads to proper array sizing for IOPS, latency, I/O size and bandwidth, Kern said. The types of data stored on the array is important because that has an impact on the effective capacity of an all-flash array. The more information you have around your workload, the better response you can get from the array to satisfy that workload, Kern said. 4. Automation. Can you request and control the quality of service along with the capacity of the array, Kern asked? With access to millions of IOPs now controlling how the storage is consumed, automation is critical to delivering high-array utilization and improving mission outcomes. This eliminates the overprovisioning and overbuying that tends to happen with all-flash arrays and maximizes the utilization of the systems. 5. Storage Service Delivery. This is used to match workload requirements with I/O storage service, measured in IOPS per terabytes stored. Can a customer or array support these nextgeneration service definitions and engage in a new support model and billing model that aligns with applications needs?

Use Case: VDI at Iowa Workforce Development Iowa Workforce Development (IWD) faced a budget challenge. Part of the Iowa state government, IWD has a critical mission: Provide employment advice and services for the nearly 90,000 Iowans who are unemployed. At the time, the state’s 5.7 percent unemployment rate includes 25 percent of the soldiers who have returned from active duty to Iowa. Budget cuts meant that IWD would have to close more than half of its 55 field offices. The agency wanted to make its services available digitally, through virtual desktops, instead of requiring field offices. Virtual desktops already served 30 percent of its staff, but the VDI program was having storage-related performance and provisioning issues. IWD replaced its prior storage with a NetApp V3160 storage system with Flash Cache. The increased IOPS enabled the agency to roll out 500 virtual access points and support 1,500 virtual desktops. The access points can be found at public libraries, homeless shelters, the YMCA, service organizations and other sites. The self-service desktops at each access point provide job service and resume development assistance, a job bank, skill-testing tools and other information. A little more than half of Iowa’s 99 counties had field offices before; now all of them have access points for IWD services. In the prior VDI environment, the IT team used to get as many as 40 trouble tickets a day from employees who couldn’t connect to their virtual desktops, largely due to storage performance issues. “VDI was the first target use case for flash arrays. By the end of 2016, flash storage will probably be the first choice for any application or workload with active file-sharing,” Kern said.

FLASH FORWARD: The Next Generation Data Center for Public Sector Organizations

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NetApp Solutions

Conclusion

NetApp offers all-flash arrays that deliver flash performance suited to the specific workload requirement of the environment, thereby accelerating speed, improving customer experience, reducing total cost of ownership. In particular, NetApp has a portfolio of offerings that meet a user’s unique needs, and distinguish the company from other flash storage vendors.

IT requirements at all levels of government must keep pace with the evolution of technology even in tighter and tighter budget environments. They strive to meet both constituent demands for greater connectivity, lower latency and greater data storage capability amid mandated budget cuts, strict data privacy regulations and requirements for cloud offerings and shared services.

NetApp All-Flash FAS: This is suited for users who want the performance of all-flash arrays and data management features. All-Flash FAS provides multiple protocol support, snapshot and provisioning, replication and disk backup with SnapVault cloning. Inline compression and deduplication are turned on. Plus, it integrates with the cloud.

All-flash storage array solutions can help government IT managers and leaders satisfy these competing demands successfully – and also lowers cost through reduced overhead, increased rack space and decreased energy consumption. Specifically, government agencies at all levels are turning to solutions that are priced for performance and offer a dedicated high-performance storage platform to support workloads and databases that may be non-sequential. Flash can help agencies stay within budget while they provide a higher level of storage performance, with the high IOPS, absolute and consistently sub-millisecond latency and bandwidth that are essential for applications such as databases, analytics and backup.

NetApp EF Series: Agencies that don’t want all the data management features can opt for the EF Series. For instance, they might be running Oracle RMAN for backup instead of using NetApp Snapshot. In a small 2Unit form factor, the EF Series can push through a lot of I/O. NetApp SolidFire: Targeted at cloud providers that need the scalability to address the needs of hundreds of thousands of multitenant users. NetApp guarantees 100,000 IOPS can be accessible to a particular application. The arrays are also self-healing, so a cloud provider can add or remove SolidFire nodes automatically to other parts of the cloud environment. Each node has its own controller and storage SSD built in, so cloud providers can handle unpredictable growth and capacity.

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Industry Perspective


About NetApp

About Arrow

Government agencies of all levels count on NetApp for software, systems, and services to manage and store their most important asset, their data. With solutions ranging from data protection and recovery to cloud computing, data analytics, and flash solutions, NetApp has become government customers’ top choice for key technologies that drive data center transformation. Top counties, cities, and states count on NetApp and value our teamwork, expertise, and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future.

Through a vast network of suppliers and partners, Arrow helps enhance innovative transformation for government agencies by supporting mission goals from national security to public education and beyond. Arrow leverages a 75-year legacy of collaborating with global organizations to enhance performance and efficiencies through technology. As a Fortune 200 company with 400 offices worldwide and more than 4,000 partners, we have the tools, resources and technology to empower our partners and suppliers to meet the ever growing requirements of government end users. Visit us online at http://ecs.arrow.com.

Learn about NetApp’s vision for the future of data management. Visit netapp.com/datafabric

About GovLoop

GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 250,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government. For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com. www.govloop.com Twitter: @GovLoop

FLASH FORWARD: The Next Generation Data Center for Public Sector Organizations

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1152 15th St NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20005 Phone: (202) 407-7421 Fax: (202) 407-7501 www.govloop.com Twitter: @GovLoop


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