Table of Contents
Storage Platform Questions
Auto Tiering
& HyperScale
Selling the Power of EMCII Portfolio attach
Example
IO breakdown (estimates):
- MS SQL (50% of our total IO)
- 75% OLTP
- 25% OLAP
- MS Exchange (30% of total IO)
- Generic servers (15% of total IO)
- VDI (5% of total IO)
Capacity consuming apps:
- SQL (40TB after compression)
- File server (35TB after compression)
- Generic VM’s (16TB after compression)
- Exchange (8TB after compression)
- http://www.ericcsinger.com/review-2-5-years-with-nimble-storage/?replytocom=2#respond
Server Architecture
- Traditional (Scale Up)
- Client/Server – ERP, Filers, DBs
- Converged (Scale Up)– VSPEC, VCE
- Mission Critical – SAP, VDI, Exchange
- HyperConverged (Scale-Out) – vSAN, VxRack
- Software Defined Data Centre (Networking, Storage) and Flash – VDI, Branch,
- HyperScale(Scale-Out) – ScaleIO, Ceph, AWS, OpenStack
- 3rd Platform – Mobile, Big Data, Social Apps, IoT
Server Questions
- Do you require NUMA
- Do you require anti-affinity
- Do you require Server Pinning
- Do you require bare metal or 100% virtual
- What is your peak usage for Memory, CPU, IOPS?
- What is your workload types (CPU, RAM DISK) e.g. Test/UAT/Prod/DR,etc
- Workload percentage
- Workload total server
- What is your total CPU, Memory, Disk
- What is your current CPU mark score total?
- What is your expected growth?
- Availability
- Snapshot reserves
technical Questions
- Describe current infrastructure and applications?
- What is your critical business services?
- What is your main pain points?
- What is you growth requirements?
- What are you key drivers for change?
- Can you meet your RPO and RTOs?
- What is your DC Strategy?
- What is your WAN and Links bandwith, speed and type?
- Logical Server and Storage Architectures?
- Match Workloads and Application to right architecture and Product Portfolio
- Do you have existing storage?
- What is your usable Space requirements?
- What is your budget
- What is the core application
- What is your Rate of Change of Data? (Compare most recent full backups.)
- What is the visualization platform
- What is your connectivity protocol. (NFS, CIFS, FC, ISCSI, FCoE)
- Switch Speed
- Host compatibility?
- Switch Compatibility?
- What type of data (File, VM, Database)
- Write intensive or Read Intensive or both transnational
- What IOPS are required?
- What is the percentage for Read vs Write?
- What is the Application System Requirements
- What are you Server requirements
- What Replication is required?
- Storage Performance Split (Flash Cache, SSD, SAS, Near-Line SAS, Capacity, SATA)
- Disk IOPS (IOPS = 1/(*avgLatency + *avgSeek) *in seconds
- SATA
- 7.5 K 75-100
- 10 K 125-150
- NL-SAS
- 7.5 K
- SAS
- 10 K 140
- 15 K 175-210
- SSD
- MLC
- SLC
- SATA
- RAID IOPS
- 1GBE or 10 GB Connectivity
- SFP = 1G
SFP+ = 1/10G
QSFP = 40G - Port Connectivity (CAT-5, 10-Base-T, TwinAx, SPF+, Copper, Fibre, SAS)
- (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, Block)6 GB SAS
12 GB SAS8 GB FC
12 GB FC1 GBase-T CAT 6
10 Gbase-T CAT 6
Optical 1 GBase-T iSCSI – SFP
Optical 10 Gbase-T iSCSI – TWAX
10GbE FCoE – SFP
10GbE FCoE – Active TWAX - Cable Requirements and Port Connections to Switch (Transceivers )
- Backup Features
- Tape Connectivity
- Support Requirements
- Controller Redudancy (NetApp 7-Mode, NetApp Cluster-Mode)
- Data Migration
- How many spares Drives
- What warranty would you like and the term
- Storage Architecture (Type 1, Type 2, Type, 3, Type 4) http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2014/01/understanding-storage-architectures.html
- http://vmtyler.com/storage-architecture-roundup-part-1-whats-old-whats-new-whats-nonsense/
- UCSQuickStart
- StorgeFundamentals
Business questions
For Business Decision-makers:
ASK:
- What plans do you have for expanding offerings or for growth in services to your customers? To your staff?
- What are your growth goals?
- What is your ROA (return on assets)?
- How are growing costs affecting your company’s—flexibility, profit margin?
- What are your compliance and security challenges?
- How would you like the data center to support your vision?
- What do you see as the greatest risks to your business?
- How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
- How do you see the data center supporting your competitive differentiation?
- What plans do you have in place for business continuance? Have they been implemented?
LISTEN for:
- We need to reduce TCO
- We need to make the data center a profit center
- Green initiatives are of great importance to our customers, too.
- We want to expand our cloud services
- We want to virtualize our workforce
- We have acquisitions planned that will require consolidation
ACT/Do:
- Research the company well: Dig into financials, read industry reports, subscribe to industry blogs and feeds
- Build consensus at operational levels
- Know competitor offerings
- Prepare to describe how an end-to-end approach can reduce TCO and improve productivity.
- Ask yourself: Why does my customer need or want it?
- Know your competition.
- Review available Cisco Capital options.
For technology decision-makers:
ASK:
- Tell me about how your data center has developed. Has that development posed challenges?
- Are you moving to total virtualization?
- What business strategies are you grappling with fulfilling now? Into the future?
- How do you see the data center contributing to business growth?
- How quickly can you roll out new apps?.
- What issues are you experiencing around technical readiness, implementation, monitoring and optimization?
- What technical issues keep you up at night?
- Has your business continuance and data recovery plan been tested? Is it adequate to effectively deal with internal and external risks and threats?
- How do you expect the Cisco data center solution to help you?
- Are you planning to deploy new applications,
- Do you have any plans for data center growth or changes? Or are you adding new branches or acquired companies to the data center load?
- What is your biggest challenge in the data center today?
LISTEN:
- We struggle with planning around product lifecycles
- There are too many access points/policies that are difficult to manage effectively.
- We need to have air-tight security
- We need hardware and software support for our remote workers.
- We’re not getting efficient utilization out of our existing infrastructure.
ACT/Do:
- Describe planning around business lifecycles instead of product lifecycles
- Use the three-level architectural selling model :
- Identify Current State – technical and business
- Define Target State
- Create Transition Roadmap
- Know what the competition is offering, and why