Live Webcast: A New Approach to Simplified Storage Management (Part of a Series) Clustered NAS from BlueArc supplants Isilon at film effects firm. The Future of NetApp. As I was sitting in London’s Heathrow Airport this morning catching up on RSS feeds before boarding my plane back to the United States, an article headline caught my eye: Why NetApp Must Seek Acquisition. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see this article published, because it gives me the opportunity to share something I’ve been thinking about for a while, even before I joined EMC. I’m sure that everything I have to say about NetApp will be colored by the fact that I now work for EMC, and—whether I like it or not—all comments about any other storage vendor or technology are immediately suspect. Recent comments to my VPLEX article proved that point; it will take time to re-establish objectivity and prove to my readers that I’m not an EMC shill.
But I digress; back to the article. In the article, the author (“secretcto”) states why he believes that NetApp must seek acquisition in order to survive. Now lets take a look at the market cap of each of these players. SAS-2: Benefits and drawbacks of the newest Serial Attached SCSI version. How Intelligent Does Your Storage Need To Be? - Storage Blog.
IT 2.0 : Next Generation IT infrastructures. Data storage technology and management resources - SearchStorage. SAN, NAS and the Future of Virtualization | Blogs | ITBusinessEd. The future of the data center clearly rests on virtualization. Without breaking the ties between hardware and software, there is no rapid scalability, no data flexibility, no cloud. But it seems that few people are giving thought to the infrastructure implications of this transition. A key question at this point is: What's to become of the Storage Area Network (SAN)?
Those of you who are already pushing the virtual envelope might be wondering how your current SAN will be able to cope in an increasingly complex environment. As Anand Perisamy of storage software developer Gluster points out, non-virtual architectures were able to cope with one server having one Logical Unit Number (LUN). But increasing numbers of VMs, each with their own LUN, quickly overloads most SANs. Gluster is one of the many companies touting NAS as the solution, by virtue of its greater scalability and its ability to provide shared data access across multiple virtual machines. Virtualization Short Take #40 - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog. Welcome to the 40th post in the Virtualization Short Take series, where I share with you various virtualization-related links, thoughts, and news tidbits. (Occasionally, I throw in some stuff that’s not virtualization related just to see if you are paying attention.) Enjoy! There have been a couple of posts now discussing Storage IO Control, a new feature that is possibly slated for inclusion in a future release of VMware vSphere.
Storage IO Control extends the disk shares model cluster-wide, allowing administrators to properly shape access to back-end storage resources. The inimitable Scott Drummonds discussed it on Pivot Point (his blog), and Craig Stewart also recently published an article about Storage IO Control over at Gestalt IT. There’s a fair amount of duplication between the two articles (Craig based his article partly on Scott’s), but both are worth a read if you need to come up to speed on this new feature. That’s it for now. StorageMojo — Data storage info & analysis. SSDs: A New Era in Throughput. It was indeed fortuitous that enterprise-class SSDs came along just in time to accommodate IT's need for incredibly high throughput brought on by virtualization and the cloud. But as they say in show business, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Indications are that the I/O possibilities of solid-state technologies are only just beginning, and an era of lightning-fast data transmission is in the making.
Ironic, isn't it, that storage was always seen as the weak link in the data-networking chain, but now seems poised to meet, or dare I say exceed, the capability of many networking devices? Our first bit of evidence comes from PMC-Sierra this week. That company has introduced a new RAID-adapter system, the MaxRAID BR5225-80, that uses the PCI-Express bus to link up to eight SAS/SATA ports for a combined throughput of 300,000 IOPS.
There is also a lot of action taking place on the storage array itself.
Data Protection Storage Is Different. Best Practices for Storage Tiering and Deduplication. NextIO Achieves 2.2 Million IO/s. NextIO, provider of I/O consolidation solutions, and Fusion-io, in new memory tier of flash-based solid-state (ioMemory) technology, have broken the record for IOPS performance in a single rack-mount flash array. A single NextIO vSTOR Application Acceleration Appliance populated with six ioDrive Duo ioMemory cards and two SuperMicro servers equipped with Six-Core AMD Opteron processors reached performance levels of 2.2M read input/output operations per second (IOPS), besting the previous single-box flash performance record of 1.7M IOPs.
NextIO vSTOR Application Acceleration Appliance vSTOR’s innovative implementation makes multiple high-performance PCI-Express connections available to servers, each of which provides significantly higher host connection bandwidth than flash arrays using Fibre Channel or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host interfaces. To help NextIO meet this goal, they have entered into an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Fusion-io. Data Archiving: Email, File, Document Archiving Solutions & Soft.
Storagebod's Blog: Protecting De-Duped Data. Key Issues for Enterprise Storage, 2009. Several issues intersect in a broad set of choices and outcomes involving an IT organization's storage requirements: expanding business requirements, new and emerging technologies, tactical considerations, and evolving best practices in the deployment and management of storage. This research highlights some of the most-important questions driving Gartner's 2009 research agenda in the storage space. What are the strengths and challenges of storage products, services and vendors? Despite vendor consolidations, enterprises face many choices when evaluating storage hardware, software and services.
To help enterprises sort through the choices, we will continue to publish Magic Quadrants, MarketScopes, Vendor Ratings, and vendor strength, weakness, opportunity and threat (SWOT) reports, as well as product and technology research with a focus on the operational and financial implications of various choices for the storage market. This will be relevant: What is the future of storage? Free Library Membership - Join Now! As file data continues to grow at a rapid pace, businesses are looking for more ways to cut their storage costs and lighten the management burden on IT. But where should you begin? The storage market presents an overwhelming array of choices even to experienced storage veterans, in terms of both technologies and vendors.
Instead of starting with potential solutions, you should first develop an understanding of your data storage requirements, not only as they are today but also how they are expected to change over time. To achieve this level of understanding, you must monitor your file storage environments over time, tracking what kinds of files are being created, why they are being created, who is creating them, how old they are, and how much storage capacity they consume.
Using this information, you can create a smarter storage strategy based on business value. Vendor: F5 Networks Posted: 10 Sep 2009 Published: Format: Length: 13 Page(s) Type: White Paper Language: English. Virtual Infrastructure products: features comparison. Back to the "Resources" web page on it20.info Storage Architectures for Virtualization LAST UPDATED on 22nd December 2009 1 Introduction 2 Background: Storage Management Principles in a Virtual Environment 3 High Level Design Principles for Storage Resiliency in a Virtualized Environment 3 . 1 Building Architectures 3 . 2 Campus Architectures 3 . 3 Globe Architectures 3 . 4 Hybrid Designs 3 . 5 Networking Considerations 3 . 6 SAN Considerations 3 . 7 Conclusions and Summary Table 4. 4 . 1 Asynchronous Vs Synchronous replication 4 . 2 Data Consistency: Not Only a Technical Issue 5 High Availability and D/R at the "Virtualization layer" Vs "Virtual Machine layer" 6 Storage Resiliency: Actual Implementations in a Virtualized Environment 6 . 1 Building Implementations 6 . 2 Campus Implementations 6 . 2 . 1 Campus Implementations for VMware Virtual Infrastructures 6 . 2 . 1 . 1 Campus Implementations for VMware Virtual Infrastructures (Host-based Replication) 6 . 3 Globe Implementations 1. 2. 3.