Avaya Storage Management with ease

Lean the 4 fundamentals to maintain the Avaya Storage and its technology

By the end of this post, “Avaya Storage Management with ease” you will learn the 4 fundamentals and technologies available to us for implementation, design and maintain the Storage with the Avaya Core solutions. See how knowing some of these technologies can help us provide better service, identify risks, and maintain our data running smooth.

Have you ever found yourself troubleshooting Avaya Storage Technologies, without knowing how to get a picture of which storage type is been used? In this post, I will help you identify most of the types of technologies available for both physical and virtual environments.

Here are the 4 fundamentals=

• 1. Types of Data Storage
• 2. Storage Technologies
• 3. Server Configuration
• 4. Maintenance best practices

1.- Types of Data Storage

Before we begin describing the different types of storage available and supported by Avaya, lets understand the different types. Our legacy systems use local tapes, optical drives, Flash Memory, and good old HDD called DAS (Direct Attached Storage) through the SCSI (Internet Small Computer System) ribbon cables.

2. Storage Technologies

There are a variety of different types of storage available for us to choose from, here are some of them:

SCSI – Uses block level storage using bits and bytes instead of file level storage, where files are fully transferred or accessed instead of using bits/bytes of data.

NAS – Network Attached Storage lets multiple servers share a single storage unit, instead of having dedicated DAS per server. It uses the File Access technology over the network.

Performance becomes an issue when compared to SCSI.

SAN – Storage Area Network – Is another technology that has different protocols and characteristics. here are some:

Fiber Channel (FC) –It uses high speed block level storage over the network using a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) direct connected to a Fiber Channel Switch, connecting a bank of disks using Fiber Channel Storage. The downside to this technology are the two physical connections needed to connect to the SAN. An Ethernet Network Connection, and a Direct FC Switch connection using the HBA to get to the Fiber Channel Storage.

FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) – It uses the FC protocol to encapsulate Fiber Channel frames over Ethernet frames, and it runs at 10 Gbps or higher. Using the Block Level Storage without the HBA fiber connection, instead it uses a FCoE Switch to connect to the Fiber Channel Storage.

iSCSI (Internet SCSI) – It uses block level commands sent over IP to a bank of storage devices (NAS) connected through the existing IP Network. Performance is not a good as Fiber Channel but cheaper and works well for small/medium businesses.

InfiniBand normally used for supercomputing with a similar technology as Fiber Channel, but instead it uses an InfiniBand or IB switches, providing up to 200 Gbps throughput.

3. Server Configuration

The Server Storage gets configured different ways depending the software level and type of deployment. For the legacy systems it is normal to have RAID-5 or RAID-10 configured with an Array of 3 Disks connected in the DAS configuration through the SCSI technology.

For the Enterprise servers you see the legacy 8800 IBM Servers and HP DL360Gs using three disk configuration, where you can pull any of these drives out without causing data interruption.

When running a Virtual environment through VMWare EXSi, you have different storage configurations available. FCoE and iSCSI are the most common technology used.

4. Maintenance best practices

These systems will have SNMP monitoring software reviewing the health of the hardware. In some instances, these alarms won’t create traps to let us know whenever there is a fault with one of the disks.

To help you identify which type of Raid array of disks are being implemented and which type of Disk connectivity type, use some of these commands=

Raid Commands – the two main commands are the “raid_status -s” and the “raid_status -p” commands to display the amount the array of disks available and which type of Raid is been used.

Knowing the disk connectivity – For those using a virtual ESXi environment you can run “esxcli iscsi adapter list” to list how many NICs are configured in the iSCSI configuration, the same command works for FCoE, just swap iscsi with FCoE within the command.

Which Avaya Storage have you had to work with?

iSCSI and FCoE Cisco Description