Tune into this podcast to learn all about SAN and server virtualization management. Topics discussed include: types of storage architectures most common among companies using virtualization, the benefits and drawbacks of adding storage abstraction layers into virtual servers and more.
Published by: Overland Storage
Read this case study to learn how a full-service professional engineering and landscape architecture firm found simple way to migrate its 14 remote sites to a virtualized platform without data loss or extended downtime, which resulted in a significant backup throughput boost and huge company savings.
Published by: CA
This presentation transcript explains a little background on Storage Switzerland and then gets into some of the details of automated tiering - like where and how you might want to do that. It also provides details about file virtualization.
Published by: F5 Networks
Virtualization is one of the hottest topics in enterprise computing today, with advocates promoting benefits including improved business efficiency, cost savings, and mission-critical data and application protection. In this note, we examine opportunities to leverage virtualization to automate consolidation and systems management.
Published by: Dell and VMware
infoLaw passes along this excerpt from Threatpost: “Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Emergency Response Team has released a new fuzzing framework to help identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities from software products. The Basic Fuzzing Framework (BFF) is described as a simplified version of automated dumb fuzzing. It includes a Linux virtual machine that has been optimized for fuzz testing and a set of scripts to implement a software test.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Schools typically have limited funds to take on massive IT projects. In fact, many of the desktops are over 5 years old, with significant numbers of desktops reaching 10 years old. So how does a school expect to maintain aging hardware. How does a school plan to provide students with newer applications? The ABC School District looked at virtual desktops.
This particular school district consists of 50 school campuses that supports 70,000 users. Due to limited funding, the technology infrastructure is aging quickly. Thanks to a voter approved tax levy, the ABC School District is receiving an infusion of money to upgrade their computing infrastructure. Instead of going down the same path of distributed computing, the ABC School District has decided to implement desktop virtualization based on the following architecture.
Previously I’ve talked about how using local storage can help reduce the costs of desktop virtualization. Paul Wilson tested this type of environment to determine that it is indeed possible. So we have a new design decision, which way will you go?
Before making the decision, you have to determine if local storage is good enough for your environment or if you need shared storage.
Local storage is the storage located within the server running a hypervisor (XenServer, Hyper-V, vSphere). By using the local drives, here are important considerations to remember.
This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.
These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.
The trends that I am seeing with converged networking and I/O fall into a couple of categories. One being converged networking including unified communications, FCoE/DCB along with InfiniBand based discussions while the other being around I/O virtualization (IOV) including PCIe server based multi root IO virtualization (MRIOV).
As is often the case with new technologies the trend of some saying these are the next great things thus drop everything and adopt them now as they are working and ready for prime time mission critical deployment. Then there are those who say no, stop, do not waste your time on these as they are temporary, they will die and go away anyway. In between, there is reality which takes a bit of balancing the old with the new, look before you leap, do your homework, and do not be scared however have a strategy and a plan on how to achieve it.
Thus is FCoE a temporal or temporary technology? Well, in the scope that all technologies are temporary however it is their temporal timeframe that should be of interest. Thus given that FCoE will probably have at least a ten to fifteen year temporal timeline, I would say in technology terms it has a relative long life for supporting coexistence on the continued road to convergence which appears to be Ethernet.
Related and companion material:
Video: Storage and Networking Convergence
Blog: I/O Virtualization (IOV) Revisited
Blog: I/O, I/O, Its off to Virtual Work and VMworld I Go (or went)
Blog: EMC VPLEX: Virtual Storage Redefined or Respun?
That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.
These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.
The topic of this post is a trend server virtualization and recent EMC virtual storage announcements.
Virtual storage or storage virtualization has been as a technology and topic around for some time now. Some would argue that storage virtualization is several years old while others would say many decades depending on your view or definition which will vary by preferences, product, vendor, open or closed, hardware, network, software not to mention feature and functionality.
Consequently there are many different views and definitions of storage virtualization some tied to that of product specifications often leading to apples and oranges comparison.
Back in the early to mid 2000s, there was plenty of talk around storage virtualization which then gave way to a relative quiet period before seeing adoption pickup in terms of deployment later in the decade (at least for block based).
More recently there has a been a renewed flurry of storage virtualization activity with many vendors now shipping their latest versions of tools and functionality, EMC announcing VPLEX as well as the file virtualization vendors continuing to try and create a market for their wares (give it time, like block based, it will evolve).
One of the trends around storage virtualization and part of the play on words EMC is using is to change the order of the words. That is where storage virtualization is often aligned with product implementation (e.g. software on an appliance or switch or in a storage system) used primarily for aggregation of heterogeneous storage, with VPLEX EMC is referring to it as virtual storage.
What is interesting here is the play on life beyond consolidation a trend that is also occurring with servers or using virtualization for agility, flexibility and ease of management for upgrades, add, move and changes as opposed to simply pooling of LUNs and underlying storage devices. Stay tuned and watch for more in this space as well as read the blog post below about VPLEX for more on this topic.
Related and companion material:
Blog: EMC VPLEX: Virtual Storage Redefined or Respun?
That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
Blog: Industry Trends and Perspectives: 6GB SAS and DAS are not Dumb A$$ Storage
This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.
These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.
The topic of this post is a trend that I am seeing and hearing about during discussions with IT professionals pertaining to the use of two or more server virtualization hypervisors or what is known as tiered Hypervisors.
A trends tied to server virtualization that I am seeing more of are that IT organizations are increasingly deploying or using two or more different hypervisors (e.g. Citrix/Xen, Microsoft/HyperV, VMware vSphere) in their environment (on separate physical server or blades).
Tiered hypervisors is a concept similar to what many IT organizations already have in terms of different types of servers for various use cases, multiple operating systems as well as several kinds of storage mediums or devices.
What Im seeing is that IT pros are using different hypervisors to meet various cost, management and vendor control objectives aligning the applicable technology to the business or application service category.
Of course this brings up the discussion of how to manage multiple hypervisors and thus the real battle is or will be not about hypervisors, rather that of End to End (E2E) management.
A question that I often ask VARs and IT customers if they see Microsoft on the offensive or defensive with HyperV vs. VMware and vice versa, that is if VMware is on the defense or offense against Microsoft.
Not surprisingly the VMware and Microsoft faithful will say that the other is clearly on the defensive.
Meanwhile from other people, the feelings are rather mixed with many feeling that Microsoft is increasingly on the offensive with VMware being seen by some as playing a strong defense with a ferocious offense.
Related and companion material:
Video: Beyond Virtualization Basics (Free: May require registration)
Blog: Server and Storage Virtualization: Life beyond Consolidation
Blog: Should Everything Be Virtualized?
That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio