Storage Virtualization
There are 17 entries for the tag Storage Virtualization
Gear shifting in a modern car is a highly virtualized application nowadays. Whether you’re driving a stick or an automatic, it is certainly not the same as your great grandaddy’s shifting (assuming he owned a car). The huge difference between a stick and an automatic is how much work the operator has to perform to get the job done. In the case of an automatic, the driver sets the car up correctly (putting it into drive as opposed to one of the other gears), and then forgets about it other than depressing and releasing the gas and brake pedals....
On occasion I have talked about military force multipliers. These are things like terrain and minefields that can make your force able to do their job much more effectively if utilized correctly. In fact, a study of military history is every bit as much a study of battlefields as it is a study of armies. He who chooses the best terrain generally wins, and he who utilizes tools like minefields effectively often does too. Rommel in the desert often used Wadis to hide his dreaded 88mm guns – that at the time could rip through any tank the British...
As you all know, I try to keep my marketing spiel for F5 to a minimum here. I don’t hesitate to mention when F5 has a product that will solve your problem, but try to focus on the problem and technical solutions. But sometimes I want to crow about how good our product lines really are. Thankfully, Lori provides a venue for us to do just that called F5 Fridays. This week I guest wrote an F5 Friday article about our new ARX Cloud Extender product and it’s cool enough I thought I’d let those of you who...
The last couple of years have been painful, to say the least. Some call them unprecedented, financially, but I do believe that is pushing the descriptor a bit far, since there have been plenty of instances where business pretty much en-masse questioned the amount that IT returns for their investment and cut budgets, so the feel of this recession is not much different than what we’ve felt before, it’s just by necessity. The funny bit of this is that everyone seems to agree that IT spending still went up in 2009, just by a massively reduced amount. Since the pinch...
So I’m jealous that Lori works D&D references into her posts regularly and I never have… Until today! For those who aren’t gamers or literary buffs, a Hydra is a big serpent or lizard with a variable number of heads (normally five to nine in both literature and gaming). They’re very powerful and very dangerous, and running into one unprepared is likely to get you p0wned. The worst part about them is that mythologically speaking, if you cut one of the heads off, two grow in its place. Ugly stuff if you’re determined to defeat it. That’s...
THE INTERSTATE HIGHWAY The Interstate road network in the US was built to facilitate interstate trade. Using public funding, the idea was that everyone benefitted if goods were able to move easier across the nation. Everyone did benefit, and unfettered interstate trade facilitated a whole lot of business that might never have occurred if each state maintained their own road network. But then a rather odd, and likely unforeseeable thing happened. Where an interstate ran through large cities, locals started using it not for inter-state travel, but for their daily commute...
Since I first started covering storage, back around the turn of the century (sounds more impressive than it is, no?), the argument has been ongoing in far more organizations than you could imagine about who should “own” storage security. Does it belong with the storage group? With the security group? How about in IT services, since they’re the ones that are on the pointy end of user relations? Considering the number of times that the security group has been around this May-pole, you’d think they would have all the answers, but in many ways this isn’t a “what...
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...
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 they’re only disk purchase deferments, I would disagree....
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...
If you’re just joining this series, check out Reason #1 and Reason #2 That You Need File Virtualization Tiering is the one benefit that a sales person will tell you about, so I was putting it off a bit, but it is the one thing I’ve had requests for, and it’s a benefit most enterprises can relate to. I’ll tell you up-front that even though it does offer a huge savings, for reasons I’ll mention below, this isn’t one of the big drivers for me – I knew about the benefits of tiering before I decided that 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 it’s explained, even my Security friends will have...
We get the opportunity to interview people on occasion, and when we signed a partnership with Data Domain, I became intrigued. The two technologies definitely could be complimentary, but I wanted to understand the how/why of our partnership. Rick Gillett, VP of Data Systems Architecture took some time to chat with me and provide some slides that illustrate how the two technologies work together via this partnership and what the cost implications could be - based on real-world deployments of ARX with Data Domain. It had some serious surprises for me, that's for certain, I'm hoping it does for you...
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?...
Well, my guest view for SDTimes went live yesterday or today. You have all heard the story from me before - Approach Virtualization and every other buzzword du jour with a bit of skepticism. Generally speaking, buzzwords get that way because there's a very useful application behind them - notable exceptions being NAC (Network Access Control) and ILM (Information Lifecycle Management), but those two had useful bits, they were just industry-sponsored umbrella buzzwords for a whole lot of stuff. Server Virtualization yields great benefits early on when you're merging servers that don't use much in the way of resources and...
Last week while Joe and I were at our Lowell offices (formerly Acopia, now known as the F5 Data Solutions group), I learned a lot that I didn't previously know about our ARX directory-level virtualization product. Now I'm not new to the storage space, and indeed, had looked at Acopia briefly when I was the storage editor at Network Computing, but there was so much going on in storage at the time that I never got around to covering them directly. All things considered, I hoped to get a handle on how specifically we did what all storage virtualization products...
So I'm sitting in the airport in Boston, going home after a three day stint here learning about the ARX and getting some other stuff done that Joe and I had on our agenda. I'm coming home with a ton of fodder for how to utilize ARX in your enterprise, both alone and with LTM. Soon you'll be seeing more storage blog posts from me, and that's good news, I really enjoy the storage space - except for that part where a few companies control the high end and good ideas either go through them or die on the vine....
