NAS and SAN Introduction

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy and today's class is nas and San introduction so a lot of people get confused about what nas and sand are because they do similar things within the network environment and so I figured hey let's do a class on introduction about these different things so Nazz is network attached storage and san is storage area network so basically what both of these things do is they store data for your infrastructure so so way back when way back in the day 2002 or whatnot we had servers and servers are what stored all of the data essentially so whether it was Windows 2000 server 2003 server or UNIX server basically you had these servers then they started coming out with these custom devices in order to store data so basically they started coming out with with infrastructure that's entire purpose was to store data its purpose was not to do Active Directory its purpose was not to do virtualization its purpose was not to do VPN or iis or any of that all its purpose was was to store data so the first thing that you should understand is Nass Nass stands for network attached storage really basically at the end of the day what Nazz devices are are they are essentially file servers those they are essentially file servers that that is all they do you would not have a file server and then install other applications onto it basically it is a file server it's us as a network attached storage device all it does is store data so basically what as it is one unit its entire purpose in life is to store that it may store one terabyte of data it may store a few petabytes of data but basically all it does is it store that another big thing for the definition of an ass device is that you're using standard file transfer protocols in order to interact with it so basically this is the equivalent when you set up an as as a shared drive on the network so basically you share out whatever folders that you create on the NAS device and they are accessed just like you would access a shared drive on a server so you would be using the FTP protocol the file transfer protocol in order to interact with the NAS device or SMB CFS apple file protocol basically any of the standard protocol so SMB and CFS these are the protocols that allow you to copy and paste files and folders within a Windows Network so basically that is how you would interact with this nasta vise basically it is a shared file server on the network now when you're dealing with as there's a lot of different nas devices out there you can use things like FreeNAS FreeNAS is a free an ork attached storage operating system and the thing is with these nas devices with these nas operating as operating systems is that they are specifically designed only to store files why that's important is because that means you're not going to be interacting with that server or device in any other way so it will be more secure than other types of servers so again one of the big problems that you get into in the real world is you set up this beautiful Windows Server 2012 box you install the file server you install all this fancy stuff and basically you know that as long as nobody touches this server it is going to run very well for the next decade as long as a power supply doesn't blow up well then supplies supplies what happens is one of the employees comes in and decides to start surfing the internet on your window wonderful Windows Server 2012 box then gets viruses then installs a screen saver then does just a whole bunch of stupid crap on this computer and all of a sudden you've got tons and tons of problems why because it's a Windows operating system and people do stupid things so what does operating systems it's true and spaghett monster I've seen a time and time and time again you walk yet that you walk into the server room and you see all this crap on the server and you're like what the hell's wrong with you right well the nice part is if you use at Nassau reign as operating system is that all it does is is store files so if somebody goes on to it they can't look at porn they can't download and install applications willy-nilly they can't get onto the internet and check their Gmail why because it's an as unit right so that's one of the benefits of NAS units beyond that since they're specially designed for storing data they're simply better at it than many of the other server operating systems basically they they are you know when they create the operating system they optimize it only for storing and transmitting data being able to send and receive data therefore it does that a whole lot better so that's what it has is a network attached storage device is simply basically a file server that's just an uber file server that all it does is serve files again like I say you can use software such as FreeNAS in order to create your own Nass this does not have to be we highly customized hardware you can go out and you can create a NAS device using just an Intel processor and hard drives and RAM and all that the main thing is within as is that the operating system is designed to only be a file storage device now when we start talking about sans sans are a different critter this is one of the things that people get confused about so Nazz is one box right as is a box that stores files a sand or a storage area network is basically a network of boxes to store data so when you start using a storage area network what happens is you connect numerous different devices sand devices and all of them store your data generally in something like a cluster so with that nas device if the power supply the NAS device fails the rate controller the NAS device fails if who the hell knows the user somehow shoves a virus on to it and it fails your data your data stop - you can get it back up and working now with the sand what is nice basically you can create a cluster of these storage devices and if anyone fails all of your data is still there it is still accessible depending on on what the replication strategy is and and what the redundancy is you can have one two three four five entire boxes completely and utterly fail but the data will still be there you will still be able to write to the sand you will still be able to read to the sand for you it will be a relatively seamless even if again an entire device fails now the other important thing with the sand and why the sands are important is because you can actually map drives to the sand so again when we're talking about network-attached storage NAS devices basically it is offering up file shares on the network uh s : shared folder right you know same thing you've been doing for the last 20 years when you're dealing with sand what is really cool is you can actually map to the sand and have that folder on the sand seem as if it is a local hard drive to your computer so using fibre channel or using something called I scuzzy you can actually map you can mount sorry you can mount that folder on the sand and now it looks as if it is local to your server now why this is important is because then you can install software so basically you're sitting at your computer and you mount to the sand you could actually install software onto that sand and it would seem as if it is running locally anything that you would want to do local you could then do on the sand you could store it on the sand and not worry about losing that data that becomes very very very important especially when we start dealing with virtualization so let's go over to to my little whiteboard for a second just so I can explain some of this stuff because I think when you see it on on the whiteboard it'll it'll make a little more sense so basically when we're talking about Nass as is a device you have your computer you go and interact Nazz with FTP or SMB or CFS right if anything happens it fails and all of your data is gone you can't get to it now we're talking about a sand NOAA storage area network this is a network of storage devices and they become a cluster so what that means is when you go to the sand you don't really know if you're going to this particular set that sand device or this particular sand of Iser this particular same device this particular same device what you see is just the sand and so you just go to the sand and now why this is important is because if this device fails you're going to the sand you're not going to that device so you may not even notice if this device fails you may not even notice because you are simply going to the sand you're not going to the individual devices so as far as as reliability and redundancy and all that that's why sands are absolutely awesome the other thing that's great the other thing that is so wonderful with sands and again think about where I was talking about with that mount point for the servers is anybody who has dealt with servers in the enterprise world what's the big what is the most one of the most obnoxious problems you ever run into and one of us obnoxious problems you ever run into is when you buy your server you're going to put in a certain size hard drive and it is not seeing huge that's going to see massive it's gonna seem like the biggest hard drive you ever could possibly want and then when like three or four years that hard drive is going to fill up and then you're going to have to be figuring out how to add hard drive space to that server seamlessly to the end user and so the problem is you have your normal server and then you have the hard drive he gets all full up and now you've got a problem you have to migrate the data onto a new hard a bigger hard drive and then put it in do you have to do some tedious thing with you add hard drives and you span volumes it can just be a real pain in the butt and especially when you're dealing with end users that one a hundred percent uptime and don't want downtime right so when this this hard drive fills up on a normal server it is it's just tedious tedious it's horrible it's nasty but you don't want to go deal with that but think about this if you have this server and you create a mount point to the sand so you're now storing all your users data onto the sand what's the cool part where the sand is is you can rather seamlessly add a new server with ten terabytes of data and then just connect it to the sand and all of a sudden the sand will now have ten more terabytes of data so now instead of having to worry about all this stuff you just added 10 terabytes of data storage to the sand and now you can just use it very easily so again remember all of these are their own individual network attack devices and so you just add a new one with ten terabytes of storage or 20 terabytes or 30 terabytes or one petabyte but basically you can just connect it to the sand and now all of a sudden you have all of that extra data at your disposal or extra storage at your disposal now the big thing the big thing with now-why sands are becoming more and more useful it is that's the first part the first part is basically you can add storage to sands very very very very easily because you're no longer dealing with individual hard drives you're no longer dealing with individual partitions you're dealing with entire boxes so you can just add a new 10 terabyte box and all of a sudden you now have 10 more terabytes in your sand you have to go in and do a couple of configurations but believe me doing a couple of configurations is a hell of a lot easier then do it a massive data migration right and if you need to to pull an old device out of the sand you can basically just turn it off within the sand management console and then unplug it and plug something new in so it's very easy to replace storage now instead of worrying about raid cars instead of worrying about hard drives you can just plug in entire boxes or pull out in tyre boxes now why the other reason that sands are becoming so important is because of virtualization right so we have started virtualizing all of our servers instead of having 50 Hardware boxes 50 physical servers sitting in our data center we now have 5 or 6 physical servers with 50 instances of server operating systems a flow in between all of those physical servers now I've talked about virtualization before I've talked about how with this type of virtualization if a if a piece of if one of the servers when the physical servers fails how the instances of operating systems can automatically be migrated to other physical machines and a lot of you guys it said Eli you're a liar that doesn't make any sense if if the instance of the operating system is working on is running on one physical machine and that physical machine fails well then how does it hop to another physical machine Eli you're a liar maybe they really have their they've been kind of nasty at it so let me kind of explain to you how this works let's go back to our whiteboard so basically what we have here is we have our virtual environment and so these are the physical boxes so we've got we've got four physical boxes right here and these are the hypervisors so these are what are running the virtual machines and so then let's say we have ten instances of virtual machines so basically these instances are running on this hardware or so it seems what really happens is that these hypervisors are connected to the sand so the sand over here actually in fact is where all these instances of the operating system are stored what the virtualization software does is it goes to the sand it grabs an instance and then it takes it to the physical machine that has the resources in order to use it so let's say this one takes two of the of the instances this physical machine takes out of five of the instances and this physical machine takes three of the instances so we have this one machine down here this one physical machine down here where where nothing's happened it doesn't have any instances running so the instances are actually stored on the sand but they're being run on the virtual computers now why this is important is because they're stored on the sand they're stored on the stand stored stored stored on the sand they're not actually they're run on the virtual on the hypervisor they're not stored there so if this machine here fails the virtualization software recognizes that and it automatically will then turn the instances on on a different machine that has the resources so this is the big thing to understand with these sans is that the instances reside in the sand and then are pulled into the hypervisor infrastructure in order to actually be run that that is what is going on that's why this this new virtual infrastructure can have so much redundancy because the sand is a cluster of storage devices that contain all the data contain all the instances contain all of that and everything gets pulled out as it's needed now you're probably asking you're like well II like that cuz I make a darn bit of sense because especially you know when I talked about that virtualization class I talked about how if you pull the power supply out of one of those physical machines the instance of a server will be up and running on a different physical machine literally so quickly that most end users won't even recognize it so you're thinking Eli that doesn't make any sense on a 10 100 megabit per second network we're talking about networking that would be fast enough even on a gigabit per second networking um not one to be fast enough to transfer an entire instance well what you have to understand when you're dealing with sands is you start dealing with storage networks so you'll hear something called fibre channel fibre channel is something that is exceedingly expensive and you will not see it until you're a big boy and somebody trusts you enough to see it so fiber channel is the main storage network that is used for these sand environments it is a fiber optic network and it can run as it sits at anywhere from 2 to 16 gigabit per second connections so basically you have the sands all those sand devices are connected to a fiber channel switch using fiber optic cable and then these servers and this whole virtual infrastructure are then connected to the fiber channel switch using fiber-optic cable so now you have all of these servers and thus and devices all connected locally with fiber optic and that is why it is so fast so when you connect to the virtual servers when you connect to the hypervisors you're using your normal tcp/ip Ethernet cat5 cat6 infrastructure that's what you're using so on your side your side it's tcp/ip for TCP ipv6 a cat5 blah blah blah on the other side on the data storage side it is generally fiber channel fiber optic 16 gigabit per second connections so that's the important thing to understand again when we start talking about like things like networking in the infrastructure Prime environment we start talking about different things so different devices are connected in different ways depending on what's going on you connect to the servers you connect to the internet you connect to the five the print server using tcp/ip and Ethernet these devices all connect using fiber channel now there is a poor-man's version of this this storage networking protocol there's something called I scuzzy so if you wanted to start playing around with this kind of stuff I scuzzy is a storage protocol that runs over standard tcp/ip the only thing with that is it's going to be a lot slower it's not gonna be it's obviously not gonna be sixteen gigabits per second because you're running over copper you might get one gigabit per second but if you want to start playing with the sand technology and you're a little lab I scuzzy is what you are going to be be doing basically you you create an I scuzzy connection on whatever nas or sand device basically sand device that you have and then you can connect to that using Windows Server 2012 and a lot of Windows servers and Linux and all that but I scuzzy will be a different class but this is the basic idea behind Nazz and San so what you have to understand about Nass is basically Nazz network attached storage these are devices essentially these are file servers essentially that's what it at the the day it's a file server that's it now the main thing to understand what that is is that it uses the standard file transfer protocols FTP SMB CFS AFP one of those things basically you have to connect to it with some other type some type of network network sharing software in order to be able to do anything with Sam storage area networks you're actually able to mount to the sand your my able to mount to a folder on the sound as if it is a local hard drive then when you have the sand basically of a cluster of devices those clusters of devices if one fails you don't notice you can install a new one you don't notice basically you have extracted the data storage layer from the computational layer and now you can deal with the data very very very easily again when you're dealing with sans generally you're dealing with something called fibre channel for its network infrastructure in order for all of this stuff to happen so quickly again your time out anywhere between two to 16 Giga bits per second the thing for you guys to realize is you probably a lot of you guys will probably never see this because it's exceptionally expensive equipment I mean just yeah it's just exceptional we're talking lots of money I mean we're talking about like sand real sand devices we're talking about twenty thousand dollar device for the individual device that's not including the switch and that's just one so if you want to connect ten of these plus a switch plus connected to the virtual control servers the hypervisors you're talking about 250 to 500 thousand dollars without really blinking so just realize the real sand real fiber channel is that expensive you want to try to start playing with this at home you can use something called I scuzzy and of course we will have an ice cutter class later but that is basically the introduction to Nazz and sand again a very important concept nowadays and again this continues the concept of abstracting the different layers of computing uh and in creating infrastructures that only deal with those layers so the hardware layer you have the processing layer you have a data storage layer before everything was on one server so you had one physical box you had the operating system installed on that physical box you had the data stored on that physical box everything was on that one physical buck power supply failed your screw if the CPU fail you're screwed now we're separating all those things out so the data is in its own cluster the hardware is in its own cluster the virtual instances migrate at will so now we're we're pulling all those things apart it makes it easier to manage maintain and if there is a failure now most of the time you don't even notice you know now like with ass and with ass and if one of the the sand devices fails you just unplug it you yawn you go home when you come back in the morning you order a new one and two weeks later you install it right whereas if a hard drive fails on your server you got to fix that right right right right now so so that's why this stuff is important so as you know I am Eli the computer guy this class was nasty network-attached storage and sand storage area network introduction as always I enjoy teaching this class and look forward to see at the next one

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 350,459

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Id: csdJFazj3h0

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2013