IT Expert Voice

If your organization manages SANs and is contemplating a move to Windows 7, here’s a few things you can do now to help make your job easier later.

If you’re the storage manager in your organization, you might be looking on your desktop management colleagues with a bit of sympathy. After all, Windows 7 is just an end user product, right? Storage-area networks and network-attached storage run off a server, so what relevance does Windows 7 have to you? It’s not something you have to worry about at all.

Not so fast.

It’s true that Windows 7 is primarily a desktop issue, and even some storage vendors don’t see the new version of the Microsoft operating system as particularly significant.

“Windows 7 is not really relevant to us, because it’s a pure client-side product,” said Sonal Dave, with Qlogic Corp. However, the company is part of Microsoft’s Independent Hardware Vendor readiness team to enhance its Fibre Channel driver, which it expects to release on November 30, she said.

Several other enterprise storage vendors, such as Brocade Communications Inc. and Adaptec Inc., said they were working to ensure their products worked with Windows 7. Brocade is working with Microsoft, testing to confirm interoperability of its SAN portfolio, but would not say when it expected this to be completed; Adaptec expects to launch official support for Windows 7 with its Series 1, Series 2, Series 5, and Series 5Z RAID controllers in November.

While it’s important due diligence to ensure your storage vendors support Windows 7, it’s true the vendors probably won’t be making a big deal about it, said Greg Schulz, senior analyst for StorageIO.

“If someone jumped up on stage and said their storage system was all primed and ready, I would say, ‘What’s wrong, you don’t have anything else to talk about?’” Schulz explained. While Windows 7 is an important piece, it’s like supporting the new version of any other operating system, he said.
That’s not to say that storage managers don’t need to pay attention to the migration, Schulz said. At least, for each of the users, “Make sure you have a really good backup before you do your migration,” he said. “That should go without saying.”

In particular, in organizations that didn’t upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, users will not be able to migrate straight from Windows XP, but will require an intermediate step or, preferably, a fresh install, Schulz said. That will have ramifications for the SAN because extra disk space may be needed while that conversion is going on. “It’s not like your normal, one version of Windows XP to another, where you install the service pack,” he said. “It’s a complete restructuring.”

Schulz also expects most corporations to wait a while before migrating. “If you’re rushing out to upgrade tomorrow, unless you have no other hobbies, I’d wait a week, a month, a couple of months,” he said. “Let the dust settle a little bit.”

SAN managers, however, can make good use of that time by cleaning up and reorganizing their data to make it easier to migrate and maintain afterwards.

For example, an organization could look at implementing wide-area network optimization software such as Cisco Systems Inc.’s Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) to reduce the volume of data that’s backed up, said Mark Weiner, director of Cisco’s Data Center Solutions. “The backup window can be measured in minutes or short hours, not days,” he said. Version 3.4 of WAAS Mobile has been successfully tested for Win7 interoperability, and future versions will be as well, he said.

Organizations can also look at a more thorough revamp of the way they store their data, said John Savill, senior solutions architect with EMC Corp. Consulting. For example, if users are storing their data locally on their own computers, there could be a SAN hit, he said. “If you migrate 200 laptops a night, with 10 GB of data, you’ll need a terabyte of data just to store that,” he said.

But a number of companies have moved from keeping data stored on the user computer to storing it on a file server and using folder redirection, Savill said. “The user thinks he’s accessing data locally, but it’s actually redirected to the server,” he said. In addition to simplifying the installation process, such methods also help protect corporate data from problems due to system crashes or laptop theft.

In addition, using data deduplication technology, organizations can reduce the amount of storage they need by up to tenfold, Savill said. For example, everyone in the company has their own copy of the human resources manual or the sales catalog on their computers – and if data is stored individually, the SAN contains dozens or hundreds of copies of that data. “It varies by organization, but it can be huge,” he said.

Ambitious SAN managers can look further, at virtual desktop infrastructure, Savill said. Instead of running the operating system on the user computer itself, he said, run a file server using virtualization software (such as EMC’s VMware) with 20 virtual machines that run the client operating system (such as Windows 7). “It’s attractive from a management perspective because I no longer care what’s on their laptop,” he said. Such a system also makes it easier to add the inevitable patches to the operating system.

While setting up such a system can definitely beef up SAN requirements – “each of those operating system virtual machines might require a 50-gigabyte hard drive,” Savill said – organizations can also save space by storing just incremental differences between user systems. “We don’t just copy the disk 10,000 times,” he said. “We store it once for every 200 machines, and then make a copy of the differences,” he said.

Especially in this economy, with limited IT staff, SAN managers are encouraged to be conservative, make sure their applications all work, and look for ways to improve their return on investment and not make the migration too painful. “The desktop is very impactful if you don’t get it right,” said Weiner.

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