NAS Virtualization

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 – 4TB of Tasty Goodness Lori and I have a larger home network, with several servers, multiple switches, two WAPs, and eight or so clients. Thrown into the middle of all of that is an aging Infrant Technologies (now NetGear) ReadyNAS, 1 Terabyte. The ReadyNAS, from before NetGear purchased Infrant, has had a bad cable for about two years, but has been working just fine otherwise. Of course a bad cable implies one of the drives was down (it was), and that makes RAID kind of redundant. About a week ago the ReadyNAS took itself off-line. We have a lot of data out there that... posted @ Thursday, May 07, 2009 10:39 AM | Feedback (4)

Reason #5 That You Need File Virtualization If you’re just joining this series, there is a complete list of the Reasons to date on my team member page. Are we at reason #5 already? Wow. Okay, this is another one that salesmen will tell you because it is truly compelling, but it is truly a good reason, one of the best. It is also one of the ones that I eschewed before getting to see real numbers that I could quantify were not marketing material. The disk savings are real. Yeah, I said it, and it’s true. Sure, you could argue that... posted @ Thursday, April 02, 2009 8:13 PM | Feedback (3)

Reason #4 That You Need File Virtualization I took the easy topic this week, and things are so crazy it’s still late in the day that I’m posting this. My apologies. This one also focuses more on ARX than previous ones – this is because replication is a differentiator for many vendors’ products, so I’m being careful to talk about what most can do, then give details for the one I know the best. If you’re just joining this series, there is a complete list of the Reasons to date on my team member page. Replication is of growing importance in the enterprise, be it... posted @ Thursday, March 26, 2009 5:30 PM | Feedback (0)

Reason #2 That You Need File Virtualization If you’re just joining us, the first article in this series is here. While desktop management is a volume issue – touch enough desktops and something is likely to break – Reason #2 is more about complexity. Our data centers are like the cloverleaf on a busy freeway intersection – stuff going every which direction, and no one is quite certain (though some claim to be) what causes all those collisions and slowdowns. Simplified – and possibly more effective - Security Yes indeed, I did say that. And I mean it. I figure that once... posted @ Thursday, March 12, 2009 8:21 AM | Feedback (0)

Reason #1 That You Need File Virtualization So I’ve been going to start this series forever, and things just kept piling up. Today I have decided to embark upon it, and worry later about other commitments, because I think it is an important topic. I wasn’t a fan of File/NAS Virtualization at first – it seemed like an added layer to the very clean (if chatty) NAS hierarchy. I’ve grown to understand that the addition of the layer is nothing compared to the adaptability that layer provides, so I want to share. This series will start with the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that anyone who’s... posted @ Wednesday, March 04, 2009 8:09 PM | Feedback (4)

The Many Faces of Storage Virtualization I started a blog post about this topic over a week ago, and it grew into a huge article instead of a blog post. I'm hoping to have it ready for posting as an article yet this week, but there are some tidbits I thought I'd share outright. Less of a teaser than a "if you want just the overview, here's info with recommendations for further research topics". In the world of storage virtualization there are a ton of options for enterprise IT to pursue, including SAN virtualization, NAS virtualization, Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs), and iSCSI virtualization (new to you?... posted @ Tuesday, December 02, 2008 1:49 PM | Feedback (1)