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Enhanced Availability and Business Continuity with NetApp’s Data Fabric and the NetApp-Brocade 7840 Extension Solution

AbstractNetApp’s Data Fabric vision for the future of data management, relies on the access of a highly available, high performance, scalable and secure network to connect all of the storage endpoints in a hybrid cloud environment. NetApp, in partnership with Brocade, can deliver the infrastructure needed to build a data fabric, unifying data management and enabling seamless data mobility across hybrid clouds today.

The Brocade 7840 Extension Switch and Brocade Fabric Vision technology enable NetApp end users to gain significant increases in performance, security, reliability, and availability between various sites. This addendum details the features and advantages provided by Brocade Extension technology in NetApp Data Fabric deployments.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: A Resilient Data Fabric .................................................................................. 3

Challenges in Designing a Resilient IT Architecture .................................................... 3

Brocade 7840 Extension Switch ......................................................................................... 4

How to Achieve Business Resiliency and Be Ready When Disaster Strikes? ... 6

Brocade 7840 Use Case for NetApp Data Fabric .........................................................7

Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 8

Appendix I ...................................................................................................................................... 9

Appendix II .................................................................................................................................... 9

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Introduction: A Resilient Data FabricIT professionals today are seeking ways to accelerate innovation by taking advantage of technology trends with cloud, object storage, open source, converged infrastructures, virtualization, flash, containers, and software-defined storage, to name a few. Hybrid cloud deployment models—a combination of private and public cloud resources—are becoming the new normal for enterprise IT organizations. They offer a wide choice of application environments with a seemingly limitless pool for compute, network, and storage resources. Organizations want the freedom to move applications and workloads to the optimal environment as their needs change and as new options gain traction in the market.

Applications are largely stateless: they can be rapidly spun up and down in various environments. Data, however, is stateful and often served by independent datastores or databases. Data has mass: it takes time to move it where it is needed and resources to store it. Data has value: it is a protected asset for any modern company. Data has temperature: it has different degrees of accessibility at any point in time. All of these properties of data are dynamic, which makes comprehensive data management necessary.

Managing data in hybrid cloud architectures that have evolved into incompatible data silos brings additional challenges, including:

• Inability to move data. After an organization’s data is in a particular cloud, it is difficult or impossible to move it to a different one.

• Difficulty managing data consistently. Each environment has a different set of tools, APIs, and management software that make it difficult to apply consistent policies to data. IT staff must learn how to use all of these tools and applications effectively.

• Limited choice. New technologies and services that do not integrate with existing environments are difficult to adopt. As a result, IT is limited in its technology choices, affecting its ability to exploit the capabilities of existing and new environments.

• Lack of control. Data is a critical asset for successful organizations. IT must be the stewards of that data no matter where it is. Storing that data in a cloud where there is little visibility into how it is protected and governed can put businesses at risk.*

• *Source: NetApp Data Fabric Architecture Fundamentals WP-7218, April 2016

Challenges in Designing a Resilient IT ArchitectureFew events can generate a stronger adverse business impact as an IT outage, even when it lasts for only a few minutes. Even worse is the negative publicity that such events often generate in today’s “always connected” news media world. Clients, partners, and the market that a business operates in are driving the need for continuously available, resilient IT architectures. The potential revenue loss from an outage and the damage to a company’s reputation can be costly. WAN Connections pose yet another challenge since they are problematic. It is hard to maintain Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) as IP storage traffic over WAN is not designed for storage demands due to the following reasons:

• Widespread replication throughput challenges over distance

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• Unprotected traffic between data centers

• Competing demands for bandwidth and priority

- Regular users affected by high-bandwidth replication or backup traffic

- Storage team sees Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) impacts from high-bandwidth events in the user community

• No proactive warnings or insight to identify network problems and ownership

• Cannot efficiently adapt to changes in WAN bandwidth

• No guarantee of high availability

• Problems are inherent to WAN connections

- Latency, packet loss, bandwidth constraints

• Disruption events are frequent

- WAN connections have frequent disruption events every year

• Greater range of potential errors

- Complete loss of connectivity, degraded connections, asymmetrical conditions

• Multiple hops and multiple vendors involved

Also, as the limited visibility can prolong downtime, the lack of pre-deployment validation increases risk of longer response times and downtime. Zero visibility only allows for reactive management of issues and can impact operations, and hence the unidentified network issues lead to lack of ownership and longer troubleshooting times.

Brocade 7840 Extension Switch With Brocade 7840 Extension Trunking, organizations maintain availability by utilizing multiple links as one logical link. Typically, when a WAN link goes down, packets in transit on the failed link are lost, and the replication application stops and goes into error recovery mode. With Brocade 7840 Extension Trunking, availability is maintained by continuously transmitting packets over non-affected WAN links, allowing the replication application to continue without disruption. Brocade Extension Trunking is a key technology for data transmission high availability.

Also, with Brocade 7840 Adaptive Rate Limiting, the other extension switch automatically detects that the first device went idle, and dynamically adjusts to utilize 100% of the available WAN bandwidth, providing full throughput even during this failure scenario.

Furthermore, Brocade 7840 MAPS and Flow Vision capbabilities can automatically detect anomalies and help pinpoint whether the storage or network is causing the cycle time to exceed target levels. This helps customers accelerate troubleshooting and avoid unplanned downtime.

Lastly, NetApp Data Fabric users can validate and troubleshoot the physical infrastructure with the Brocade 7840 built-in traffic generator and Flow Vision to accelerate deployment. This helps eliminate potential issues that can cause delays in deployment.

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Brocade 7840 provides enterprise-class extension benefits to IP storage replication, with Resiliency and Availability, Security, Visibility and Management of Network Connectivity and Application Performance, and Performance at Scale.

Since network components need to individually provide high reliability, high availability, and resiliency, the overall solution is only as good as its individual parts. The Brocade 7840 includes IP Extension high availability features such as Extension Trunking, IPSec for inflight data encryption with minimal latency impact and a better performance with Brocade innovations such as WAN Optimized TCP and Adaptive Rate Limiting.

Brocade 7840 provides local replication performance over long distance with strong encryption. It moves up to 50 times more data to meet recovery objectives, encrypts data flows over distance with no performance penalty, maximizes utilization of WAN links through protocol optimization technology, and minimizes downtime and overcome disruptions due to WAN link failure.

Brocade 7840 IPEX switch alighs perfectly with NetApp Data Fabrics as it:

• Increases performance and scalability with more than 30 Gbps application throughput per platform

• Provides dramatically higher throughput than native IP storage replication

• Secures data flows over distance with 256-bit IPsec encryption without a performance penalty

• Improves load balancing and network resilience with Extension Trunking, Adaptive Rate Limiting, and Fabric Vision technology

• Extends proactive monitoring between data centers to automatically detect WAN anomalies and avoid unplanned downtime

• Pre-validates and troubleshoots the physical infrastructure with a built-in traffic generator and WAN Test Tool to accelerate deployment

Brocade 7840 extension trunking bundles multiple circuits together into a single logical trunk, with circuits spanning multiple service providers and different data center LAN switches for redundancy. It manages bandwidth in such a way that if a data center LAN switch goes offline or encounters any disruption along a path, the bandwidth of the remaining paths adjusts to compensate. With the proper network design, bandwidth can be maintained during outages of various devices in the pathway.

Also, with Brocade Fabric Vision Technologies, deploying Brocade 7840 in a Data Fabric landscape can offer unmatched performance, continuous availability, and greater control and insight across data centers. Brocade’s Fabric Vision capbability on BR 7840 provides deep visibility and insight into the network for meaningful knowledge, delivers real-time information that organizations can act on to meet key business objectives, and integrates with third-party orchestration tools to bridge the customer gap for end-to-end management.

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How To Achieve Business Resiliency and Be ready when disaster strikes?The Brocade 7840 is a purpose-built extension solution. It is an enterprise-class product that is characterized by an essential feature set: excellent performance, increased security, high reliability, proactive monitoring, flow visibility, and diagnostic tools. The Brocade 7840 is an ideal platform for building a high-performance data center extension infrastructure for replication and backup solutions. It leverages any type of inter-data center Wide Area Network (WAN) transport to extend open systems and mainframe storage applications over any distance. Without the use of extension, those distances are often impossible or impractical. In addition, the Brocade 7840 addresses the most demanding disaster recovery requirements. With twenty-four 16 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) Fibre Channel (FC)/FICON ports, sixteen 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, and two 40 GbE ports, customers can achieve the bandwidth, port density, and throughput required for maximum application performance over WAN connections. Brocade technology integrates perfectly into any IP network and provides a highly efficient data transport capable of full bandwidth utilization across great distances. The defining features that bring value to Brocade

Extension Trunking, WAN-Optimized TCP (WO-TCP), IP security (IPsec), Adaptive Rate Limiting (ARL), Brocade Fabric Vision technology, and Brocade Network Advisor. Brocade also provides a full spectrum of security features and connectivity validation tools. Overall, Brocade Extension products leverage 20 years of distance connectivity innovation and thought leadership, as demonstrated by the fact that they are the market’s preferred extension solution. The Brocade 7840 is capable of both Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) extension and IP Extension. Therefore, the Brocade 7840 provides an ideal platform for NetApp Data Fabrics, for both high-availability and disaster recovery configurations, because it:

• Optimize Service Level Objective (SLO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).

• Reduce bandwidth needs and associated costs

• Preempt outages and lost revenue

• Faster time to outage resolution

• Strengthen security and mitigate liability

• Reduce costs associated with deployment and daily operations

Brocade 7840 guarantees secured data, preempts outages, optimizes Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), reduces bandwidth and operational costs.

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Brocade 7840 Use Case for NetApp Data FabricSince Brocade 7840 can support both FCIP Extension and IP Extension at the same time, users can use Brocade 7840 IP Extension capability to extend IP storage for replication and disaster recovery in much the same way as Fibre Channel storage while taking advantage of the compression, encryption, QoS, and trunking features available in the Brocade 7840.

Also, since Brocade 7840 is capable of both FICON FCIP and IP extension, it makes it an ideal platform for customers taking a Data Fabric approach for both disaster recovery and high-availability configurations, since it extends multiprotocol disaster recovery and data protection storage solutions over long distance.

Deploying 7840 at both ends of connected locations provides greater monitoring and manageability of the data flow. Also, it enables the customer to have the storage and network end points supported by NetApp and utilize NetApp’s auto-support services

Brocade 7840 offers 24x 16G FC ports, 16x 1/10GbE WAN, and 2x 40GbE FCIP WAN ports.

Furthermore, Brocade 7840 offers Flow Generation capability which is a built-in traffic generator for pre-testing and validating storage extension infrastructure— including route verification, QoS zone setup, extension trunking configuration, WAN access, IPsec policy setting, and integrity of optics, cables, and ports—for robustness before deploying applications. Deploying Brocade 7840 in between the colocation, data center and public cloud enhances the operators visibility of the network due to its advanced monitoring and reporting on system, flows and WAN conditions including latency detection by network segment. In addition, its dedicated WAN simulator support, LZ compression (2:1) which can process up to 80Gbps application throughput, Deflate compression (4:1) which can process up to 40Gbps application throughput and the LUN level per-flow statistics enhance native IP storage performance for NetApp data fabric users that cannot be matched.

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The Brocade 7840 multiprotocol storage connectivity solution switch brings enterprise-class extension benefits—previously available only to FC/FICON storage—to IP storage replication, enabling new IP storage applications and new DR/BC architectures.

Key IP storage features include:

• Local data center application throughput over unlimited distances

• Enhanced security with strong encryption for data in-flight, without a performance penalty

• Continuous availability with protection against WAN disruptions

• Simplified network management with greater control and insight The Brocade 7840 supports simultaneous FC, FICON, and IP storage applications, consolidating and extending replication I/O from heterogeneous arrays and multiple protocols across the same managed tunnel, offering a comprehensive storage extension solution that integrates seamlessly into any IP network

SummaryNetApp’s Data Fabric seamlessly connects different data management environments across disparate clouds into a cohesive, integrated whole. NetApp Data Fabric helps organizations maintain control and choice in how they manage, secure, protect, and access their data across the hybrid cloud, no matter where it is. The Brocade 7840 offers an innovative, unique IP Extension solution for Data Fabric implementations to gain significant increases in performance, security, and availability between data centers. These solutions, combined with the sophisticated tools of Brocade Fabric Vision technology, enable you to distinguish trouble with the network from storage array application problems. These effective tools facilitate more efficient support calls and faster problem resolution. Taking a Data Fabric approach to data management, combined with the Brocade 7840 Extension Switch offers the end user a highly available, resilient mechanism for improving Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).

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Appendix I7840 is a purpose built platform that provides the following capabilities:

Appendix II:Here is a list of pertinent Brocade technologies implemented in IPEX:

• Purpose built hardware and software: What are Brocade 7840 customers getting for their money? They get 64 processors, 128 GB of RAM, two FPGAs and two ASICs and a decade worth of advanced TCP development. It should be obvious that the advanced level of electronics in the 7840 does not exist in native IP storage end-devices, hosts or appliances because it’s simply just not practical. Putting the electronics and engineering contained in the 7840 into every IP storage end-device would make those devices considerably more expensive and wouldn’t be competitive in the market. Does it make sense for every IP storage end-device company to hire a slew of engineers just to enhance transport across the WAN? Clearly, this is not the bailiwick of these companies

• Intolerant IP storage applications Brocade has now tested a number of IP storage applications and there is one thing in common, they do not tolerate latency and packet loss. Metro distance latencies appear to be well tolerated without droop. Droop is the diminishing of throughput with more latency. Beyond metro distances throughput is lost due to the inability to maintain full utilization. Essentially, there is excessive idle time waiting for acknowledgments. As for packet loss, even the smallest number of lost packets results in dramatic throughput loss. IPEX solves this problem by requiring the IP storage end-devices to only communicate locally within the data center. The Brocade 7840 takes care of the WAN transport.

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• WAN Optimized TCP Brocade Extension Engineering has spent significant resources developing advanced TCP technologies and associated features. This is not trivial! Brocade’s WAN Optimized TCP is a purpose built TCP stack with special features and functionality applied directly to extension solutions. WO-TCP is an advanced and aggressive TCP stack for quickly getting big data from point A to B over large long pipes. There is no better TCP stack in the storage industry

• TCP Acceleration What is the fastest environment in which IP storage devices can communicate between each other? Answer: If you put them right next to each other connected by a fiber cable, they couldn’t go faster than that. Make that the maximum benchmark speed. If IPEX can maintain that speed over latency, dirty links and packet loss; then IPEX is doing its job. Brocade IPEX terminates TCP streams locally and the 7840 supports 1024 IP storage TCP streams. This happens at both the local and remote data centers. WAN Optimized TCP does the heavy lifting of getting the data from data center A to data center B while mitigating the nasty effects of latency, packet loss and dirty links. Because the end-devices are talking locally via fiber in the data center, it sends at that device’s maximum capable speed. IPEX just provides “local” performance across the WAN. This is TCP Acceleration.

• End-to-End Flow Control Each local TCP stream terminated by IPEX gets its own WO-TCP windows so that end-to-end flow control can be maintained. This is significant in preventing packet loss in the IP network, which results in dramatically less throughput.

• Data batching Brocade does not apply an extension header to each FC/FICON (FCIP) or IP datagram (IPEX) that enters the 7840. Think about that, WOW, how much overhead would that be! Instead, the 7840 forms batches that are about 32 KB in size. For IPEX, TCP/IP headers are stripped off to further reduce overhead. Those headers are reformed again at the remote side. Compressed byte streams do not care where frames or datagrams begin or end enabling the stuffing of TCP segments to their maximum size. This reduces overhead even more. The entire process is extremely efficient and superfast.

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• Jumbo Frames Jumbo frames make an already efficient and fast process even faster and more efficient.

• Adaptive Rate Limiting (ARL) ARL is bandwidth management. You set a ceiling and the 7840 doesn’t push beyond that rate. Additionally, you set a floor and the 7840 pushes at least that much. Every-thing between the floor and ceiling is adaptive based on conditions in the IP network and WAN. What’s important here is the 7840 is a device that is seeing all the IP storage flows headed for the WAN and manages them properly

• QoS (Enforcement and Marking) QoS enforcement is a mechanism that improves performance of critical applications at the expense of less critical applications during times of contention for available WAN bandwidth. The Brocade 7840 has PTQ (PerPriority TCP QoS) in which there are separate autonomous WO-TCP sessions for each QoS priority. There are 7 priorities (4 for FCIP: class-F, High, Med, Low and 3 for IPEX High, Med, Low).

• Compression More compression means more data can traverse a fixed amount of WAN bandwidth, everything else being equal (like efficiency, protocol optimization…). The Brocade 7840 Extension Switch has all new compression algorithms: Fast Deflate (FCIP only), Deflate (FCIP & IPEX) and Aggressive Deflate (FCIP & IPEX) and powerful hardware to implement them. When using Deflate with IPEX you could achieve 3:1 compression (typical), 15 Gbps per engine (there are 2 engines) for WAN bandwidth usage of 5 Gbps. Using both engines (referred to as DPs or Data Processors) gets you 30 Gbps of IP storage bandwidth between data centers across a single 10 Gbps connection

• Scalability IPEX allows the maximum number of flows and flow sizes across your infrastructure while managing each flow and preventing poor performance due to dropped packets.

• IPsec support Ensures secure transport over WAN links by encrypting data-in-flight with a standard 256-bit AES algorithm without a performance penalty.

• FCIP Fast Write Accelerates SCSI write processing, maximizing performance of synchronous and asynchronous replication applications across high-latency WAN connections over any distance.

• Open Systems Tape Pipelining Accelerates read and write tape processing over distance, significantly reducing backup and recovery times over distance anywhere in the world.

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