This chat will discuss how EqualLogic WAN acceleration and optimization products, such as the BIG-IP® product family from F5 Networks, can encrypt traffic and help dramatically reduce transfer times, improve bandwidth utilization, and allow for replication across greater distances.


Technical Community - Background Reading


EqualLogic WAN Replication Using f5 BIG-IP WAN Optimization Module

Chat Transcript



Dell-JeffS Today's topic is EqualLogic WAN Optimization Module with the F5 BIG-IP WOM (F5, BIG IP).
Dell-JeffS The chat is informal, so feel free to jump in with your questions at any time.
Dell-JeffS If you see a link, make sure and Right Click! Otherwise you might get booted from the chat... interface can be funny like that on occasion.
Dell-JeffS No need to take notes, a transcript will be posted in a day or two.
Dell-JeffS On hand we have a number of experts from both Dell and F5. Fred, Goose, Saxon, agramps, and Mchristianson are all from F5.
Dell-JeffS I met with F5 at a recent internal training event... explained what we do here in the Dell TechCenter and the rest is history. Fred, would you like to give a short description of what we did here in the lab?
FredJohnson-F5 We set up a proof of concept in the Dell TechCenter lab to demonstrate EqualLogic iSCSI using F5 Wan Optimization Module (WOM).
Dell-JeffS Here's a link to the article Fred & I worked on -- http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/equallogic+wan+replication+using+f5+big-ip+wan+optimization+module.
FredJohnson-F5 This solution is something that we've been working on with Dell recently.
Dell-JeffS Essentially, we emulated a WAN, through a Dell EqualLogic PS 4000XV on one side, a Dell EqualLogic PS 6000XV on the other, and ran a number of different replication tests.
FredJohnson-F5 We wanted to show how WAN Optimization Module can accelerate and encrypt iSCSI replication to lower replication times, increase throughput and add encryption to that traffic.
Dell-JeffS Through = threw.
Dell-JeffS One of the interesting things I found was the inline deduplication we were seeing from some of the sample datasets.
FredJohnson-F5 I'd like to introduce Saxon Amdahl. He is the F5 Acceleration Architect who will help answer questions today.
FredJohnson-F5 This solution can be useful for Dell and F5 customers who need both application delivery and WAN Optimization Module features. BIG-IP provides these features on the same platform.
JasonPowell So is this a special add-on to a normal BIG-IP hardware?
sudh_dell What are the scenarios I would plan to suggest a WAN Optimization Module (WOM)? Are they any specific use cases?
Dell-JeffS Anyone currently replicating over a WAN or looking into it?
FredJohnson-F5 Jason, this is a license add-on to the existing BIG-IP platform, starting with V10.1 code.
JasonPowell We've just lit up an offsite location for disaster recovery, so WAN replication is of big interest to us
FredJohnson-F5 Sudh_dell.Better use of bandwidth, faster replication times, and associated cost savings.
JasonPowell Of course, being a church we don't know if we can afford F5, but I'm very curious to learn regardless.
FredJohnson-F5 Jason, the payback can be very quick, within several months.
FredJohnson-F5 Existing Dell+F5 customers can take advantage of this by adding the module to an existing BIG-IP.
Dell-JeffS Anyone have any questions on the tests we did or the setup?
JasonPowell Do you mean we have to go read the test doc? ;-)
shanfont What size WAN did you use for testing?
FredJohnson-F5 The WAN link was set for 45 Mbps, 100ms latency and 1% packet loss (10K packets per million).
Graham_Gray I have a customer with a 100mb link currently looking at EqualLogic for replication.
Dell-DennisS Jeff orFred, can you tell us what dataset you used for the test?
Dell-ScottH Details are here - http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/equallogic+wan+replication+using+f5+big-ip+wan+optimization+module
Graham_Gray I suspect their rate of change will be quite high.
Dell-JeffS Shanfont -- 4 feet?
Dell-JeffS :) They were all in the same rack.
FredJohnson-F5 Dell-denniss, yes, the dataset (volume contents) are very important to the results that a customer will get in the real world.
Dell-ScottH Diagram of setup is here - http://media.community.dell.com/en/dtc/attach/dell-equallogic-f5-wom.pdf
Graham_Gray We've costed some Riverbed appliances, but they are stupid money.
Graham_Gray How do the F5s stack up to Riverbed?
Dell-JeffS Right click those links.
shanfont Ha, good one. Have you tested customers with small links? We have a 6mb pipe but plan on upgrading to a 45mb.
FredJohnson-F5 Dell-denniss, we use three datasets, each 2GB volumes (very small, I know). One was very compressible, one was real-world at about 38% comp and the last one was completely compressed. See the link above for the details.
shanfont Hey Jeff, next time you guys do a test do a real one from Austin to Harvey. I'll let you use my rack.
Dell-JeffS The very compressible one Fred mentions got a windows compression rate of 100%.
JasonPowell So you save on bandwidth. Do you also save on overall time to replicate similar chunks of data?
Dell-JeffS Got a good chuckle out of that one... broke the space time continuum sort of thing.
FredJohnson-F5 Graham_gray, yes, we compete with Riverbed. But we are more focused on replication and datacenter-to-datacenter scenarios.
JasonPowell I've heard some WAN optimizers save your bandwidth but don't actually save much overall time for the replication.
SaxonAmdahl The F5 solution provides both compression and acceleration, so replication times are dramatically reduced.
Graham_Gray Fred: It usually boils down to cost at the end of the day. The Riverbed appliances we were looking at were £48k each. A customer could have a gig link for the same amount.
FredJohnson-F5 F5 WOM uses a variety of features including compression, deduplication (cache), TCP optimization and tunneling to speed up the traffic. It also provides SSL encryption for customers who have compliance requirements.
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY We tried a number of WAN optimization vendors but none seemed to work for us. Most likely this was because our WAN link was only 6mb, but we plan to upgrade it to 45mb. How is F5?
Dell-KongY To[Private] shanfont I haven't personally used F5 since the old (Circa 2003/2004) days.
Dell-KongY To[Private] shanfont I’ll be working with Fred and Jeff in the next few weeks though on Microsoft Exchange and such.
FredJohnson-F5 Graham, you can send me an e-mail at fred.johnson@f5.com and we can help you with your customer, cost estimates, etc.
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY We did find some of our applications that ran extremely slow when going through a WAN optimization device.
Dell-JeffS F5 actually has a pretty decent wiki community... (we're still the best as far as I'm concerned): F5 Devcentral - Wiki, Blogs, Community Site: http://devcentral.f5.com/
Dell-JeffS :)
Dell-KongY To[Private] shanfont How was the bandwidth on your WAN pipe?
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY Well, I don't plan on testing out another vendor until after we upgrade our WAN.
FredJohnson-F5 Does anyone have any questions? I will provide some links next.
FredJohnson-F5 EqualLogic+WOM Partnership - http://www.equallogic.com/partnerships/default.aspx?id=9217
Dell-KongY To[Private] shanfont So it was slower going thru the WAN optimization device vs. no WAN optimization device.
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY It’s horrible. I can’t even do replication because it takes up to 95% of my bandwidth. We also use double-take.
Dell-JeffS There wasn't much configuring on our (Dell TechCenter's) part. We just moved the EqualLogic arrays and attached hosts over to new IP Addresses used for the other side of the WAN. Fred recorded a video of the Big IP setup on that article link from earlier: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/equallogic+wan+replication+using+f5+big-ip+wan+optimization+module
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY The bad thing is that we have mail and our intranet on the Austin side while everything else is at corporate in New Orleans. All those request for mail and web applications throughout the day fills it up, too.
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY This is something we've been fighting for two years now. Hopefully, moving up to VPLS and a 45mb pipe will resolve a lot of our issues.
Dell-KongY To[Private] shanfont How many users in your Microsoft Exchange database?
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY Close to 500. Say about 300 at one time.
sudh_dell So what happens to SAN HQ? It will still be able to provide reporting on the replication and other associated functionalities, right?
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY My database is about 50gb's.
Dell-KongY To[Private] shanfont Yes, shanfont. With 95% bandwidth utilization on 6mb pipe, the larger pipe and VPLS should resolve many of your issues.
Dell-JeffS Good question, sudh_dell.You would be able to see both sides of the WAN, assuming the SAN HQ host had connectivity to both. I'm pretty sure you would be able to see the difference in throughput on both sides.
Dell-JeffS You'd probably access the BIG-IP interface for the details of the data transferred (deduplication/compression, etc).
Dell-JeffS That’s something we could test. The hardware is still here in the lab
Dell-JeffS We're actually about to start a larger effort adding Microsoft Exchange failover to the mix.
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY Yes, I'm expecting that. When I see those results, that’s when I will be looking for a WAN optimization solution. I really liked Riverbed, but they are expensive.
Dell-JeffS Hopefully, there will be a Power Solutions article in the fall.
FredJohnson-F5 Sudh-dell, BIG-IP has performance statistics and a Performance Dashboard that will show real-time information on the system. This includes WAN optimization stats for de-dupe, compression, connections, throughput, etc.
sudh_dell As far as Dell EqualLogic is concerned, my understanding is that the BIG-IP appliance is transparent to it. From the EqualLogic perspective, there is absolutely no functionality change on the replication features and setup. It’s just that this appliance brings an added goodie of doing things faster and more efficiently. Is that.right ?
shanfont To[Private] Dell-KongY Has Jeff tested Certeon? Is he familiar with them? I think they are a partner of Dell. They were the first ones I played with, but all we were doing was having issues with EqualLogic replication problems, which they claimed they fixed. I gave up on them because they could never get past my issues
FredJohnson-F5 Sudh-dell, WOM does not affect the functionality of Dell EqualLogic.
Dell-JeffS True, but can't you tune it to your workload preferences?
FredJohnson-F5 There are profiles that can be finely tuned for different traffic types and datasets.
sudh_dell I just want to reconfirm that this appliance would require the storage to be similar at both the sites, right?
Dell-JeffS The storage?
sudh_dell As in certain appliances allows you to replicate between heterogeneous arrays
FredJohnson-F5 Sudh_dell, there are two types of de-dupe cache stores: memory and disk. The memory store has faster access but is small. This often works well with replication applications. The disk store is much larger but obviously has slower access to the cache information. We actually used disk store in our testing.
Dell-JeffS If the hardware can replicate on a LAN, then adding F5 allows it replicate on a WAN.
sudh_dell To[Private] Dell-JeffS Then it has be Dell EqualLogic at both the ends, right?
SaxonAmdahl The compression used by the BIG-IP is called Symmetric Adaptive Compression. What makes it adaptive is that it monitors both network throughput requirements, application latency constrains, and data compressibility in real-time. For bulk data flows (such as replication), BIG-IP will attempt to maximize compression ratios while fully utilizing available bandwidth.
FredJohnson-F5 Here is some more tuning information from our lab. Since the WAN conditions had high packet loss (10K packets per million), we made some adjustments to the TCP profiles for this WAN condition. This allows the TCP optimization to make better use of the link.
sudh_dell To[Private] Dell-JeffS If it was able to do this between disparate arrays, then it would have simply meant a lot more opportunity to position in accounts that have Disaster Recovery site coming up, but have some other storage in the Pr. But I understand you. I suppose it's Dell EqualLogic to Dell EqualLogic only.
JasonPowell Are there any issues with flow control or jumbo frames?
JasonPowell Suppose the F5 box on the remote end has a failure of some sort. Does the traffic still passively flow?
FredJohnson-F5 Jasonpowell, no problems with flow control or jumbo frames. These are local network settings and this issue does not come in to play over the WAN. Note that the BIG-IP does not support jumbo frames.
FredJohnson-F5 BIG-IP supports high-availability. Each site has two units. If the primary (active) unit fails, then a failover is done to the standby unit.
FredJohnson-F5 Once the failure is detected, BIG-IP is typically sub-second.
JasonPowell Without high-availability setup, you'd have to physically route traffic around BIG-IP and then correct.
JasonPowell This would be around both remote and local sites?
FredJohnson-F5 That is correct. But high-availability is recommended for any production deployment.
Graham_Gray If you have SANS on each side of the link with both actively supporting local servers and replication defined for both ways, will BIG-IP be able to handle that?
FredJohnson-F5 Yes, two-way traffic is supported.
JasonPowell I find many of us in the SMB market can't afford high-availability. Thus, we need to know what exactly the scenario looks like in non-high availability setup. :-)
Graham_Gray Sorry, I don't have many questions, but appliances like these do tend to be plug and play, so there's not much to ask about. :)
JasonPowell We don't have high-availability on our current firewall, but we have a plan B ready to go if it fails
FredJohnson-F5 Jasonpowell, I completely understand your situation. Note that there are various topologies that will work if you only have one system. Send e-mail fred.johnson@f5.com and I can help you with that.
Dell-JeffS Thanks everyone for joining! Thanks Fred, Saxon & the rest of F5 for moderating!