TechInsight Magazine
Building and selling servers is one thing. After all, the systems your SMBs customers are buying employ many of the same technologies you see on the desktop. Of course, the components that go into them are designed from the ground-up to be more robust. But designing and deploying storage systems is another animal entirely. You’re dealing with data—irreplaceable information vital to the way your customers do business. To say that it’s important to pick the right components, build in the right redundancy, and ensure long-term reliability would be an understatement. We’re going to show you how.
High-Capacity Storage. LSI’s SAS 9211-8i serves up eight 6 Gb/s SAS ports internally, supporting twice as many drives per port compared to last generation’s 3 Gb/s host bus adapters.
But falling prices on flash-based solid state NAND memory have led to an upsurge in SSD adoption. As we’ve discussed in the past, SSDs have the potential to drastically improve the performance of your customers’ storage subsystems, especially in the enterprise, where heavy I/O workloads really benefit from the technology’s unprecedented IOps throughput.
We all know that price is a relative measurement though, and while SSDs are more affordable now than they have ever been before, the cost per gigabyte of solid state storage is significantly higher than more familiar hard drives. This is actually good news. According to IDC, the increased cost of SSDs and the capacity advantages of hard drives mean the two formats will have a complementary relationship in the storage business, rather than a competitive one.
Between SSDs and conventional hard drives, the storage space has seen significant innovation in the past couple of years. If you’re selling storage solutions and haven’t yet explored the dynamics of magnetic and solid state drives, then it’s definitely time to revisit the fundamentals of storage using hardware that’ll improve the way your customers store and protect their mission-critical files.
Robust Entry-Level RAID. With support for SAS and SATA hard drives, RAID 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60, Intel’s four-port RS2BL040 is an excellent controller for SMB-class servers and workstations.
Before we dive too deeply into the technical nuts and bolts of today’s landscape, it’s important to talk about what SMBs are looking for in a storage system. “If I were to characterize what businesses want, in one word, it would be efficiency,” says David Graas, technical marketing manager at LSI. “They’re trying to get the most for the hardware cost, which is why leveraging hardware is one of the primary goals of an integrator in a system config. Being able to produce the lowest-cost design is how they win the business.” Naturally, it’s important to still meet the needs of the customer, so the VAR’s job becomes addressing functionality while keeping a handle on cost.
“When I talk to system integrators and resellers at trade shows, I try to emphasize building storage based on the application they’re trying to support.” In other words, if your customer needs a certain level of performance, you have to think critically about balance. Not only does that include the right processors, memory, and motherboard, but also storage. Is there a capacity requirement? How much capacity? Does the storage subsystem need to be expandable as the customer’s data burgeons, or are you looking at minimal growth? Then there’s the performance expectation. If an application requires a certain rate of throughput to sustain its operation, that’s what you need to be looking at.
All of these questions answered will begin to lead you down the path your customer should be taking. “If you determine that your customer’s application is more capacity-driven, and the performance levels aren’t as extreme, then I need to be looking at a solution taking advantage of higher-capacity, lower-RPM hard drives,” says LSI’s Graas. “They have a lower cost per gigabyte and they facilitate the most storage space in the fewest possible units, like 2TB drives. They aren’t the highest-performing, but based on the application, it makes the most sense to consider that type of storage. This is actually what a majority of what our channel customers are using—large SATA disks. Then they look to the RAID controller to team those drives together, matching the performance needs of the application.”
Of course, there’s a flip-side to that coin. Web servers and transactional databases (like SQL and Exchange servers) have a large client load. The capacity these environments require doesn’t change dramatically. But the randomized performance characteristics are critical. So, be on the lookout for a higher class of storage—a more advanced controller, as well as a higher-RPM SAS infrastructure capable of better performance in those randomized I/O applications. There’s naturally an increased cost that goes hand-in-hand with addressing an I/O-sensitive app, but that’s part of Graas’ education message to resellers. “We’re talking to customers in the channel about how to intelligently architect these types of storage solutions based on the application, rather than just slapping hardware together, picking just any controller out of a catalog, and the drives that are on sale.”
Lessons From The Tech Insight Lab
We pick up on some of the best pieces of information when we go hands-on with new technology. After all, taking full advantage of the latest and greatest requires more than just an academic discussion or overview of the speeds and feeds. Recently, our interests were piqued by three real-world issues worth in-depth exploration. The first centers on Microsoft's WIndows 7 down-grade rights, which many SMBs are using in order to maintain Windows XP within their organizations. On the cusp of expiration, we show you how to exploit the company’s software compatibility efforts, which include a repository of online resources, built-in API emulation able to mimic older operating systems, and Windows XP Mode, a virtualized environment that allows Windows XP to run within Windows 7.
MORE COMPATIBLE. Intel recently launched a pair of CPUs with unlocked clock multipliers, giving performance enthusiasts access to an overclocking mechanism formerly available only with Extreme Edition processors.
Microsoft Windows 7 XP Mode
We're creatures of habit, to be sure. When we find something that works (and works well), we tend to hold on, whether it’s a route to work, a favorite value meal, or an operating system. Microsoft saw massive success with Windows XP. And as the OS picked up momentum, it became a more deeply-entrenched part of many business’ infrastructures. Windows XP persisted for more than five years as the desktop flagship in Microsoft’s software portfolio. So, when Vista launched in 2007, it was already fighting an uphill battle. Just imagine. You’re an engineer, an architect, or a software developer. The application on which your livelihood depends is known to be problem-free in Windows XP. The drivers your professional graphics card employs are both optimized for performance and stability under the same OS. It’s hardly a wonder when you hold fast to what works. Even now, with Windows 7 capturing the hearts and minds of desktop users everywhere, many businesses are taking advantage of Microsoft’s offer to downgrade the latest and greatest to Windows XP. There’s a rub, though. The ability to downgrade to XP expires on October 22nd, 2010. So, if you’re selling to SMB customers with a real penchant for familiarity, it’s time to start thinking about a full-fledged migration to Windows 7. Fortunately, that shouldn’t be a tough sell. You see, Microsoft put a ton of work into making legacy titles work better in Windows 7, going so far as to include a feature it calls Windows XP Mode.
Energize SMBs With VPRO
We're only halfway into 2010 and it has already been a big year for Intel. The successful introduction of 32 nm manufacturing paved the way for affordable Core i3 and Core i5 processors for SMBs, while a couple of new chipsets augment what resellers can do to protect customer data and manage IT resources remotely. This generation’s exciting architectural changes have taken center stage up until now. But there’s a lot of very channel-friendly functionality built into Intel’s latest, too. We show you how to capitalize. You'd be hard-pressed to find a critic of the performance improvements wrapped up in Intel’s newest Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 CPUs. From an integrated memory controller able to improve data flow between components to a return of Hyper-Threading, which maximizes utilization of available compute resources, SMBs that update their desktops will find applications running faster, without question. But for all of the emphasis on threading, Turbo Boost, and generously-large caches, there is also a long list of capabilities designed to enhance security, simplify manageability, and bolster productivity. We’re naturally bullish on the architectural foundation of Intel’s latest and greatest. However, the value-adds (and the savings they enable) are what we think will impress customers long after they’ve grown used to snappy performance.
ONE TO GROW ON. Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini delivers his keynote address at CES 2010 in Las Vegas. Intel launched PC platforms with more than 25 new products.
The Three Tenets
Transitioning from Core 2 to Core i3/5/7 has been more than a year and a half in the making, but all of the hardware needed to address entry-level desktops and high-end workstations (along with everything in between) is now in place. From this broad ecosystem of components, Intel is looking to enable a trio of sellable strengths.You’re already familiar with the first, intelligent performance. When Intel’s dual- and quad-core processors are taxed, performance is increased through a combination of Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost, the former propelling well-threaded apps by virtue of greater parallelism, and the latter accelerating lightly-threaded software with an increase in clock rate. At the other end of the spectrum, idle periods see large chunks of the CPU turned off completely, shaving power consumption down to almost nothing.
The second and third pillars are perhaps more impactful, overall, to your customer’s day-to-day operations. Smart security is one, encompassing platform-based technologies intended to minimize vulnerability to viruses, protect against the loss of valuable data due to hardware failure, and keep information safe in the event of a PC loss. Easier PC care is the other. The idea here is to enable remote management and service, regardless of whether the system is on or off. VARs able to cut back time-consuming service calls can not only increase uptime, but also reduce support costs for value-conscious SMBs. Intel puts five different technologies under the umbrella of smart security, and another four technologies into the easy PC care category. The total of eight value-adds (vPro technology falls under both categories) gives resellers an ambitious list of extras to enable; exposing the octet results in a formidable business machine unlike anything SMBs have ever seen before.
Packed With Value: In addition to its four cores and Turbo Boost technology, Intel's 32 nm Core i5 processors sport AES-NI, accelerating encryption and decryption in hardware.
Intel's newest desktop processors are so attractive because they allow resellers to effectively address performance requirements in single-threaded and more parallel applications using a multi-core architecture and Turbo Boost technology. Of course, it's great to offer compelling speed in every piece of software your customers run. But if you had the opportunity to expose additional value, wouldn't you?
The Benefit Of AES-NI
All of Intel's Core i5-600-series desktop CPUs (manufactured using the company's advanced 32 nm process), along with the flagship Core i7-980X, include a new feature called Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions, or AES-NI. In short, AES-NI gives those processors hardware-based support for the encryption and decryption standard used by the government.
Part Of A Stable Platform: As part of Intel's Stable Image Platform Program, the DQ57TM motherboard makes a great companion to the Core i5-600-series CPUs.
Why should you advocate disk encryption in the first place? Your customers have information they don't want anyone else accessing. E-mail, financial data, client records—it all needs to be protected. But when a hard drive gets decommissioned or stolen, it's vulnerable. By encrypting everything in real-time, you maintain privacy where it matters.
Used in conjunction with AES-NI-equipped CPUs, apps like BitLocker can be deployed without affecting performance. And the experience becomes virtually transparent to your customers, especially if you’re building workstations using motherboards with a Trusted Platform Module, which seals the key used for disk encryption. Intel’s DQ57TM is the board to buy for enabling such a comprehensive (yet unobtrusive) security solution, and its synergies with the Core i5-600-series processors make it a great companion platform.
Building Better With SIPP
It just so happens that the Core i5-670, -660, and -650—all boasting AES-NI support—are on Intel's 2010 Stable Image Platform Program compatibility list, along with the DQ57TM motherboard. SIPP is the lynchpin that brings capable hardware together with a consistent software environment.
The way it works is simple. You buy your processors and motherboards today with a guarantee from Intel that they'll enjoy a lengthy 12-month deployment cycle. You receive drivers that don't change during that period. And the result is a standardized software image you can install throughout the SIPP cycle.
SIPP is good for resellers because you know you'll find hardware in distribution for an extended period. It's good for your customers because management is easier. Plus, Intel validates the hardware and software, so you know it's going to be the most reliable combination of components available. Lean on SIPP to enable workstations armed with AES-NI and software-based security. The value-adds don't get any sweeter than this.
