Announcing My New Book Data Infrastructure Management Insight Strategies

Announcing My New Book Data Infrastructure Management Insight Strategies

Announcing My New Book Data Infrastructure Management Insight Strategies

Announcing my new book Data Infrastructure Management Insight Strategies published via Auerbach/CRC Press is now available via CRC Press and Amazon.com among other global venues.

My Fifth Solo Book Project – Data Infrastructure Management

Data Infrastructure Management Insight Strategies (e.g. the white book) is my fifth solo published book in addition to several other collaborative works. Given its title, the focus of this new book is around Data Infrastructures, the tools, technologies, techniques, trends including hardware, software, services, people, policies inside data centers that get defined to support business and application services delivery. The book (ISBN 9781138486423) is soft covered (also electronic kindle versions available) with 250 pages, over a 100 figures, tables, tips and examples. You can explore the contents via Google Books here.

Data Infrastructure Books by Greg Schulz
Stack of my solo books with common theme around Data Infrastructure topics

Data Infrastructure Management Book
Data Infrastructure Management – Insight and Strategies e.g. the White book (CRC Press 2019)

Some of My Other Books Include

Click on the following book images to learn more about, as well as order your copy.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials BookSNIA Recommended Reading List
Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (SDDI) – Cloud, Converged, and Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft e.g. the Blue book covers software defined, sddc, sddi, hybrid, among other topics including serverless containers, NVMe, SSD, flash, pmem, scm as well as others. (CRC Press 2017) available at Amazon.com among other global venues.

Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking Intel recommended reading listIntel recommended reading list
Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CVDSN) – Your Journey to efficient and effective Information Services e.g. the Yellow or Gold Book (CRC Press 2011) available at Amazon.com among other global venues.

 

The Green and Virtual Data Center BookIntel Recommended Reading List
The Green and Virtual Data Center (TGVDC) – Enabling Efficient, Effective and Productive Data Infrastructures e.g. the Green Book (CRC Press 2009) available at Amazon.com among other venues.

Resilient Storage Networks Book
Resilient Storage Networks (RSN) – Designing Flexible scalable Data Infrastructures (Elsevier 2004) e.g. the Red Book is SNIA Education Endorsed Reading available at Amazon.com among other venues. I have some free copies of RSN for anybody who is willing to pay shipping and handling, send me a note and we will go from there.

Where to learn more

Learn more via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Today more than ever there tends to be a focus on the date something was created or published as there is a lot of temporal content with short shelf life. This means that there is a lot of content including books being created that are short temporal usually focused on a particular technology, tool, trend that has a life span or attention focus of a couple of years at best.

On the other hand, there is also content that is still being created today that combines new and emerging technology, tools, trends with time-tested strategies, techniques as well as processes, some of whose names or buzzwords will evolve. My books fit into the latter category of combing current as well as emerging technologies, tools, trends, techniques that support longer shelf life, just insert your new favorite buzzword, buzz trend or buzz topic as needed.

Data Infrastructure Books by Greg Schulz

You will also notice looking at the stack of books, Data Infrastructure Management Insight and Strategies is a smaller soft covered book compared to others in my collection. The reason is that this new book can be a quick read to address what you need, as well as be a companion to others in the stack depending on what your focus or requirements are.

Common questions I get having written several books, not to mention the thousands of articles, tips, reports, blogs, columns, white papers, videos, webinars among other content is what’s is next? Good question, see what’s next, as well as check out some other things I’m doing over at www.picturesoverstillwater.com where I’m generating big data that gets stored and processed in various data infrastructures including cloud ;) .

Will there be another book and if so on or about what? As I mentioned, there are some projects I’m exploring, will they get finished or take different directions, wait and see what’s next.

How do I find the time to create these books and how long does it take? The time required varies as does the amount of work, what else I’m doing. I try to leverage the book (and other content creation projects) with other things I’m doing to maximize time. Some book projects have been very fast, a year or less. Some take longer such as Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials as it is a big book with lots of material that will have a long shelf life.

Do I write and illustrate the books or do I have somebody do them for me? For my books I do the writing and illustrating (drawings, figures, images) myself along with some of the layouts relying on external copy editors and production folks.

What do I recommend or give advice to those wanting to write a book? Understand that publishing a book is a project, there’s the actual writing, editing, reviews, art work, research, labs or other support items as book companions. Also understand why are you writing a book, for fame, fortune, acclaim, to share with others or some other reason. I also recommend before you write your entire book to talk with others who have been published to test the waters, get feedback. You might find it easier to shop an extended outline than a completed manuscript, that is unless you are writing a novel or similar.

Want to learn more about writing a book (or other content), get feedback, have other questions, drop me a note and will do what I can to help out.

Data Infrastructure Management Book

There is an old saying, publish or perish, well, I just published my fifth solo book Data Infrastructure Management Insight Strategies that you can buy at Amazon.com among other venues.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2019. Author of Data Infrastructure Insights (CRC Press), Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Also visit www.picturesoverstillwater.com to view various UAS/UAV e.g. drone based aerial content created by Greg Schulz. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2019 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday #blogtobertech

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday #blogtobertech

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday including moving beyond or outside our current tradecraft focus area. If you are an expert in a field or given focus area, learn something new about an area outside your expertise or comfort zone. Now if you are of the mind-set that there is nothing new to learn about, it’s all old, boring, perhaps its time to step back, look around, explore other areas.

Doing something new can be in an adjacent technology area, or something completely unrelated. For example, in a recent VMUG keynote presentation and blog post I discussed how Next Generation Hybrid Software Defined Data Infrastructures Are In Your Future.

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday
Next Generation Data Infrastructures are in your future (if not already)

What tradecraft skills and experience do you need to have, expand or refresh to support next-generation hybrid software-defined data infrastructures? If you are a server person than you need to broaden your tradecraft skills experience to storage, I/O networking, cloud, virtual, container across hardware as well as software. Likewise, if you are storage or I/O and networking, you need to expand into other areas. If you are a VMware focused professional, then learn about Microsoft Hyper-V or vice versa. If you are an AWS focused person, learn about Google, Azure or vice versa, same applies across different technology domains.

On the other hand, if you know all there is to know, chances are they are other areas you need to learn more about, or, determine what you don’t know to address that. By chance, if you do happen to know everything, there is to know, how much time are you spending interacting with others to teach them, possibly learning something new yourself.

Invest Time into Your Tradecraft Skill set

If you are not spending at least an hour a day learning something new, you are missing out on the opportunity. Part of that hour should also be outside your comfort zone core focus area. For example, if you are a software pro, learn more about hardware, clouds, or something different. If you are a VMware focused person, learn Hyper-V, AWS, Azure, something else. If you are storage, learn server, network, cloud and beyond. If you are focused on data infrastructures, then learn about the upper-level business applications along with the users who use them and vice versa.

How I Continue to Learn Expanding My Tradecraft Skills Experience Every day

As part of expanding my tradecraft, I spend part of my day learning, refreshing on core data infrastructure focus areas (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, cloud, containers, converged, software-defined, data protection) and related topics. Learning involves vendor briefings, researching, talking with others, reading, hands-on technology trial to gain insight experience perspectives.

I also have expanded my tradecraft experiences by becoming an FAA Part 107 licensed commercial pilot of small unmanned aerial system (sUAS), small unmanned aerial vehicle (sUAV) or more commonly merely called drones. Besides being FAA licensed, I also expanded by becoming Minnesota sUAV/drone and aerial photography licensed. Drone flying has an adjacent to data infrastructures in that one of my drones’ records at 4K 60 frames per second (fps) meaning about 1 GByte of data every two minutes of video, plus telemetry. Note that the drones have internet capability and can be considered IoT for their video, as well as telemetry.


Above is a 4K video flights via my companion site www.picturesoverstillwater.com

Where to learn more

Learn more about learning, data infrastructures, tradecraft, drones as well as related trends, tools, technologies and topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

What this means is that in addition to expanding as well as refreshing my data infrastructure related tradecraft skills, I’am also expanding my experiences into other adjacent areas. In other words, instead of just talking about big data, fast data, video, IoT, drones and related, I’am involved with it hands on.

Keep in mind, at some point the student becomes the teacher, and a teacher is a student. Leverage your pair of eyes and ears to see things in different ways, listen to and learn about items outside your primary focus area as you expand or refresh your tradecraft skill set experiences.

If you can’t learn something new every day, either you are not trying, or you are in trouble. Even experts and unicorns can learn something new every day, even if that is as simple as learning to listen to others.

With October being #blogtobertech there are plenty of opportunities to Don’t Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday which also includes student becoming teacher, teacher being student.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Application Data Access Lifecycle Patterns Everything Is Not The Same

Application Data Access Life cycle Patterns Everything Is Not The Same(Part V)

Application Data Access Life cycle Patterns Everything Is Not The Same

Application Data Access Life cycle Patterns Everything Is Not The Same

This is part five of a five-part mini-series looking at Application Data Value Characteristics everything is not the same as a companion excerpt from chapter 2 of my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged and Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft (CRC Press 2017). available at Amazon.com and other global venues. In this post, we look at various application and data lifecycle patterns as well as wrap up this series.

Application Data Value Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

Active (Hot), Static (Warm and WORM), or Dormant (Cold) Data and Lifecycles

When it comes to Application Data Value, a common question I hear is why not keep all data?

If the data has value, and you have a large enough budget, why not? On the other hand, most organizations have a budget and other constraints that determine how much and what data to retain.

Another common question I get asked (or told) it isn’t the objective to keep less data to cut costs?

If the data has no value, then get rid of it. On the other hand, if data has value or unknown value, then find ways to remove the cost of keeping more data for longer periods of time so its value can be realized.

In general, the data life cycle (called by some cradle to grave, birth or creation to disposition) is created, save and store, perhaps update and read with changing access patterns over time, along with value. During that time, the data (which includes applications and their settings) will be protected with copies or some other technique, and eventually disposed of.

Between the time when data is created and when it is disposed of, there are many variations of what gets done and needs to be done. Considering static data for a moment, some applications and their data, or data and their applications, create data which is for a short period, then goes dormant, then is active again briefly before going cold (see the left side of the following figure). This is a classic application, data, and information life-cycle model (ILM), and tiering or data movement and migration that still applies for some scenarios.

Application Data Value
Changing data access patterns for different applications

However, a newer scenario over the past several years that continues to increase is shown on the right side of the above figure. In this scenario, data is initially active for updates, then goes cold or WORM (Write Once/Read Many); however, it warms back up as a static reference, on the web, as big data, and for other uses where it is used to create new data and information.

Data, in addition to its other attributes already mentioned, can be active (hot), residing in a memory cache, buffers inside a server, or on a fast storage appliance or caching appliance. Hot data means that it is actively being used for reads or writes (this is what the term Heat map pertains to in the context of the server, storage data, and applications. The heat map shows where the hot or active data is along with its other characteristics.

Context is important here, as there are also IT facilities heat maps, which refer to physical facilities including what servers are consuming power and generating heat. Note that some current and emerging data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools can correlate the physical facilities power, cooling, and heat to actual work being done from an applications perspective. This correlated or converged management view enables more granular analysis and effective decision-making on how to best utilize data infrastructure resources.

In addition to being hot or active, data can be warm (not as heavily accessed) or cold (rarely if ever accessed), as well as online, near-line, or off-line. As their names imply, warm data may occasionally be used, either updated and written, or static and just being read. Some data also gets protected as WORM data using hardware or software technologies. WORM (immutable) data, not to be confused with warm data, is fixed or immutable (cannot be changed).

When looking at data (or storage), it is important to see when the data was created as well as when it was modified. However, you should avoid the mistake of looking only at when it was created or modified: Instead, also look to see when it was the last read, as well as how often it is read. You might find that some data has not been updated for several years, but it is still accessed several times an hour or minute. Also, keep in mind that the metadata about the actual data may be being updated, even while the data itself is static.

Also, look at your applications characteristics as well as how data gets used, to see if it is conducive to caching or automated tiering based on activity, events, or time. For example, there is a large amount of data for an energy or oil exploration project that normally sits on slower lower-cost storage, but that now and then some analysis needs to run on.

Using data and storage management tools, given notice or based on activity, which large or big data could be promoted to faster storage, or applications migrated to be closer to the data to speed up processing. Another example is weekly, monthly, quarterly, or year-end processing of financial, accounting, payroll, inventory, or enterprise resource planning (ERP) schedules. Knowing how and when the applications use the data, which is also understanding the data, automated tools, and policies, can be used to tier or cache data to speed up processing and thereby boost productivity.

All applications have performance, availability, capacity, economic (PACE) attributes, however:

  • PACE attributes vary by Application Data Value and usage
  • Some applications and their data are more active than others
  • PACE characteristics may vary within different parts of an application
  • PACE application and data characteristics along with value change over time

Read more about Application Data Value, PACE and application characteristics in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017).

Where to learn more

Learn more about Application Data Value, application characteristics, PACE along with data protection, software defined data center (SDDC), software defined data infrastructures (SDDI) and related topics via the following links:

SDDC Data Infrastructure

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

Keep in mind that Application Data Value everything is not the same across various organizations, data centers, data infrastructures, data and the applications that use them.

Also keep in mind that there is more data being created, the size of those data items, files, objects, entities, records are also increasing, as well as the speed at which they get created and accessed. The challenge is not just that there is more data, or data is bigger, or accessed faster, it’s all of those along with changing value as well as diverse applications to keep in perspective. With new Global Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) going into effect May 25, 2018, now is a good time to assess and gain insight into what data you have, its value, retention as well as disposition policies.

Remember, there are different data types, value, life-cycle, volume and velocity that change over time, and with Application Data Value Everything Is Not The Same, so why treat and manage everything the same?

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Data Infrastructure Resource Links cloud data protection tradecraft trends

Data Infrastructure Resource Links Server Storage I/O Network

data infrastructure resource links server storage I/O cloud data protection tradecraft links

By Greg Schulzwww.storageioblog.com April 28, 2018

Various data infrastructure resource links.

SDDC Data Infrastructure

The following are a collection of server storageioblog data infrastructure resource links.

Where to learn more

Vmware Vsphere Vsan Vcenter Version 6 7 Summary

Vmware Vsphere Vsan Vcenter V6 7 Sddc Details

Vmware Vsphere Vsan Server Storage Io Enhancements

New Cloud Act Data Regulation

Data Protection Recovery World Backup Day

Aws Cloud Application Data Protection Webinar

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview

March 2018 Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Application Data Value Characteristics Part1

4 3 2 1 Data Protection Availability

Application Data Characteristics Types Part3

Application Data Volume Velocity

Application Data Access Life Cycle

Veeam Gdpr Experiences Walking Talk

Vmware Continues Cloud Construction March Announcements

Cloud Benefits Hyperv Disaster Recovery Draas

World Backup Day 2018 Data Protection Readiness Reminder

Install Intel Optane Nvme U2 8639 Ssd Drive In Pcie Slot

Data Infrastructure Resource Links Tradecraft Trends

Achieve Flexible Data Protection Availability Flash Storage Solutions Webinar

2017 Holiday Greetings From Serverstorageio

November 2017 Server Storageio Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Transformation Serverless Life Beyond Devops New York Times Cto Nick Rockwell

Data Protection Fundamentals

Reliability Availability Serviceability Ras Data Protection Fundamentals

Data Protection Acess Availabity Raid Erasure Codes

Enabling Data Protection Rpo Archive Backup Cdp Pit Copy Snapshots Versions

Point Time Data Protection Granularity Points Interest

Nvme Place Volatile Memory Express

Nand Flash Ssd Storage Io Conversation

Welcome To The Obeject Storage Resources Center

Server And Storage Io Benchmark Resources

Server Storage Io Converged Infrastructure Hci Overview

Data Protection Diaries Main

Data Infrastructure Server Storage Io Networking Recommended Reading Book Shelf Blogtober

Gdpr General Data Protection Regulation Resources Areyou Ready

Data Infrastructure Primer Overview

Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Overview

Announcing Software Defined Data Infrastructure Sddc Book

Travel Fun Crossword Puzzle Vmworld 2017 Las Vegas

Hot Popular Trending Data Infrastructure Vendors Watch

Data Protection Security Logical Physical Software Defined

Data Protection Tools Technologies Toolbox Buzzword Bingo Trends

Walking Data Protection Talk

Whos Toolbox Technology Tools

Data Protection Resources Learn

October 2017 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Introducing Windows Subsystem For Linux Wsl

Enterprise Hdd Content Servers

Why Fc And Fcoe Vendors Get Beat Up Over Bandwidth

Are Vmware Vvols In Your Virtual Server And Storage Io Future

Putting Some Vmware Esx Storage Tips Together Part I

Server Storage Io Memory Dram Nand Flash

Intel Micron 3d Xpoint Nvm Scm Pm Nvme Ssd

Garbage Data In Garbage Information Out Big Data Or Big Garbage

Only You Can Prevent Cloud Data Loss

Cloud Conversations Aws Ebs Glacier And S3 Overview Part I

Cloud Conversations Confidence Certainty And Confidentiality

Cloud Conversations Azure Aws Service Maps

Aws S3 Storage Gateway Revisited Part

Cloud Conversations Aws S3 Cross Region Replication Storage Enhancements

Cloud Conversations Aws Ebs Glacier And S3 Overview Part Ii S3

Aws Announces S3 Cloud Storage Security Encryption Features

Fixing Windows 10 1709 Post Upgrade Restart Loop

Microsoft September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

Nvme Wont Replace Flash Complement

Intel Micron Unveil New 3d Xpoint Nvm For Servers Storage

Answer Nvme Questions

Gaining Industry Traction Adoption

Industry Adoption Vs Industry Deployment Is There A Difference

Seven Databases In Seven Weeks A Book Review Of Nosql Databases

Hpe Announces Amd Powered Gen 10 Proliant Dl385 Software Defined Workloads

August 2017 Sddi Update Newsletter

Backyard Black Bears Stillwater St Croix River Valley

Story Stadiums Along Seismic Activity

Side Slbs Serverless Bs Software Hardware Fud

Standing Tall Proud September 11 2001 Forget

Participate In Top Vblog 2016 Voting Now

Cloud Constellation Spacebelt Out Of This World Cloud Data Centers

Water Data Storage Analogy

S3motion Buckets Containers Objects Aws S3 Cloud Emccode

Server Storage Io Cables Connectors Chargers Geek Gifts

Storageio Out And About Update Vmworld 2014

Happy Earth Day 2016 Eliminating Digital Data Ewaste

Green And Virtual Data Center Primer

Green Virtual Data Center Productive Economical Efficient Effective Flexible

Green And Virtual Data Center Links

Part Ii Geek2014

Data Center Sustainability Convergence Zone

June 2013 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Epa Energy Star Data Center Storage Draft Specification Review

Web Chat Thur 30th Hot Storage Trends 2013

Spring Snw 2013 Storage Networking World Recap

Server Storageio Data Infrastructure Related Links

Server Storageio Data Infrastructure Related Links 2

Server Storageio Data Infrastructure Related Links 3

Server Storageio Data Infrastructure Related Links 4

Server Storageio Data Infrastructure Related Links 5

Data Centers Trade Show Exhibit Infrastructure Granted

Family Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Enable Software Defined Data Infrastructures Sddi Sddc

Azure Stack Technical Preview 3 Tp3 Overview Preview Review

Broadcom Aka Avago Aka Lsi Announces Sas Sata Nvme Adapters Raid

Pace Your Server Storage Io Decision Making Its About Application Requirements

More Data Footprint Reduction Dfr Material

Revisiting Raid Remains Relevant Resources Context Matters

Preparing World Backup Day 2017 Prepared

Data Storage Tape Update V2014 Alive

Server Storageio August 2016 Update Newsletter

Farley Flies Into Snw Spring 2013

Talking With Tony Dicenzo At Snw Spring 2013

Dave Demming Talking Tech Education Snw Fall 2012

Amazon Web Service Aws September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

Dell Emc Vmware September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

September 2017 Server Storageio Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

July 2017 Server Storageio Data Infrastructures Update Newsletter

2017 Server Storageio Data Infrastructures Update Newsletter

Pcie Fundamentals Server Storage Io

Emc Dell Emc Part Dell Technologies Updates

Vmware Vsan V66 Part Vsan Evolution Summary

Dell Emc World 2017 Day News Announcement Summary

Getting Caught Happened September 2017

February 2017 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Gdpr Effect 25 2018 Ready

Part Iii Focus Expands Data Protection Action

Backup Big Data Big Data Protection Cmg Tom Becchetti Podcast

Data Infrastructure Data Center Software Defined Management Dashboard Tools

Zombie Technology Life Death Tape Alive

Cloud Bulk Object Storage Fundamentals

Nvme Overview And Primer Part I

Nvme Ssd Game Intel 750

Part Ii Nvme Overview And Primer Different Configurations

Part Iii Nvme Overview And Primer Need For Performance Speed

Part Iv Nvme Overview And Primer Where And How To Use Nvme

Part V Nvme Overview And Primer Where To Learn More What This All Means

Server Storage Io Benchmark Workload Scripts Part

Part Ii Server Storage Io Benchmark Workload Scripts Results

Politics And Storage Or Storage In An Election Year V2008

Sherwood Becomes Atrato

Updated Look And Feel

Chargeback For Storage

Beware Of Announcements On April 1st

Im Leaving On A Jet Plane

Links To Upcoming And Recent Webcasts And Videocasts

Off To Snw In Dallas For The Day

Poll Whats Your Take On Windows 7

Update Energystar For Server Workshop

Emc And Cisco Acadia Vce What Does It Mean

Moving Beyond The Benchmark Brouhaha

Snw Spring 2008 Audio And Podcasts

Presentation Downloads From Storage Decisions New York 2008

Us Epa Energystar For Servers Wants To Hear From You

Upcoming Event Industry Trends And Perspective European Seminar

Could Huawei Buy Brocade

Back From Fall 2008 Snw In Dallas

Another Storageio Appearance On Storage Monkeys Infosmack

Atrato Part Deux

Updated Look And Feel Part Deux

Summer Dog Days

My How Time Flys By

Missing Dedupe Debate Detail

Trick Or Treat Either Way Be Safe

Storage Performance Council Releases Component Spc 1c And Spc 2c Results

Happy Earth Day 2008

Something You May Not See Everyday

The Function Of Xaasx Pick A Letter

Recent Storageio Media Coverage And Comments

The Many Faces Of Solid State Devicesdisks Ssd

Snw Spring 2008

Downloads For Fall 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions Now Available

On The Road Again An Update

Dutch Storageexpo Recap

Worried About It Ma Here Come The New Startups

Out And About Update Off To Vmworld Next Week

Visit My New Amazon Authors Page

Upcoming Out And About Events

Happy Labor Day V2 009

Storageio Aka Greg Schulz Appears On Infosmack

Storageio Debuts At 79 In Technobabble Top 400 Analyst List

Going Rouge In It

Poll What Was Hot In 2009 And What Was Not Cast Your Vote

Upcoming Events And Activities Update V2010 1

Epa Server And Storage Workshop Feb 2 2010

Networking With Bruce Ravid And Bruce Rave

Practical Email Optimization And Archiving Strategies

Why Vasa Is Important To Have In Your Vmware Casa

Convergence People Processes Polices And Products

Cloud Virtualization And Storage Networking Conversations

New Seagate Momentus Xt Hybrid Drive Ssd And Hdd

Top 2011 Cloud Virtualization Storage And Networking Posts

A Conversation From Snw 2011 With Jenny Hamel

2012 Industry Trends Perspectives And Commentary Predictions

Should You Feel Sorry For Revenue Prevention Departments

Top Storageio Cloud Virtualization Networking And Data Protection Posts

Can I Ask For Your Support Please Vote For My Blog

Is 14 4tbytes Of Data Storage For 52503 A Good Deal It Depends

Are Large Storage Arrays Dead At The Hands Of Ssd

Is Ssd Dead No However Some Vendors Might Be

More Storage Io Momentus Hhdd And Ssd Moments Part Ii

What Is The Best Kind Of Io The One You Do Not Have To Do

How Much Ssd Do You Need Vs Want

Various Cloud Virtualization Server Storage Io Polls

3rd Of July Fireworks Grand Finale Video

Dell Is Buying Quest Software Not The Phone Company Qwest

Dell Storage Customer Advisory Panel Cap

Epa Energy Star For Data Center Storage Draft 3 Specification

Kudos To Lenovo Customer Service Redefined Or Re Established

What Does New Emc And Lenovo Partnership Mean

What Are Some Endangered It Species

Over 1000 Entries Now On The Storageio Industry Links Page

Cloud Conversations Aws Government Cloud Govcloud

Who Will Be Winner With Oracle 10 Million Dollar Challenge

Cloud Virtualization Storage And Networking In An Election Year

Technology Buying Do You Decide On G2 Or Gq

Raid And Iops And Io Observations

Trick Or Treat And Vendor Fun Games

Industry Trends And Perspectives Snw 2012 Rapping With Dave Raffo Of Searchstorage

Industry Trends And Perspectives Ray Lucchesi On Storage And Snw

Industry Trends And Perspectives Catching Up With Quantum Cte David Chapa

Industry Trends And Perspectives Snw 2012 Waynes World

Industry Trends And Perspectives Chatting With Karl Chen At Snw 2012

Industry Trends And Perspectives Learning With Leo Leger Of Snia

Industry Trends And Perspectives Meeting Up With Marty Foltyn Of Snia

Have Ssds Been Unsuccessful With Storage Arrays With Poll

Little Data Big Data And Very Big Data Vbd Or Big Bs

Data Center Infrastructure Management Dcim And Irm

Is Ssd Only For Performance

Ssd Flash And Dram Dejavu Or Something New

Thanks For Viewing Storageio Content And Top 2012 Viewed Posts

Summary Emc Vmax 10k High End Storage Systems Stayin Alive

Cloud Conversations Public Private Hybrid And Community Clouds Part Ii

Hardware Software What About Valueware

Cloud Virtualization Storage Io Trends For 2013 And Beyond

Vote For Top 2013 Vblogs Thanks For Your Continued Support

Conversation With Justin Stottlemyer Of Shutterfly And Object Storage Discussion

Snias New Spdecon Conference

Snia Spring 2013 Update With Wayne Adams

Speaking Of Ssds With Poll

Io Io Its Off To Virtual Work And Vmworld I Go Or Went

Blame It On The Un In Nyc This Week

Trick Or Treat Have You Seen Any It Frankenstacks

Cloud And Travel Fun

Some Alternative And Fun Cloud Api Meanings

Emcworld 2012 Tust And Marketing Can They Coexist

Iod Iot Ioe Ios Iop Iou Iox Future

Storage Decisions Spring 2009 Sessions Update

Removing Complexity Cost Drive Return Innovation Roi

Storageio Industry Links Page Updated 1200 Entries

School School Current Future School 2

Ivmcontrol Iphone Vmware Management Itool Itoy

Lenovo Ts140 Server Storage Io Review

Aws Adds Zocalo Enterprise File Sync Share Collaboration

Vmware Vvols And Storage Io Fundementals Part 2

Docker Smarties Nondummies Vmworld 2014

Server Storage Io Networking Virtualization Cloud Scaling

Remember The Alamo

Do You Have Your Copy Of The Green And Virtual Data Center Yet

Green It Deferral Blamed On Economic Recession Might Be Result Of Green Gap

Just For Fun Roses Are Red

Snw And Other Conferences Want And Need You

R U Twittering Yet

More Storage Io Momentus Hhdd And Ssd Moments Part I

Ssd And Green It Moving Beyond Green Washing

Io Io How Well Do You Know About Good Or Bad Server And Storage Ios

In The Data Center Or Information Factory Not Everything Is The Same

Cloud Conversations Public Private Hybrid What About Community Clouds

Data Protection Modernization More Than Swapping Out Media

Modernizing Data Protection With Certainty

Trick Or Treat 2011 It Zombie Technology Poll

Is There An Information Or Data Recession Are You Using Less Storage With Polls

Spring 2014 Storageio Events Activities Update

Seagate Shipped 10 Million Hhdds Lot

Revisiting Reinvent 2014 Aws News

Data Protection Diaries Are Your Restores Ready For World Backup Day 2015

How To Test Your Hdd Ssd Or All Flash Array Afa Storage Fundamentals

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Cloud And Virtual Data Storage Networking Now On Kindle

Modernizing Data Protection Ways

Storageio In The News Update V2010 1

Ibm Speed Of Light Energy Saving Or Speed Of Light Green Marketing

Amazon Web Services Aws And The Netflix Fix

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Why Ssd Based Arrays And Storage Appliances Can Be A Good Idea Part Ii

Director Dinner Discussions Of The San Kind

Hello From Emc World Bloggers Lounge

Going Dutch And Other Spring Spring 2012 Storageio Activities

Storageio Going Dutch And Deutsch Fall 2012

Some August 2015 Amazon Web Services Aws And Microsoft Azure Cloud Updates

What Am I Hearing And Seeing While Out And About

Work And Entertainment From Coast To Coast

Snia Announces Cloud Data Management Initiative Cdmi V1 1

Storage Magazine In A Virtual World

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Check Out These Top 50 It Blogs 3

It Optimization Efficiency Convergence And Cloud Conversations From Snw

Usenix Fast File Storage Technologies 2014 Conference Proceedings

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Out And About Update

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Ben Woo On Big Data Buzzword Bingo And Business Benefits

Declared Dead Fibre Channel Continues Evolve Fcbb6

Getting Caught Up Its Been A Busy Year

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Green Data Storage And Server Io Topics

Introducing Josh Apter And The Padcaster From Nab 2013

Amazon Cloud Storage Options Enhanced With Glacier

Software Defined Virtual Hard Disk Vhd

Ibm Vs Oracle Nad Intervenes Again

Vmware Announces Vsphere V6 Virtualization Technologies

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Cloud Conversations Focused Cost Missing Cloud Opportunities

Logo Ology

If March 31st Is Backup Day Dont Be Fooled With Restore On April 1st

The Blame Game Does Cloud Storage Result In Data Loss

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Future Ethernet 2016 Roadmap Released Ethernet Alliance

Brocade To Buy Foundry Networks Prelude To Upcoming Converged Ethernet Battle

Podcast Vbrownbags Vforums And Vmware Vtraining With Alastair Cooke

Snw Fall 2011 Revisited And Snia Emerald Program

Goodbye 2013 2014 Predictions Present Future

March And Mileage Mania Wrap Up

Was Today The Proverbal Day That He Froze Over

Something For Free From Vmware Other Than Your Time

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Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go In The Water Again

What Industry Pundits Love And Loathe About Data Storage

Lenovo Thinkserver Td340 Storageio Lab Review

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Networking Convergence Ethernet Infiniband Or Both

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My Server And Storage Io Holiday Break Projects

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Does Dell Have A Cloudy Cloud Strategy Story Part Ii

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Nad Recommends Oracle Discontinue Certain Exadata Performance Claims

Vmware Buys Virsto Is It About Storage Hypervisors

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Did Hp Respond To Emc And Cisco Vce With Microsoft Hyperv Bundle

Plenty Of Industry Firsts At Vmworld Europe

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California Center For Sustainable Energy Ccse

Help Save A Life

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Collecting Transaction Minute Sql Server Hammerdb

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More Storage And Io Metrics That Matter

Snow Birds

The Human Face Of Big Data A Book Review

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Data Protection Gumbo Protect Preserve Serve Information

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Mr Backup Curtis Preston Goes Back To Ceph School

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Recent Tips Videos Articles And More Update V2010 1

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Volatile Memory Nvm Nvme Flash Memory Summit Ssd Updates

April 2015 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Researchers And Marketers Dont Agree On Future Of Nand Flash Ssd

Emc Vfcache Respinning Ssd And Intelligent Caching Part I

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Computer Data Storage Complex Depends

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Diy Converged Server Software Defined Storage Budget Lenovo Ts140

Server Storageio December 2015 Update Newsletter

November 2014 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

February 2015 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

July 2015 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

March 2015 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

August Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Server Storageio October 2015 Update Newsletter

Server Storage Io Network Benchmark Winter Olympic Games

Enterprise Sshd And Flash Ssd Part Of An Enterprise Tiered Storage Strategy

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September October 2014 Server And Storageio Update Newsletter

Seagate 1200 12gbs Enterprise Sas Ssd Server Storgeio Lab Review

Microsoft Windows Server Azure Nano Life Cycle Updates

Server Storage Io Intel Nuc Nick Knack Notes Impressions

Emcworld 2016 Emc Hybrid And Converged Clouds Your Way

Server Storageio 2016 Update Newsletter

Server Storageio Industry Trends Perspectives Report Wekaio Matrix

Data Quantum Revenues Continue Grow

Chelsio Storage Ip Networks Enable Data Infrastructures

Post Holiday It Shopping Bargains Dell Buying Exanet

Predictions Did Mayans Have It Right Or Did We Read It Wrong

Overview Review Microsoft Refs Reliable File System

Gaining Server Storage Io Insight Microsoft Windows Server 2016

How Many Degrees Separate You And Your Information

Inaugural Storageio Newsletter

Spring 2010 Storageio Newsletter

Storage Comments From The Field And Customers In The Trenches

Virtual Storage And Social Media What Did Emc Not Announce

Are Social Media And Networking A Waste Of Time

Congratulations To New And Returning 2012 Vmware Vexperts

Hitting The Road Again

It Feels Like Grand Central Station Here

Storageio Outlines Intelligent Power Management And Maid 20 Storage Techniques Advocates New Technologies To Address Modern Data Center Energy Concerns

Trains Going Green Ah Well Maybe Blue

Happy Earth Day 2009

Mirror Mirror On The Wall Who Is The Greenest Of Them All

Green Virtual Servers Storage And Networking 2008 Beijing Olympics

Hot Storage Topics Converge On Chicago Next Week

John Carpenters Escape From New York Back From Storage Decisions Ny 2008

Does Dell Have A Cloudy Cloud Strategy Story Part I

Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 Scos 7

Lenovo Buys Ibms Xseries Aka X86 Server Business Emc

Cloud And Virtual Data Storage Networking Book Vmworld 2011 Debut

Cloud And Virtual Data Storage Networking Book Released

Server Storageio September 2015 Update Newsletter

Some Windows Server Storage Io Related Commands

Server Storageio November 2015 Update Newsletter

Dell Emc Azure Stack Hybrid Cloud Solution

Msp Business Journal Names Greg Schulz An Eco Tech Warrior

Continuing Education And Refresher Time Raid And Luns

Many Different Implementations Of Raid

Wide World Of Archiving Life Beyond Compliance

Comfort Zones Stating What Might Be Obvious To Some

The Differences Between Singapore And Houston In May

Do Disk Based Vtls Draw Less Power Than Tape

More On Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Fcoe

Green Hype Or Reality

Thank You Gartner For Generating Awareness For My New Book

Why Xiv Is So Important To Ibms Storage Business

Das Sas Fcoe Green Efficient Storage And Io Podcast Faqs

Cmg Enabling The Green And Virtual Data Center

It Belt Tightening And Stratigies For It Economic Sustainment

Vendors Who Dont Want To Be Virtualized

Did Someone Forget To Tell Dell That Tape Is Dead

Ssd Activity Continues To Go Virtually Round And Round

All Work And No Play Ok How About An Education Half Day

Industry Trend And Perspective Seagate Changes Disk Drive Warranties

Just For Fun Of Flying

Raid Data Protection Remains Relevant

Protecting And Storing Personal Digital Documents

Is There Still Innovation For It And Storage

Io Virtualization Iov Revisited

Shifting Industry Trend From Purchase To Leasing

Is There A Data And Io Activity Recession

Us Epa Looking For Industry Input On Energy Star For Storage

Shifting From Energy Avoidance To Energy Efficiency

Ibm Out Oracle In As Buyer Of Sun

Us Epa Energy Star For Server Update

Data Center Io Bottlenecks Performance Issues And Impacts

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Green It Confusion Continues Opportunities Missed

Clouds Are Like Electricity Dont Be Scared

Hp Buys One Of The Seven Networking Dwarfs And Gets A Bargain

Should Everything Be Virtualized

Optimize Data Storage For Performance And Capacity Efficiency

Justifying Green It And Home Hardware Upgrades With Energystar

How To Win Approval For Upgrades Link Them To Business Benefits

What Is The Future Of Servers

Ssd And Storage System Performance

Green It And Virtual Data Centers

Emc Storage And Management Software Getting Fast

Its Us Census Time What About It Data Centers

Nas Nasa And Nascar Do They Have Anything In Common

Is Maid Dead I Dont Think So

Happy Earth Day 2010

Who Or What Is Your Sphere Of Influence

Apple Ipad Is It A Business Itool Or Itoy

Cloud Conversations Nirvanix Shutdown Caused Cloud Confidence Concerns

Industry Trends And Perspectives Raid Rebuild Rates

Industry Trends And Perspectives Storage Virtualization And Virtual Storage

Industry Trends And Perspectives Converged Networking And Io Virtualization Iov

Industry Trends And Perspectives Tiered Storage Systems And Mediums

Initial Virtumania Appearance Episode 14 With Fellow Vexperts

Industry Trends And Perspectives Tiered Hypervisors And Microsoft Hyperv

Vmware Vexpert 2010 Thank You Im Honored To Be Named A Member

Industry Trends And Perspectives Blog Series

My Favorite Late Summer Reading Material

Supreme Court Rules Sarbox Intact Oversight Board Changes

While Hp And Dell Make Counter Bids Exclusive Interview With 3par Ceo David Scott

End To End E2e Systems Resource Analysis Sra For Cloud And Virtual Environments

Has Fcoe Entered The Trough Of Disillusionment

What Is Dfr Or Data Footprint Reduction

Santas It Elf Limited Time Discount

What Do You Do When Your Service Provider Drops The Ball

Green It Goes Mainstream What About Data Storage Environments

Storageio Momentus Hybrid Hard Disk Drive Hhdd Moments

Buzzword Bingo 1 0 Are You Ready For Fall Product Announcemnts

Happy Holidays 2010

What Have I Been Doing This Winter

What Do Vars And Clouds As Well As Msps Have In Common

What Do You Need When Its Time To Buy A New Server

Securing Data At Rest Self Encrypting Disks Seds

Buzzword Bingo And Acronym Update V2 011

Happy Earth Day 2011

The Data Storage Prayer

Cloud And Virtual Data Storage Networking

Cloud Storage Dont Be Scared However Look Before You Leap

Storageio Going Dutch Seminar For Storage And Io Professionals

Seagate Kinetic Cloud Object Storage Io Platform

Summer Greetings And Happy Holidays V2011

Industry Trend People Plus Data Are Aging And Living Longer

Dell Storage Forum 2011 Revisited

Storageio Going Dutch Again October 2011 Seminar For Storage Professionals

Time In And Around Clouds

Congratulations To Infosmack On Episode 100

Industry Trends And Perspectives Public And Private It Clouds

Dude Is Dell Going To Buy Brocade

Spring May 2012 Storageio News Letter

Data Migration Tips

Cloud Conversation Thanks Gartner For Saying What Has Been Said

December 2012 Storageio Update News Letter

January 2013 Server And Storageio Update Newsletter

Behind The Scenes Santa Claus Global Cloud Story

Emc Vmax 10k Looks Like High End Storage Systems Are Still Alive Part Iii

Many Faces Of Storage Hypervisor Virtual Storage Or Storage Virtualization

February 2013 Server And Storageio Update Newsletter

Xtremio Xtremsw And Xtremsf Emc Flash Ssd Portfolio Redefined

Some Things Keep Going Around Seagate Ships 2 Billion Hdds

Where Has The Fcoe Hype And Fud Gone With Poll

A Pivotal Or Cloudy Moment For Emc And Vmware

March Metrics And Measuring Social Media

Are Your Analyst Blogger Media Or Press Requests Being Read

March 2013 Server And Storageio Update Newsletter

Pressure Cooker Good

Hp Moonshot 1500 Software Defined Capable Compute Servers

Netapp And Akorri An E2e Cross Technology Domain Sra Play

Full Rss Archive Feeds Are Now Available For Storageioblog

2013 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Morning Summer Storms Walking Midwest

Ibm Buys Softlayer Software Defined Infrastructures Clouds

Upgrading Lenovo X1 Windows 7 Samsung 840 Ssd

Geek Gadgets Kill A Watt Meter

Green Storage Practical Ways To Reduce Power Consumption

Data Proteciton For Virtual Environments At Vmware Vmworld

From Ilm To Iim Is This A Solution Sell Looking For A Problem

Industry Trends And Perspectives Tape Disk And Dedupe Coexistence

Ilm Has It Losts Its Meaning

Is Ibm Xiv Still Relevant

Data Proteciton For Virtual Environments

Spc And Storage Benchmarking Games

Server And Storage Virtualization Life Beyond Consolidation

Epa Draft 3 Of Energy Star For Computer Server Specification

Cloud Virtual Server Storage Io Technology Tiering

Disruptive Updates

Virtual Cloud Availability Shared Responsibility Common Sense

Storage Performance

Will 6gb Sas Kill Fibre Channel

Poll Whats Do You Think Of It Clouds

Closing The Green Gap Green Washing May Be Endangered However Addressing Real Green Issues Is Here To Stay

Catch Of The Day Or Post Of The Day

Availability Or Lack There Of Lessons From Our Frail Aging Infrastructure

Cisco Wins Fcoe Pre Season And Primaries Now For The Main Event

Power Cooling Floor Space Environmental Pcfe And Green Metrics

Tape Talk Changing Role Of Tape

Sas Disk Drives Appearing In Larger Mid Range Arrays

Blog Post March Metric Madness Fun With Simple Math

Hard Product Vs Soft Product

Optical Storage Oppourtunities Or Obsolence

Storage Efficiency And Optimization The Other Green

Smb Capacity Planning Focusing On Energy Conservation

Whats Your Take On Ftc Guidelines For Bloggers

Technology And Traveling

Clouds And Data Loss Time For Cdp Commonsense Data Protection

Epa Energy Star For Data Center Storage Update 2

From Bits To Bytes Decoding Encoding

Industry Trends And Perspectives 6gb Sas And Das Are Not Dumb A Storage

As The Hard Disk Drive Hdd Continues To Spin

Another Storageio Hybrid Momentus Moment

Cloud Conversations Aws Ebs Optimized Instances

Unified Storage Systems Showdown Netapp Fas Vs Emc Vnx

April 2013 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Cloud Conversations Aws Ebs Glacier And S3 Overview Part Iii

Part Ii Ibm Server Side Storage Io Ssd Flash Cache Software

Are Hard Disk Drives Hdds Getting To Big

2011 Summer Momentus Hybrid Hard Disk Drive Hhdd Moment

Measuring Windows Performance Impact For Vdi Planning

Getting Sasy The Other Shared Storage Option For Disk And Ssd Systems

Supporting It Growth Demand During Economic Uncertain Times

Inaugural Ssd Show

Care Coraid Content Conversation

Wd Buys Nand Flash Ssd Storage Io Cache Vendor Virident

Depends

Fall 2013 Dutch Cloud Virtual Storage Io Seminars

Data Footprint Reduction Part 2 Dell Ibm Ocarina And Storwize

Fall 2010 Storageio News Letter

Spring 2011 Server And Storageio News Letter

Winter 2011 Server And Storageio News Letter

Summer 2011 Storageio News Letter

A Storage Io Momentus Moment

Part Ii Emc Announces Xtremio General Availability

Fall December 2011 Storageio News Letter

Merry Christmas Seasons Happy Holidays 2013 Server Storageio

Fusionio Fio Ssd Vendor Ceo Flash Whats

Server Virtualization Nested Tiered Hypervisors

Book Review Rethinking Enterprise Storage Microsoftstorsimple Marc Farley

Kudos To Hp Ceo Mark Hurd For Dignity To Step Down From His Post

Dell Inspiron 660 Virtual Diamond Rough

August 2010 Storageio News Letter

Small Medium Business Smb Continues Gain Respect Soho

Using Removable Hard Disk Drives Rhdds

Storage Bridge Bay Sbb Industry Group Update

Emc Announces Xtremio General Availability Part

Emc Evolves Enterprise Data Protection Enhancements Part

Raid Extend Life Nand Flash Ssd

Fall 2013 Aws Cloud Storage Compute Enhancements

Emc Vplex Virtual Storage Redefined Or Respun

The Other Green Storage Efficiency And Optimization

Is Fcoe Struggling To Gain Traction Or On A Normal Adoption Course

Big Fish And Small Fish Fish Story Or The One That Did Not Get Away

Side Context Iops

Part Ii Revisiting Reinvent 2014 And Other Aws Updates

Summer 2013 Server And Storageio Update Newsletter

Dell Will Buy Someone However Not Brocade At Least For Now

Happy Thanks Giving 2010

June 2010 Storageio Newsletter

What Records Will Emc Break In Nyc January 18 2011

Smb Soho And Low End Nas Gaining Enterprise Features

Gregs Storageio Out And About Update June 2010

Vmware Vsphere V5 And Storage Drs

Storage Effiency And Optimizaiton Balancing Time And Space

Pue Are You Managing Power Energy Or Productivity

Emc Vnx Mcx Storage Io Work

The New Green Gaining Realistic Economic Efficiencys Now

Closing The Green Gap Wsradio Internet Radio Interview

Determining Computer Or Server Energy Use

Epa Energy Star For Data Center Storage Update

Saving Money With Green It Time To Invest In Information Factories

Webcast E2e Awareness And Insight For It Environments

Ibm Server Side Storage Io Ssd Flash Cache Software

Part Ii Emc Evolves Enterprise Data Protection Enhancements

Cisco Buys Whiptail Continuing Storage Storage Io Flash Cash Cache Dash

Fall 2013 Storageio Update Newsletter

Raid Relevance Revisited

Have You Heard Of 2drs Data Protection Technology

July 2010 Odds And Ends Perspectives Tips And Articles

Has Ssd Put Hard Disk Drives Hdds On Endangered Species List

Seagate Proof Life Enterprise Hdd Enhancements

Seagate To Say Goodbye To Cayman Islands Hello Ireland

Cloud Conversations Gaining Cloud Confidence From Insights Into Aws Outages

Have Vtls Or Vxls Become Zombies Declared Dead Yet Still Alive

Tiered Communication And Media Venues

Are You On The Storageio It Data Infrastructure Industry Links Page

Green Storage Is Alive And Well Energy Star Enterprise Storage Stakeholder Meeting Details

Tape Talk Time

Back To School Dedupe School

Storageio V20 11 2011 Events Seminars And Web Casts Schedule

Getting Caught Up And Holiday Shopping

Performance Availability Storageioblog Featured Itke Guest Blog

The New Green It Efficient Effective Smart And Productive

Dude Is Dell Doing A Disk Deal Again With Compellent

Intelligent Power Management Ipm And Second Generation Maid 20 On The Rise

2010 And 2011 Trends Perspectives And Predictions More Of The Same

Mainframe Cmg Virtualization Storage And Zombie Technologies

Vmworld 2010 Virtual Roads Clouds And Inxs Devil Inside

Green Power And Cooling Tools And Calculators

Green It Green Gap Tiered Energy And Green Myths

Vmworld 2013 Vmware Server Storage Io Networking Update Day 1

Part Ii Xtremio Xtremsw And Xtremsf Emc Flash Ssd Portfolio Redefined

Datadynamics Storagex 70 File Data Management Migration Software

Whats Your Take On Open Virtualization Alliance And Vmware

September October Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Server Storageio June July 2016 Update Newsletter

Open Data Center Alliance Odca Bmw Private Cloud Strategy

Happy 20th Birthday Microsoft Windows Server Get Ready Windows Server 2016

Server Storageio March 2016 Update Newsletter

Netapp Ef540 Something Familiar Something New

Data Footprint Reduction Part 1 Life Beyond Dedupe And Changing Data Lifecycles

Emc Vipr Software Defined Object Storage Part Ii

Emc Vipr Software Defined Object Storage Part Iii

Emc Vipr Virtual Physical Object Software Defined Storage Sds

Breaking Vmware Esxi 55 Acpi Boot Loop Lenovo Td350

Storageio In The News

Summer Book Update And Back To School Reading

February 2014 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

November 2013 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Matt Vogt Computex Talks Vmware Vcops Podcast

August 2014 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

July 2014 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Storage Virtualization In Band Vs Out Of Band Debates To Be Resurrected

Snow Fun And Information Technology They Do Mix

Technology Tiering Servers Storage And Snow Removal

Netapp Buying Lsis Engenio Storage Business Unit

Summer Weddings Emcdatadomain And Hpibrix

Server Storage Io Intel Nuc Nick Knack Notes Second Impressions

Emc Vfcache Respinning Ssd And Intelligent Caching Part Ii

Hds Claus Mikkelsen Talking Storage Snw Fall 2012

How To Write Publish And Promote A Book Or Blog

Oracle Xsigo Vmware Nicira Sdn And Iov Io Io Its Off To Work They Go

Open Data Center Alliance Odca Publishes Two New Cloud Usage Models

Nand Flash Sata Ssd Ddr3 Dimm Slot

Server Storageio February 2016 Update Newsletter

Server Storageio January 2016 Update Newsletter

June 2017 Server Storageio Data Infrastructures Update Newsletter

Ibms Storwize Or Wise Storage The V7000 And Dfr

Re Visiting If Ibm Xiv Is Still Relevant With V7000

Part I Puresystems Something Old Something New Something From Big Blue

Part V Puresystems Something Old Something New Something From Big Blue

Part Iv Puresystems Something Old Something New Something From Big Blue

Part Ii Puresystems Something Old Something New Something From Big Blue

Microsoft Azure Cloud Software Defined Data Infrastructure Reference Architecture Resources

Happy 100th Birthday Or Anniversary Wishes

Azure Stack Tp3 Overview Preview Review Part Ii

Data Protection Diaries Data Protection

March2014 Storageio Newsletter Cisco Cloud Vmware Vsan

June 2014 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Chat With Cash Coleman Talking Cleardb Cloud Database And Johnny Cash

April 2014 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Acadia Vce Vmware Cisco Emc Virtual Computing Environment

Storageio Spring Keynote And Speaking Tour V2008

Server Storageio April 2016 Update Newsletter

Cloud Conversations Loss Of Data Access Vs Data Loss

Hpe Buying Server Storage Io Data Infrastructures

January 2017 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Top Vblog 2017 Voting Open

Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Trends

Converged Ci Hyperconverged Hci Mean Storage Io

Popular Viewed Storageioblog Posts 2016

March 2017 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Top Storage World Decade

Back To School Shopping Dude Dell Digests 3par Disk Storage

Does Ibm Power7 Processor Announcement Signal Storage Upgrades

Do You Know Hds Or What It Means

Is The New Hds Vsp Really The Mvsp

Hds Mid Summer Storage Converged Compute Enhancements

Object Storage News Trends Cloud Bulk Storage

Hds Buys Bluearc Any Surprises Here

June 2015 Server Storageio Update Newsletter

Server Storageio Holiday Seasons 2016

Do Software Vendors Eliminate Or Move Location Of Vendor Lock In

Vendor Lockin Responsibiity

Spam Of A Different Kind

Part Iii Puresystems Something Old Something New Something From Big Blue

Emc Vmax 10k Looks Like High End Storage Systems Are Still Alive

Which Enterprise Hdd Content Application Testing

Which Enterprise Hdd Content Server Test Configuration

Hdd Ssd Flash Storage Iops

Which Enterprise Hdd Use For Database Workloads

Enterprise Hdd For Content Server Different File Size

Which Enterprise Hdd General Io Performance

Enterprise Hdds Evolve For Content Server Applications

Achieve Flexible Data Protection

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

SDDC Data Infrastructure

Check out the above links to data infrastructure resource links.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Data Infrastructure Data Protection Diaries Fundamental Security Logical Physical

Data Infrastructure Data Protection Security Logical Physical

Companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft ( CRC Press 2017)

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

By Greg Schulzwww.storageioblog.com November 26, 2017

This is Part 6 of a multi-part series on Data Protection fundamental tools topics techniques terms technologies trends tradecraft tips as a follow-up to my Data Protection Diaries series, as well as a companion to my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Server Storage I/O Fundamental tradecraft (CRC Press 2017).

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

Click here to view the previous post Part 5 – Point In Time Data Protection Granularity Points of Interest, and click here to view the next post Part 7 – Data Protection Tools, Technologies, Toolbox, Buzzword Bingo Trends.

Post in the series includes excerpts from Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) pertaining to data protection for legacy along with software defined data centers ( SDDC), data infrastructures in general along with related topics. In addition to excerpts, the posts also contain links to articles, tips, posts, videos, webinars, events and other companion material. Note that figure numbers in this series are those from the SDDI book and not in the order that they appear in the posts.

In this post the focus is around Data Infrastructure and Data Protection security including logical as well as physical from chapter 10 , 13 and 14 among others.

SDDC, SDI, SDDI data infrastructure
Figure 1.5 Data Infrastructures and other IT Infrastructure Layers

There are many different aspects of security pertaining to data infrastructures that span various technology domains or focus areas from higher level application software to lower level hardware, from legacy to cloud an software-defined, from servers to storage and I/O networking, logical and physical, from access control to intrusion detection, monitoring, analytics, audit, monitoring, telemetry logs, encryption, digital forensics among many others. Security should not be an after thought of something done independent of other data infrastructure, data center and IT functions, rather integrated.

Security Logical Physical Software Defined

Physical security includes locked doors of facilities, rooms, cabinets or devices to prevent un-authorized access. In addition to locked doors, physical security also includes safeguards to prevent accidental or intentional acts that would compromise the contents of a data center including data Infrastructure resources (servers, storage, I/O networks, hardware, software, services) along with the applications that they support.

Logical security includes access controls, passwords, event and access logs, encryption among others technologies, tools, techniques. Figure 10.11 shows various data infrastructure security–related items from cloud to virtual, hardware and software, as well as network services. Also shown are mobile and edge devices as well as network connectivity between on-premises and remote cloud services. Cloud services include public, private, as well as hybrid and virtual private clouds (VPC) along with virtual private networks (VPN). Access logs for telemetry are also used to track who has accessed what and when, as well as success along with failed attempts.

Certificates (public or private), Encryption, Access keys including .pem and RSA files via a service provider or self-generated with a tool such as Putty or ssh-keygen among many others. Some additional terms including Two Factor Authentication (2FA), Subordinated, Role based and delegated management, Single Sign On (SSO), Shared Access Signature (SAS) that is used by Microsoft Azure for access control, Server Side Encryption (SSE) with various Key Management System (KMS) attributes including customer managed or via a third-party.

SDDC SDDI Data Protection Security
Figure 10.11 Various physical and logical security and access controls

Also shown in figure 10.11 are encryption enabled at various layers, levels or altitude that can range from simple to complex. Also shown are iSCSI IPsec and CHAP along with firewalls, Active Directory (AD) along with Azure AD (AAD), and Domain Controllers (DC), Group Policies Objects (GPO) and Roles. Note that firewalls can exist in various locations both in hardware appliances in the network, as well as software defined network (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), as well as higher up.

For example there are firewalls in network routers and appliances, as well as within operating systems, hypervisors, and further up in web blogs platforms such as WordPress among many others. Likewise further up the stack or higher in altitude access to applications as well as database among other resources is also controlled via their own, or in conjunction with other authentication, rights and access control including ADs among others.

A term that might be new for some is attestation which basically means to authenticate and be validated by a server or service, for example, a host guarded server attests with a attestation server. What this means is that the host guarded server (for example Microsoft Windows Server) attests with a known attestation server, that looks at the Windows server comparing it to known good fingerprints, profiles, making sure it is safe to run as a guarded resources.

Other security concerns for legacy and software defined environments include secure boot, shield VMs, host guarded servers and fabrics (networks or clusters of servers) for on-premises, as well as cloud. The following image via Microsoft shows an example of shielded VMs in a Windows Server 2016 environment along with host guarded service (HGS) components ( see how to deploy here).


Via Microsoft.com Guarded Hosts, Shielded VMs and Key Protection Services

Encryption can be done in different locations ranging from data in flight or transit over networks (local and remote), as well as data at rest or while stored. Strength of encryption is determined by different hash and cipher codes algorithms including SHA among others ranging from simple to more complex. The encryption can be done by networks, servers, storage systems, hypervisors, operating systems, databases, email, word and many other tools at granularity from device, file systems, folder, file, database, table, object or blob.

Virtual machine and their virtual disks ( VHDX and VMDK) can be encrypted, as well as migration or movements such as vMotions among other activities. Here are some VMware vSphere encryption topics, along with deep dive previews from VMworld 2016 among other resources here, VMware hardening guides here (NSX, vSphere), and a VMware security white paper (PDF) here.

Other security-related items shown in Figure 10.11 include Lightweight Direct Access Protocol (LDAP), Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS), and Kerberos network authentication. Also shown are VPN along with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) network security, along with security and authentication keys, credentials for SSH remote access including SSO. The cloud shown in figure 10.11 could be your own private using AzureStack, VMware (on-site, or public cloud such as IBM or AWS), OpenStack among others, or a public cloud such as AWS, Azure or Google (among others).

Where To Learn More

Continue reading additional posts in this series of Data Infrastructure Data Protection fundamentals and companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) book, as well as the following links covering technology, trends, tools, techniques, tradecraft and tips.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

There are many different aspects, as well as layers of security from logical to physical pertaining to data centers, applications and associated data Infrastructure resources, both on-premises and cloud. Security for legacy and software defined environments needs to be integrated as part of various technology domain focus areas, as well as across them including data protection. The above is a small sampling of security related topics with more covered in various chapters of SDDI Essentials as well as in my other books, webinars, presentations and content.

From a data protection focus, security needs to be addressed from a physical who has access to primary and protection copies, what is being protected against and where, as well as who can access logically protection copes, as well as the configuration, settings, certificates involved in data protection. In other words, how are you protecting your data protection environment, configuration and deployment. Data protection copies need to be encrypted to meet regulations, compliance and other requirements to guard against loss or theft, accidental or intentional. Likewise access control needs to be managed including granting of roles, security, authentication, monitoring of access, along with revocation.

Get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials here at Amazon.com, at CRC Press among other locations and learn more here. Meanwhile, continue reading with the next post in this series, Part 7 Data Protection Tools, Technologies, Toolbox, Buzzword Bingo Trends

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Data Protection Diaries Tools Technologies Toolbox Buzzword Bingo Trends

Fundamental Tools, Technologies, Toolbox, Buzzword Bingo Trends

Companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft ( CRC Press 2017)

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

By Greg Schulzwww.storageioblog.com November 26, 2017

This is Part 7 of a multi-part series on Data Protection fundamental tools topics techniques terms technologies trends tradecraft tips as a follow-up to my Data Protection Diaries series, as well as a companion to my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Server Storage I/O Fundamental tradecraft (CRC Press 2017).

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

Click here to view the previous post Part 6 Data Protection Security Logical Physical Software Defined, and click here to view the next post Part 8 Walking The Data Protection Talk What I Do.

Post in the series includes excerpts from Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) pertaining to data protection for legacy along with software defined data centers ( SDDC), data infrastructures in general along with related topics. In addition to excerpts, the posts also contain links to articles, tips, posts, videos, webinars, events and other companion material. Note that figure numbers in this series are those from the SDDI book and not in the order that they appear in the posts.

In this post the focus is around Data Protection related tools, technologies, trends as companion to other posts in this series, as well as across various chapters from the SDDI book.

SDDC, SDI, SDDI data infrastructure
Figure 1.5 Data Infrastructures and other IT Infrastructure Layers

Data Protection Tools, Technologies, Toolbox, Buzzword Bingo Trends

There are many data Infrastructure related topics, technologies, tools, trends, techniques and tips that pertain to data protection, many of which have been covered in this series of posts already, as well as in the SDDI Essentials book, and elsewhere. The following are some additional related data Infrastructure data protection topics, tools, technologies.

Buzzword Bingo is a popular industry activity involving terms, trends, tools and more, read more here, here, and here. The basic idea of buzzword bingo is when somebody starts mentioning lots of buzzwords, buzz terms, buzz trends at some point just say bingo. Sometimes you will get somebody who asks what that means, while others will know, perhaps get the point to move on to what’s relevant vs. talking the talk or showing how current they are on industry activity, trends and terms.

Just as everything is not the same across different environments, there are various size and focus from hyper-scale clouds and managed service providers (MSP) server (and storage along with applications focus), smaller and regional cloud, hosting and MSPs, as well as large enterprise, small medium enterprise (SME), small medium business (SMB), remote office branch office (ROBO), small office home office (SOHO), prosumer, consumer and client or edge. Sometimes you will hear server vs. edge or client focus, thus context is important.

Data protection just like data infrastructures span servers, storage, I/O networks, hardware, software, clouds, containers, virtual, hypervisors and related topics. Otoh, some might view data protection as unique to a particular technology focus area or domain. For example, I once had backup vendor tell me that backups and data protection was not a storage topic, can you guess which vendor did not get recommend for data protection of data stored on storage?

Data gets protected to different target media, mediums or services including HDDs, SSD, tape, cloud, bulk and object storage among others in various format from native to encapsulated in save sets, zips, tar ball among others.

Bulk storage can be on-site, on-premises low-cost tape, disk (file, block or object) as well as off-site including cloud services such as AWS S3 (buckets and objects), Microsoft Azure (containers and blobs), Google among others using various Access ( Protocols, Personalities, Front-end, Back-end) technologies. Which type of data protection storage medium, location or service is best depends on what you are trying to do, along with other requirements.

SDDC SDDI data center data protection toolbox
Data Protection Toolbox

SDDC SDDI Object Storage Architecture
Figure 3.18 Generic Object (and Blob) architecture with Buckets (and Containers)

Object Storage

Before discussing Object Storage lets take a step back and look at some context that can clarify some confusion around the term object. The word object has many different meanings and context, both inside of the IT world as well as outside. Context matters with the term object such as a verb being a thing that can be seen or touched as well as a person or thing of action or feeling directed towards.

Besides a person, place or physical thing, an object can be a software defined data structure that describes something. For example, a database record describing somebody’s contact or banking information, or a file descriptor with name, index ID, date and time stamps, permissions and access control lists along with other attributes or metadata. Another example is an object or blob stored in a cloud or object storage system repository, as well as an item in a hypervisor, operating system, container image or other application.

Besides being a verb, object can also be a noun such as disapproval or disagreement with something or someone. From an IT context perspective, object can also refer to a programming method (e.g. object oriented programming [oop], or Java [among other environments] objects and class’s) and systems development in addition to describing entities with data structures.

In other words, a data structure describes an object that can be a simple variable, constant, complex descriptor of something being processed by a program, as well as a function or unit of work. There are also objects unique or with context to specific environments besides Java or databases, operating systems, hypervisors, file systems, cloud and other things.

SDDC SDDI Object Storage Example
Figure 3.19 AWS S3 Object storage example, objects left and descriptive names on right

The role of object storage (view more at www.objectstoragecenter.com) is to provide low-cost, scalable capacity, durable availability of data including data protection copies on-premises or off-site. Note that not all object storage solutions or services are the same, some are immutable with write once read many (WORM) like attributes, while others non-immutable meaning that they can be not only appended to, also updated to page or block level granularity.

Also keep in mind that some solutions and services refer to items being stored as objects while others as blobs, and the name space those are part of as a bucket or container. Note that context is important not to confuse an object container with a docker, kubernetes or micro services container.

Many applications and storage systems as well as appliances support as back-end targets cloud access using AWS S3 API (of AWS S3 service or other solutions), as well as OpenStack Switch API among others. There are also many open source and third-party tools for working with cloud storage including objects and blobs. Learn more about object storage, cloud storage at www.objectstoragecenter.com as well as in chapters 3, 4, 13 and 14 in SDDI Essentials book.

S3 Simple Storage Service

Simple Storage Service ( S3) is the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud object storage service that can be used for bulk and other storage needs. The S3 service can be accessed from within AWS as well as externally via different tools. AWS S3 supports large number of buckets and objects across different regions and availability zones. Objects can be stored in a hierarchical directory structure format for compatibility with existing file systems or as a simple flat name space.

Context is important with data protection and S3 which can mean the access API, or AWS service. Likewise context is important in that some solutions, software and services support S3 API access as part of their front-end (e.g. how servers or clients access their service), as well as a back-end target (what they can store data on).

Additional AWS S3 (service) and related resources include:

Data Infrastructure Environments and Applications

Data Infrastructure environments that need to be protected include legacy, software defined (SDDC, SDDI, SDS), cloud, virtual and container based, as well as clustered, scale-out, converged Infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) among others. In addition to data protection related topics already converged in the posts in this series (as well as those to follow), a related topic is Data Footprint Reduction ( DFR). DFR comprises several different technologies and techniques including archiving, compression, compaction, deduplication (dedupe), single instance storage, normalization, factoring, zip, tiering and thin provisioning among many others.

Data Footprint Reduction (DFR) Including Dedupe

There is a long-term relationship with data protection and DFR in that to reduce the impact of storing more data, traditional techniques such as compression and compaction have been used, along with archive and more recently dedupe among others. In the Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book there is an entire chapter on DFR ( chapter 11), as well as related topics in chapters 8 and 13 among others. For those interested in DFR and related topics, there is additional material in my books Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), along with in The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), as well as various posts on StorageIOblog.com and storageio.com. Figure 11.4 is from Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials showing big picture of various places where DFR can be implemented along with different technologies, tools and techniques.

SDDC, SDI, SDDI DFR Dedupe
Figure 11.4 Various points of interest where DFR techniques and technology can be applied

Just as everything is not the same, there are different DFR techniques along with implementations to address various application workload and data performance, availability, capacity, economics (PACE) needs. Where is the best location for DFR that depends on your objectives as well as what your particular technology can support. However in general, I recommend putting DFR as close to where the data is created and stored as possible to maximize its effectiveness which can be on the host server. That however also means leveraging DFR techniques downstream where data gets sent to be stored or protected. In other words, a hybrid DFR approach as a companion to data protection should use various techniques, technologies in different locations. Granted, your preferred vendor might only work in a given location or functionality so you can pretty much guess what the recommendations will be ;) .

Tips, Recommendations and Considerations

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), appendices, as well as tips can be found here.

General action items, tips, considerations and recommendations include:

  • Everything is not the same; different applications with SLO, PACE, FTT, FTM needs
  • Understand the 4 3 2 1 data protection rule and how to implement it.
  • Balance rebuild performance impact and time vs. storage space overhead savings.
  • Use different approaches for various applications and environments.
  • What is best for somebody else may not be best for you and your applications.
  • You cant go forward in the future after a disaster if you cant go back
  • Data protection is a shared responsibility between vendors, service providers and yourself
  • There are various aspects to data protection and data Infrastructure management

Where To Learn More

Continue reading additional posts in this series of Data Infrastructure Data Protection fundamentals and companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) book, as well as the following links covering technology, trends, tools, techniques, tradecraft and tips.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

There are many different buzzword, buzz terms, buzz trends pertaining to data infrastructure and data protection. These technologies span legacy and emerging, software-defined, cloud, virtual, container, hardware and software. Key point is what technology is best fit for your needs and applications, as well as how to use the tools in different ways (e.g. skill craft techniques and tradecraft). Keep context in mind when looking at and discussing different technologies such as objects among others.

Get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials here at Amazon.com, at CRC Press among other locations and learn more here. Meanwhile, continue reading with the next post in this series, Part 8 Walking The Data Protection Talk.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Data Protection Diaries Fundamentals Walking The Data Protection Talk

Data Protection Diaries Walking The Data Protection Talk

Companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft ( CRC Press 2017)

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

By Greg Schulzwww.storageioblog.com November 26, 2017

This is Part 8 of a multi-part series on Data Protection fundamental tools topics techniques terms technologies trends tradecraft tips as a follow-up to my Data Protection Diaries series, as well as a companion to my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Server Storage I/O Fundamental tradecraft (CRC Press 2017).

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

Click here to view the previous post Data Protection Tools, Technologies, Toolbox, Buzzword Bingo Trends, and click here to view the next post who’s Doing What ( Toolbox Technology Tools).

Post in the series includes excerpts from Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) pertaining to data protection for legacy along with software defined data centers ( SDDC), data infrastructures in general along with related topics. In addition to excerpts, the posts also contain links to articles, tips, posts, videos, webinars, events and other companion material. Note that figure numbers in this series are those from the SDDI book and not in the order that they appear in the posts.

In this post the focus is around what I (and Server StorageIO) does for Data Protection besides just talking the talk and is a work in progress that is being updated over time with additional insights.

Walking The Data Protection Talk What I Do

A couple of years back I did the first post as part of the Data Protection Diaries series ( view here), that included the following image showing some data protection needs and requirements, as well as what being done, along with areas for improvement. Part of what I and Server StorageIO does involves consulting (strategy, design, assessment), advising and other influencers activities (e.g. blog, write articles, create reports, webinars, seminars, videos, podcasts) pertaining to data Infrastructure topics as well as data protection.

What this means is knowing about the trends, tools, technologies, what’s old and new, who’s doing what, what should be in the data protection toolbox, as well as how to use those for different scenarios. Its one thing to talk the talk, however I also prefer to walk the talk including eating my own dog food applying various techniques, approaches, tools and technologies discussed.

The following are from a previous Data Protection Diaries post where I discuss my data protection needs (and wants) some of which have evolved since then. Note the image on the left is my Livescribe Echo digital pen and paper tablet. On the right is an example of the digital image created and imported into my computer from the Livescribe. In other words, Im able to protect my hand written notes, diagrams and figures.

Data Protection Diaries Data Protection Diaries Walking The Talk
Via my Livescribe Echo digital pen ( get your Livescribe here at Amazon.com)

My Environment and data protection is always evolving, some based on changing projects, others that are more stable. Likewise the applications along with data are varied after all, everything is not the same. My data protection includes snapshots, replication, mirror, sync, versions, backup, archive, RAID, erasure code among others technologies, tools, and techniques.

Applications range from desktop, office, email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, video, audio and related items in support of day-to-day activities. Then there are items part of various projects that range from physical to virtual, cloud and container leveraging various tools. This means having protection copies (sync, backup, snapshots, consistency points) of virtual machines, physical machine instances, applications and databases such as SQL Server among many others. Other application workloads include web, word press blog and email among others.

The Server StorageIO environment consists of a mix of legacy on-premises technologies from servers, storage, hardware, software, networks, tools as well as software defined virtual (e.g. VMware, Hyper-V, Docker among others), as well as cloud. The StorageIO data Infrastructure environment consists of dedicated private server (DPS) that I have had for several years now that supports this blog as well as other sites and activity. I also have a passive standby site used for testing of the WordPress based blog on an AWS Lightsail server. I use tools such as Updraft Plus Premium to routinely create a complete data protection view (database, plugins, templates, settings, configuration, core) of my WordPress site (runs on DPS) that is stored in various locations, including at AWS.

Data Protection Diaries Walking The Talk
Some of my past data protection requirements (they have evolved)

Currently the Lightsail Virtual Private Server (VPS) is in passive mode, however plans are to enable it as a warm or active standby fail over site for some of the DPS functions. One of the tools I have for monitoring and insight besides those in WordPress and the DPS are AWS Route 53 alerts that I have set up to monitor endpoints. AWS Route 53 is a handy resource for monitoring your endpoints such as a website, blog among other things and have it notify you, or take action including facilitating DNS fail over if needed. For now, Im simply using Route 53 besides as a secondary DNS as a notification tool.

Speaking of AWS, I have compute instances in Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) along with associated Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes as well as their snapshots. I also have AWS S3 buckets in different regions that are on various tiers from standard to infrequent access (IA), as well as some data on Glacier. Data from my DPS at Bluehost gets protected to a AWS S3 bucket that I can access from AWS EC2, as well as via other locations including Microsoft Azure as needed.

Some on-premises data also gets protected to AWS S3 (as well as to elsewhere) using various tools, for different granularity, frequency, access and retention. After all, everything is not the same, why treat it the same. Some of the data protected to AWS S3 buckets is in native format (e.g. they appear as objects to S3 or object enabled applications), as well as file to file based applications with appropriate tools.

Other data that is also protected to AWS S3 from different data protection or backup tools are stored in vendor neutral or vendor specific save set, zip, tar ball or other formats. In other words, I need the tool or compatible tool that knows the format of the saved data to retrieve individual data files, items or objects. Note that this is similar to storing data on tape, HDDs, SSD or other media in native format vs. in some type of encapsulate save set or other format.

In addition to protecting data to AWS, I also have data at Microsoft Azure among other locations. Other locations include non-cloud based off-site where encrypted removable media is periodically taken to a safe secure place as a master, gold in case of major emergency, ransomeware copy.

Why not just rely on cloud copies?

Simple, I can pull individual files or relatively small amounts of data back from the cloud sometimes faster (or easier) than from on-site copies, let alone my off-site, off-line, air gap copies. On the other hand, if I need to restore large amounts of data, without a fast network, it can be quicker to get the air gap off-line, off-site copy, do the large restore, then apply incremental or changed data via cloud. In other a hybrid approach.

Now a common question I get is why not just do one or the other and save some money. Good point, I would save some money, however by doing the above among other things, they are part of being able to test, try new and different things, gain insight, experience not to mention walk the talk vs. simply talking the talk.

Of course Im always looking for ways to streamline to make my data protection more efficient, as well as effective (along with remove complexity and costs).

  • Everything is not the same, so why treat it all the same with common SLO, RTO, RPO and retention?
  • Likewise why treat and store all data the same way, on the same tiers of technology
  • Gain insight and awareness into environment, applications, workloads, PACE needs
  • Applications, data, systems or devices are protected with different granularity and frequency
  • Apply applicable technology and tools to the task at hand
  • Any data I have in cloud has a copy elsewhere, likewise, any data on-premises has a copy in the cloud or elsewhere
  • I implement the 4 3 2 1 rule by having multiple copies, versions, data in different locations, on and off-line including cloud
  • From a security standpoint, many different things are implemented on a logical as well as physical basis including encryption
  • Ability to restore data as well as applications or image instances locally as well as into cloud environments
  • Leverage different insight and awareness, reporting, analytics and monitoring tools
  • Mix of local storage configured with different RAID and other protection
  • Test, find, fix, remediate improve the environment including leveraging lessons learned

Where To Learn More

Continue reading additional posts in this series of Data Infrastructure Data Protection fundamentals and companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) book, as well as the following links covering technology, trends, tools, techniques, tradecraft and tips.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

Everything is not the same, thats why in my environment I use different technologies, tools and techniques to protect my data. This also means having different RTO, RPO across various applications, data and systems as well as devices. Data that is more important has more copies, versions in different locations as well as occurring more frequently as part of 4 3 2 1 data protection. Other data that does not change as frequently, or time sensitive have alternate RTO and RPO along with corresponding frequency of protection.

Get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials here at Amazon.com, at CRC Press among other locations and learn more here. Meanwhile, continue reading with the next post in this series Part 9 who’s Doing What (Toolbox Technology Tools).

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Data Protection Diaries Fundamentals Who Is Doing What Toolbox Technology Tools

Data Protection Toolbox Whos Doing What Technology Tools

Updated 1/17/2018

Data protection toolbox is a companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft ( CRC Press 2017)

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

By Greg Schulzwww.storageioblog.com November 26, 2017

This is Part 9 of a multi-part series on Data Protection fundamental tools topics techniques terms technologies trends tradecraft tips as a follow-up to my Data Protection Diaries series, as well as a companion to my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Server Storage I/O Fundamental tradecraft (CRC Press 2017).

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

Click here to view the previous post Part 8 Walking The Data Protection Talk, and click here to view the next post Part 10 Data Protection Resources Where to Learn More.

Post in the series includes excerpts from Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) pertaining to data protection for legacy along with software defined data centers ( SDDC), data infrastructures in general along with related topics. In addition to excerpts, the posts also contain links to articles, tips, posts, videos, webinars, events and other companion material. Note that figure numbers in this series are those from the SDDI book and not in the order that they appear in the posts.

In this post the focus is around Data Protection who’s Doing What ( Toolbox Technology Tools).

SDDC, SDI, SDDI data infrastructure
Figure 1.5 Data Infrastructures and other IT Infrastructure Layers

who’s Doing What (Toolbox Technology Tools)

SDDC SDDI data center data protection toolbox
Data Protection Toolbox

Note that this post is evolving with additional tools, technologies, techniques, hardware, software, services being added over time along with applicable industry links.

The following are a sampling of some hardware, software, solution and component vendors along with service providers involved with data protection from RAID, Erasure Codes (EC) to snapshots, backup, BC, BR, DR, archive, security, cloud, bulk object storage, HDDs, SSD, tape among others including buzzword (and buzz term trends) bingo. Acronis, Actifio, Arcserve, ATTO, AWS, Backblaze, Barracuda, Broadcom, Caringo, Chelsio (offload), Code42/Crashplan, Cray, Ceph, Cisco, Cloudian, Cohesity, Compuverde, Commvault, Datadog, Datrium, Datos IO, DDN, Dell EMC, Druva, E8, Elastifile, Exagrid, Excelero, Fujifilm, Fujutsu, Google, HPE, Huawei, Hedvig, IBM, Intel, Iomega, Iron Mountain, IBM, Jungledisk, Kinetic key value drives (Seagate), Lenovo, LTO organization, Mangstor, Maxta, Mellanox (offload), Micron, Microsoft (Azure, Windows, Storage Spaces), Microsemi, Nakivo, NetApp, NooBaa, Nexsan, Nutanix, OpenIO, OpenStack (Swift), Oracle, Panasas, Panzura, Promise, Pure, Quantum, Quest, Qumulo, Retrospect, Riverbed, Rozo, Rubrik, Samsung, Scale, Scality, Seagate (DotHill), Sony, Solarwinds, Spectralogic, Starwind, Storpool, Strongbox, Sureline, Swiftstack, Synology, Toshiba, Tintri, Turbonomics, Unitrends, Unix and Linux platforms, Vantara, Veeam, VMware, Western Digital (Amplidata, Tegile and others), WekaIO, X-IO, Zadara and Zmanda among many others.

Note if you dont see yours, or your favorite, preferred or clients listed above or in the data Infrastructure industry related links send us a note for consideration to be included in future updates, or having a link, or sponsor spot pointing to your site added. Feel free to add a non sales marketing pitch to courteous comments to the comment section below.

View additional IT, data center and data Infrastructure along with data protection related vendors, services, tools, technologies links here.

Where To Learn More

Continue reading additional posts in this series of Data Infrastructure Data Protection fundamentals and companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) book, as well as the following links covering technology, trends, tools, techniques, tradecraft and tips.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

Part of modernizing data protection for various data center and data infrastructure environments is to know the tools, technologies and trends that are part of your data protection toolbox. The other part of modernizing data is protection is knowing the techniques of how to use different tools, technologies to meet various application workload performance, availability, capacity economic (PACE) needs.

Also keep in mind that information services requires applications (e.g. programs) and that programs are a combination of algorithms (code, rules, policies) and data structures (e.g. data and how it is organized including unstructured). What this means is that data protection needs to address not only data, also the applications, configuration settings, metadata as well as protecting the protection tools and its data.

Get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials here at Amazon.com, at CRC Press among other locations and learn more here. Meanwhile, continue reading with the next post in this series, Part 10 Data Protection Fundamental Resources Where to Learn More.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Data Protection Diaries Fundamental Resources Where to Learn More

Data Protection Diaries Fundamental Resources Where to Learn More

Companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft ( CRC Press 2017)

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

By Greg Schulzwww.storageioblog.com November 26, 2017

This is the last in a multi-part series on Data Protection fundamental tools topics techniques terms technologies trends tradecraft tips as a follow-up to my Data Protection Diaries series, as well as a companion to my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Server Storage I/O Fundamental tradecraft (CRC Press 2017).

Click here to view the previous post Part 9 – who’s Doing What ( Toolbox Technology Tools).

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

Post in the series includes excerpts from Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) pertaining to data protection for legacy along with software defined data centers ( SDDC), data infrastructures in general along with related topics. In addition to excerpts, the posts also contain links to articles, tips, posts, videos, webinars, events and other companion material. Note that figure numbers in this series are those from the SDDI book and not in the order that they appear in the posts.

In this post the focus is around Data Protection Resources Where to Learn More.

SDDC, SDI, SDDI data infrastructure
Figure 1.5 Data Infrastructures and other IT Infrastructure Layers

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Table of Contents (TOC)

Here is a link (PDF) to the table of contents (TOC) for Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials.

The following is a Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book TOC summary:

Chapter 1: Server Storage I/O and Data Infrastructure Fundamentals
Chapter 2: Application and IT Environments
Chapter 3: Bits, Bytes, Blobs, and Software-Defined Building Blocks
Chapter 4: Servers: Physical, Virtual, Cloud, and Containers
Chapter 5: Server I/O and Networking
Chapter 6: Servers and Storage-Defined Networking
Chapter 7: Storage Mediums and Component Devices
Chapter 8: Data Infrastructure Services: Access and Performance
Chapter 9: Data Infrastructure Services: Availability, RAS, and RAID
Chapter 10: Data Infrastructure Services: Availability, Recovery-Point Objective, and Security
Chapter 11: Data Infrastructure Services: Capacity and Data Reduction
Chapter 12: Storage Systems and Solutions (Products and Cloud)
Chapter 13: Data Infrastructure and Software-Defined Management
Chapter 14: Data Infrastructure Deployment Considerations
Chapter 15: Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Futures, Wrap-up, and Summary
Appendix A: Learning Experiences
Appendix B: Additional Learning, Tools, and tradecraft Tricks
Appendix C: Frequently Asked Questions
Appendix D: Book Shelf and Recommended Reading
Appendix E: Tools and Technologies Used in Support of This Book
Appendix F: How to Use This Book for Various Audiences
Appendix G: Companion Website and Where to Learn More
Glossary
Index

Click here to view (PDF) table of contents (TOC).

Data Protection Resources Where To Learn More

Learn more about Data Infrastructure and Data Protection related technology, trends, tools, techniques, tradecraft and tips with the following links.

The following are the various posts that are part of this data protection series:

  • Part 1Data Infrastructure Data Protection Fundamentals
  • Part 2 – Reliability, Availability, Serviceability ( RAS) Data Protection Fundamentals
  • Part 3 – Data Protection Access Availability RAID Erasure Codes ( EC) including LRC
  • Part 4 – Data Protection Recovery Points (Archive, Backup, Snapshots, Versions)
  • Part 5 – Point In Time Data Protection Granularity Points of Interest
  • Part 6 – Data Protection Security Logical Physical Software Defined
  • Part 7 – Data Protection Tools, Technologies, Toolbox, Buzzword Bingo Trends
  • Part 8 – Data Protection Diaries Walking Data Protection Talk
  • Part 9 – who’s Doing What ( Toolbox Technology Tools)
  • Part 10Data Protection Resources Where to Learn More

  • The following are various data protection blog posts:

  • Welcome to the Data Protection Diaries
  • Until the focus expands to data protection, backup is staying alive!
  • The blame game, Does cloud storage result in data loss?
  • Loss of data access vs. data loss
  • Revisiting RAID storage remains relevant and resources
  • Only you can prevent cloud (or other) data loss
  • Data protection is a shared responsibility
  • Time for CDP (Commonsense Data Protection)?
  • Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O Tradecraft Trends (skills, experiences, knowledge)
  • My copies were corrupted: The [4] 3-2-1 rule and more about 4 3 2 1 as well as 3 2 1 here and here
  • The following are various data protection tips and articles:

  • Via Infostor Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
  • Via Network World What’s a data infrastructure?
  • Via Infostor Data Protection Gaps, Some Good, Some Not So Good
  • Via Infostor Object Storage is in your future
  • Via Iron Mountain Preventing Unexpected Disasters
  • Via InfoStor – The Many Variations of RAID Storage
  • Via InfoStor – RAID Remains Relevant, Really!
  • Via WservNews Cloud Storage Considerations (Microsoft Azure)
  • Via ComputerWeekly Time to restore from backup: Do you know where your data is?
  • Via Network World Ensure your data infrastructure remains available and resilient
  • The following are various data protection related webinars and events:

  • BrightTalk Webinar Data Protection Modernization – Protect, Preserve and Serve you Information
  • BrightTalk Webinar BCDR and Cloud Backup Protect Preserve and Secure Your Data Infrastructure
  • TechAdvisor Webinar (Free with registration) All You Need To Know about ROBO data protection
  • TechAdvisor Webinar (Free with registration) Tips for Moving from Backup to Full Disaster Recovery
  • The following are various data protection tools, technologies, services, vendor and industry resource links:

  • Various Data Infrastructure related news commentary, events, tips and articles
  • Data Center and Data Infrastructure industry links (vendors, services, tools, technologies, hardware, software)
  • Data Infrastructure server storage I/O network Recommended Reading List Book Shelf
  • Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC 2017) Book
  • Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

    What This All Means

    Everything is not the same across environments, data centers, data infrastructures including SDDC, SDX and SDDI as well as applications along with their data.

    Likewise everything is and does not have to be the same when it comes to Data Protection.

    Since everything is not the same, various data protection approaches are needed to address various application performance, availability, capacity economic (PACE) needs, as well as SLO and SLAs.

    Data protection encompasses many different hardware, software, services including cloud technologies, tools, techniques, best practices, policies and tradecraft experience skills (e.g. knowing what to use when, where, why and how).

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    Context is important as different terms have various meanings depending on what they are being discussed with. Likewise different technologies and topics such as object, blob, backup, replication, RAID, erasure code (EC), mirroring, gaps (good, bad, ugly), snapshot, checkpoint, availability, durability among others have various meanings depending on context, as well as implementation approach.

    In most cases there is no bad technology or tool, granted there are some poor or bad (even ugly) implementations, as well as deployment or configuration decisions. What this means is the best technology or approach for your needs may be different from somebody else’s and vice versa.

    Some other points include there is no such thing as an information recession with more data generated every day, granted, how that data is transformed or stored can be in a smaller footprint. Likewise there is an increase in the size of data including unstructured big data, as well as the volume (how much data), as well as velocity (speed at which it is created, moved, processed, stored). This also means there is an increased dependency on data being available, accessible and intact with consistency. Thus the fundamental role of data Infrastructures (e.g. what’s inside the data center or cloud) is to combine resources, technologies, tools, techniques, best practices, policies, people skill set, experiences (e.g. tradecraft) to protect, preserve, secure and serve information (applications and data).

    modernizing data protection including backup, availability and related topics means more than swapping out one hardware, software, service or cloud for whatever is new, and then using it in old ways.

    What this means is to start using new (and old) things in new ways, for example move beyond using SSD or HDDs like tape as targets for backup or other data protection approaches. Instead use SSD, HDDs or cloud as a tier, yet also to enable faster protection and recovery by stepping back and rethinking what to protect, when, where, why, how and apply applicable techniques, tools and technologies. Find a balance between knowing all about the tools and trends while not understanding how to use those toolbox items, as well as knowing all about the techniques of how to use the tools, yet not knowing what the tools are.

    Want to learn more, have questions about specific tools, technologies, trends, vendors, products, services or techniques discussed in this series, send a note (info at storageio dot com) or via our contact page. We can set up a time to discuss your questions or needs pertaining to Data Protection as well as data infrastructures related topics from legacy to software defined virtual, cloud, container among others. For example consulting, advisory services, architecture strategy design, technology selection and acquisition coaching, education knowledge transfer sessions, seminars, webinars, special projects, test drive lab reviews or audits, content generation, videos, podcasts, custom content, chapter excerpts, demand generation among many other things.

    Get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials here at Amazon.com, at CRC Press among other locations and learn more here.

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

    Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

    Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

    server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

    Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrasture Updates

    September was a busy month pertaining to software defined data infrastructure including cloud and related AWS announcements. One of the announcements included VMware partnering to deliver vSphere, vSAN and NSX data infrastructure components for creating software defined data centers (SDDC) also known as multi cloud, and hybrid cloud leveraging AWS elastic bare metal servers (read more here in a companion post). Unlike traditional partner software defined solutions that relied on AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances, VMware is being deployed using private bare metal AWS elastic servers.

    What this means is that VMware vSphere (e.g. ESXi) hypervisor, vCenter, software defined storage (vSAN), storage defined network (NSX) and associated vRealize tools are deployed on AWS data infrastructure that can be used for deploying hybrid software defined data centers (e.g. connecting to your existing VMware environment). Learn more about VMware on AWS here or click on the following image.

    VMware on AWS via Amazon.com

    Additional AWS Updates

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) updates include, coinciding with VMworld, the initial availability of VMware on AWS (using virtual private servers e.g. think along the lines of Lightsail, not EC2 instances) was announced. Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues its expansion into database and table services with Relational Data Services (RDS) including various engines (Amazon Auora,MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL,and SQL Server along with Database Migration Service (DMS). Note that these RDS are in addition to what you can install and run your self on Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) virtual machine instances, Lambda serverless containers, or Lightsail Virtual Private Servers (VPS).

    AWS has published a guide to database testing on Amazon RDS for Oracle plotting latency and IOPs for OLTP workloads here using SLOB. If you are not familiar with SLOB (Silly Little Oracle Benchmark) here is a podcast with its creator Kevin Closson discussing database performance and related topics. Learn more about SLOB and step by step installation for AWS RDS Oracle here, and for those who are concerned or think that you can not run workloads to evaluate Oracle platforms, have a look at this here.

    EC2 enhancements include charging by the second (previous by the hour) for some EC2 instances (see details here including what is or is not currently available) which is a growing trend by private cloud vendors aligning with how serverless containers have been billed. New large memory EC2 instances that for example support up to 3,904GB of DDR4 RAM have been added by AWS. Other EC2 enhancements include updated network performance for some instances, OpenCL development environment to leverage AWS F1 FPGA enabled instances, along with new Elastic GPU enabled instances. Other server and network enhancements include Network Load Balancer for Elastic Load Balancer announced, as well as application load balancer now supports load balancing to IP address as targets for AWS and on premises (e.g. hybrid) resources.

    Other updates and announces include data protection backups to AWS via Commvault and AWS Storage Gateway VTL announced. IBM has announced their Spectrum Scale (e.g. formerly known as SONAS aka GPFS) Scale Out Storage solution for high performance compute (HPC) quick start on AWS. Additional AWS enhancements include new edge location in Boston and a third Seattle site, while Direct Connect sites have been added in Boston and Houston along with Canberra Australia. View more AWS announcements and enhancements here.

    Where To Learn More

    Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

    What This All Means

    AWS continues to grow and expand, both in terms of number of services, also the extensiveness of them. Likewise AWS continues to add more regions and data center availability zones, enhanced connectivity, along with earlier mentioned service features. The partnership with VMware should enable enterprise organizations to move towards hybrid cloud data infrastructures, while giving AWS an additional reach into those data centers. Overall a good set of enhancements by AWS who continues to evolve their cloud and software defined data infrastructure portfolio of solution offerings.

    By the way, if you have not heard, its Blogtober, check out some of the other blogs and posts occurring during October here.

    Ok, nuff said, for now.
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (and vSAN). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio.

    Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

    Dell EMC VMware September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

    Dell EMC VMware September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

    server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

    Dell EMC VMware September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

    vmworld 2017

    September was a busy month including VMworld in Las Vegas that featured many Dell EMC VMware (among other) software defined data infrastructure updates and announcements.

    A summary of September VMware (and partner) related announcements include:

    VMware on AWS via Amazon.com
    VMware and AWS via Amazon Web Services

    VMware and AWS

    Some of you might recall VMware earlier attempt at public cloud with vCloud Air service (see Server StorageIO lab test drive here) which has since been depreciated (e.g. retired). This new approach by VMware leverages the large global presence of AWS enabling customers to set up public or hybrid vSphere, vSAN and NSX based clouds, as well as software defined data centers (SDDC) and software defined data infrastructures (SDDI).

    VMware Cloud on AWS exists on a dedicated, single-tenant (unlike Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) multi-tenant instances or VMs) that supports from 4 to 16 underlying host per cluster. Unlike EC2 virtual machine instances, VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered on elastic bare-metal (e.g. dedicated private servers aka DPS). Note AWS EC2 is more commonly known, AWS also has other options for server compute including Lambda micro services serverless containers, as well as Lightsail virtual private servers (VPS).

    Besides servers with storage optimized I/O featuring low latency NVMe accessed SSDs, and applicable underlying server I/O networking, VMware Cloud on AWS leverages the VMware software stack directly on underlying host servers (e.g. there is no virtualization nesting taking place). This means more robust performance should be expected like in your on premise VMware environment. VM workloads can move between your onsite VMware systems and VMware Cloud on AWS using various tools. The VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered and managed by VMware, including pricing. Learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS here, and here (VMware PDF) and here (VMware Hands On Lab aka HOL).

    Read more about AWS September news and related updates here in this StorageIOblog post.

    VMware PKS
    VMware and Pivotal PKS via VMware.com

    Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Google Kubernetes Partnership

    During VMworld VMware, Pivotal and Google announced a partnership for enabling Kubernetes container management called PKS (Pivotal Container Service). Kubernetes is evolving as a popular open source container microservice serverless management orchestration platform that has roots within Google. What this means is that what is good for Google and others for managing containers, is now good for VMware and Pivotal. In related news, VMware has become a platinum sponsor of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF). If you are not familiar with CNCF, add it to your vocabulary and learn more here at www.cncf.io.

    Other VMworld and September VMware related announcements

    Hyper converged data infrastructure provider Maxta has announced a VMware vSphere Escape Pod (parachute not included ;) ) to facilitate migration from ESXi based to Red Hat Linux hypervisor environments. IBM and VMware for cloud partnership, along with Dell EMC, IBM and VMware joint cloud solutions. White listing of VMware vSphere VMs for enhanced security combine with earlier announced capabilities.

    Note that both VMware with vSphere ESXi and Microsoft with Hyper-V (Windows and Azure based) are supporting various approaches for securing Virtual Machines (VMs) and the hosts they run on. These enhancements are moving beyond simply encrypting the VMDK or VHDX virtual disks the VMs reside in or use, as well as more than password, ssh and other security measures. For example Microsoft is adding support for host guarded fabrics (and machine hosts) as well as shielded VMs. Keep an eye on how both VMware and Microsoft extend the data protection and security capabilities for software defined data infrastructures for their solutions and services.

    Dell EMC Announcements

    At VMworld in September Dell EMC announcements included:

    • Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and Hybrid Cloud enhancements
    • Data Protection, Goverence and Management suite updates
    • XtremIO X2 all flash array (AFA) availability optimized for vSphere and VDI

    HCI and Hybrid Cloud enhancements include VxRail Appliance, VxRack SDDC (vSphere 6.5, vSAN 6.6, NSX 6.3) along with hybrid cloud platforms (Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud) along with vSAN Ready Nodes (vSAN 6.6 and encryption) and VMware Ready System. Note that Dell EMC in addition to supporting VMware hybrid clouds also previously announced solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack back in May.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials at VMworld Bookstore

    xxxx

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) at VMworld bookstore

    My new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) made its public debut in the VMware book store where I did a book signing event. You can get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials which includes Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) along with hybrid, multi-cloud, serverless, converged and related topics at Amazon among other venues. Learn more here.

    Where To Learn More

    Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

    What This All Means

    A year ago at VMworld the initial conversations were started around what would become the VMware Cloud on AWS solution. Also a year ago besides VMware Integrated Containers (VIC) and some other pieces, the overall container and in particular related management story was a bit cloudy (pun intended). However, now the fog and cloud seem to be clearing with the PKS solution, along with details of VMware Cloud on AWS. Likewise vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with associated vRealize tools continue to evolve as well as customer deployment growing. All in all, VMware continues to evolve, let’s see how things progress now over the year until the next VMworld.

    By the way, if you have not heard, its Blogtober, check out some of the other blogs and posts occurring during October here.

    Ok, nuff said, for now.
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (and vSAN). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio.

    Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

    Microsoft Azure September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

    Microsoft Azure September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

    server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

    Microsoft and Azure September 2017 Software Defined Data infrastructure Updates

    September was a busy month for data infrastructure topics as well as Microsoft in terms of new and enhanced technologies. Wrapping up September was Microsoft Ignite where Azure, Azure Stack, Windows, O365, AI, IoT, development tools announcements occurred, along with others from earlier in the month. As part of the September announcements, Microsoft released a new version of Windows server (e.g. 1709) that has a focus for enhanced container support. Note that if you have deployed Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and are looking to upgrade to 1709, do your homework as there are some caveats that will cause you to wait for the next release. Note that there had been new storage related enhancements slated for the September update, however those were announced at Ignite to being pushed to the next semi-annual release. Learn more here and also here.

    Azure Files and NFS

    Microsoft made several Azure file storage related announcements and public previews during September including Native NFS based file sharing as companion to existing Azure Files, along with public preview of new Azure File Sync Service. Native NFS based file sharing (public preview announced, service is slated to be available in 2018) is a software defined storage deployment of NetApp OnTAP running on top of Azure data infrastructure including virtual machines and leverage Azure underlying storage.

    Note that the new native NFS is in addition to the earlier native Azure Files accessed via HTTP REST and SMB3 enabling sharing of files inside Azure public cloud, as well as accessible externally from Windows based and Linux platforms including on premises. Learn more about Azure Storage and Azure Files here.

    Azure File Sync (AFS)

    Azure File Sync AFS

    Azure File Sync (AFS) has now entered public preview. While users of Windows-based systems have been able to access and share Azure Files in the past, AFS is something different. I have used AFS for some time now during several private preview iterations having seen how it has evolved, along with how Microsoft listens incorporating feedback into the solution.

    Lets take a look at what is AFS, what it does, how it works, where and when to use it among other considerations. With AFS, different and independent systems can now synchronize file shares through Azure. Currently in the AFS preview Windows Server 2012 and 2016 are supported including bare metal, virtual, and cloud based. For example I have had bare metal, virtual (VMware), cloud (Azure and AWS) as part of participating in a file sync activities using AFS.

    Not to be confused with some other storage related AFS including Andrew File System among others, the new Microsoft Azure File Sync service enables files to be synchronized across different servers via Azure. This is different then the previous available Azure File Share service that enables files stored in Azure cloud storage to be accessed via Windows and Linux systems within Azure, as well as natively by Windows platforms outside of Azure. Likewise this is different from the recently announced Microsoft Azure native NFS file sharing serving service in partnership with NetApp (e.g. powered by OnTAP cloud).

    AFS can be used to synchronize across different on premise as well as cloud servers that can also function as cache. What this means is that for Windows work folders served via different on premise servers, those files can be synchronized across Azure to other locations. Besides providing a cache, cloud tiering and enterprise file sync share (EFSS) capabilities, AFS also has robust optimization for data movement to and from the cloud and across sites, along with management tools. Management tools including diagnostics, performance and activity monitoring among others.

    Check out the AFS preview including planning for an Azure File Sync (preview) deployment (Docs Microsoft), and for those who have Yammer accounts, here is the AFS preview group link.

    Microsoft Azure Blob Events via Microsoft

    Azure Blob Storage Tiering and Event Triggers

    Two other Azure storage features that are in public preview include blob tiering (for cold archiving) and event triggers for events. As their names imply, blob tiering enables automatic migration from active to cold inactive storage of dormant date. Event triggers are policies rules (code) that get executed when a blob is stored to do various functions or tasks. Here is an overview of blob events and a quick start from Microsoft here.

    Keep in mind that not all blob and object storage are the same, a good example is Microsoft Azure that has page, block and append blobs. Append blobs are similar to what you might be familiar with other services objects. Here is a Microsoft overview of various Azure blobs including what to use when.

    Project Honolulu and Windows Server Enhancements

    Microsoft has evolved from command prompt (e.g. early MSDOS) to GUI with Windows to command line extending into PowerShell that left some thinking there is no longer need for GUI. Even though Microsoft has extended its CLI with PowerShell spanning WIndows platforms and Azure, along with adding Linux command shell, there are those who still want or need a GUI. Project Honolulu is the effort to bring GUI based management back to Windows in a simplified way for what had been headless, and desktop less deployments (e.g. Nano, Server Core). Microsoft had Server Management Tools (SMT) accessible via the Azure Portal which has been discontinued.


    Project Honolulu Image via Microsoft.com

    This is where project Honolulu comes into play for managing Windows Server platforms. What this means is that for those who dont want to rely on or have a PowerShell dependency have an alternative option. Learn more about Project Honolulu here and here, including download the public preview here.

    Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) Kepler Appliance

    Data Infrastructure provider DataOn has announced a new turnkey Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) powered Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (e.g. productization of project Kepler-47) solution with two node small form factor servers (partner with MSI). How small? Think suitcase or airplane roller board carry on luggage size.

    What this means is that you can get into the converged, hyper-converged software defined storage game with Windows-based servers supporting Hyper-V virtual machines (Windows and Linux) including hardware for around $10,000 USD (varies by configuration and other options).

    Azure and Microsoft Networking News

    Speaking of Microsoft Azure public cloud, ever wonder what the network that enables the service looks like and some of the software defined networking (SDN) along with network virtualization function (NFV) objectives are, have a look at this piece from over at Data Center Knowledge.

    In related Windows, Azure and other focus areas, Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius have completed the installation of a high-capacity subsea cable (network) to cross the atlantic ocean. Whats so interesting from a data infrastructure, cloud or legacy server storage I/O and data center focus perspective? The new network was built by the combined companies vs. in the past by a Telco provider consortium with the subsequent bandwidth sold or leased to others.

    This new network is also 4,000 miles long including in depths of 11,000 feet, supports with current optics 160 terabits (e.g. 20 TeraBytes) per second capable of supporting 71 million HD videos streamed simultaneous. To put things into perspective, some residential Fiber Optic services can operate best case up to 1 gigabit per second (line speed) and in an asymmetrical fashion (faster download than uploads). Granted there are some 10 Gbit based services out there more common with commercial than residential. Simply put, there is a large amount of bandwidth increased across the atlantic for Microsoft and Facebook to support growing demands.

    Where To Learn More

    Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

    What This All Means

    Microsoft announced a new release of Windows Server at Ignite as part of its new semi-annual release cycle. This latest version of Windows server is optimized for containers. In addition to Windows server enhancements, Microsoft continues to extend Azure and related technologies for public, private and hybrid cloud as well as software defined data infrastructures.

    By the way, if you have not heard, its Blogtober, check out some of the other blogs and posts occurring during October here.

    Ok, nuff said, for now.
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (and vSAN). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio.

    Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

    September 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter



    Server StorageIO September 2017 Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

    Volume 17, Issue IX (September 2017)

    Hello and welcome to the September 2017 issue of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    With September being generally known as back to school month, the two September event bookends were VMware VMworld and Microsoft Ignite with many other things in between. Needless to say, a lot has happened in and around data infrastructure topic areas since the August newsletter (here if you missed it). Here is a post covering some of the things that I participated with during September including presentations at events in Las Vegas (VMworld), New York City (Wipro SDx Summit), SNIA SDC in Santa Clara, Fujifilm Executive Summitt in Seattle, Minneapolis/St. Paul CMG along with other activities.

    Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

    One of the activities I participated in with while at VMworld in Las Vegas was a book signing event at the VMware bookstore of my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) available at Amazon.com and other global venues.

    September has been a busy month pertaining data infrastructure including server storage I/O related trends, activities, news, perspectives and related topics, so let’s have a look at them.

    In This Issue

    Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO data infrastructure update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

    Some recent Industry Activities, Trends, News and Announcements include:

    The month started out with VMworld in Las Vegas (e.g. one of the event bookends for the month). Rather than a long list of announcements in this newsletter, check out this StorageIOblog post covering VMworld, VMware and Dell EMC and related news. As part of VMworld, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced news about their partnership. AWS also had several other enhancements and new product announcements during september that can be found in this StorageIOblog post here.

    AWS, Dell EMC and VMware were not the only ones making news or announcements during September. Startup NVMe based storage startup Apeiron has announced a Splunk appliance to boost log and analytics processing performance. Gigamon has extended its public cloud monitoring, insight awareness and analytics capabilities including support for Microsoft Azure.

    For those looking for the latest new emerging data infrastructure vendors to watch, add Vexta to your list of NVMe based storage systems. Vexta talks a lot about NVMe particular for their backend (e.g. where data stored on NVM based devices accessed via NVMe), access of their storage system is via traditional Fibre Channel (FC) or emerging NVMe over fabric.

    Long time data infrastructure server and storage vendor HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) is no more (at least in name) having re branded themselves as Vantara focusing on IoT and Cloud analytics besides their traditional data center focus. Vantara combines what was HDS, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho into a single unit effectively based in what was HDS as a new, repackaged, refocused business unit.

    Another longtime data infrastructure solution and service provider IBM announced a new Linux only zSeries (ZED) mainframe solution. Some might think the Mainframe is dead, others that it can only run Linux as a virtual guest in a virtual machine. On the other hand some might recall that there are native Linux implementations on the ZED including Ubuntu among others.

    Also note that while IBM zOS mainframe operating systems use FICON for storage access, native ZED Linux systems can use open systems based Fibre Channel (FC) e.g. SCSI command set protocols. Is the ZED based Linux for everybody or every environment? Probably not, however for those who have large-scale Linux needs, it might be worth a look to do a total cost of ownership analysis. If nothing else, do your homework, play your cards right and you might have some leverage with the x86 based server crowd when it comes to negotiating leverage.

    Cloud storage gateway vendor Nasuni has landed another $38 Million USD in funding, hopefully that will enable them to start landing some new and larger customer revenues growing their business. Meanwhile storage startup Qumulo has announced extending their global file fabric name space to include spanning AWS.

    Attala Systems has announced next generation software defined storage for data infrastructures for Telco environments. Percona has added an experimental release of their MySQL engine enhancing performance for high volume, write intensive workloads along with improved cost effectiveness.

    Software defined storage vendor Datacore announced enhancements to support fast databases for online transaction processing (OLTP) along with analytics. Meanwhile Linux provider SUSE continues to expand its software defined storage story based around Ceph. Panasas has enhanced its scale out high performance cluster file system global name space for HPC environments with 20 PByte support. Another longtime storage vendor X-IO (formerly known as Xiotech) announced their 4th generation of their Intelligent Storage Element (ISE).

    September wrapped up with Microsoft Ignite conference along with many updated, enhancements and new features for Azure, Azure Stack, Windows among others. Read more about those and other Microsoft September announcements here in this StorageIOblog post.

    Check out other industry news, comments, trends perspectives here.

    Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via CDW: Comments on Is Your Network About To Fail?
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Data Storage and Big Data Analytics
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on Cloud FOMO (Fear of missing out)
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on Building a Modern Data Strategy
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on the future of Multi-Cloud Computing
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on AI, Machine Learning and Data management
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on Your riskiest data might be in plain sight
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on Data Management Too Much To Handle
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on Google Cloud Platform Gaining Data Storage Momentum
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on Singapore High Rise Data Centers
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on New Tape Storage Capacity
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on 8 ways to save on cloud storage
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Google Cloud Platform and Storage

    View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here

    Server StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    In Case You Missed It #ICYMI

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

    Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Who Will Rule the Storage World?
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on Google Cloud Platform Gaining Data Storage Momentum
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on Singapore High Rise Data Centers
    Via InfoGoto: Comments on New Tape Storage Capacity
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on 8 ways to save on cloud storage
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Google Cloud Platform and Storage

    View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here

    Server StorageIO Recommended Reading (Watching and Listening) List

    In addition to my own books including Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017), the following are Server StorageIO recommended reading, watching and listening list items. The list includes various IT, Data Infrastructure and related topics.

    Intel Recommended Reading List (IRRL) for developers is a good resource to check out.

    Its October which means that it is also Blogtober, check out some of the blogs and posts occurring during October here.

    Preston De Guise aka @backupbear is Author of several books has an interesting new site Foolsrushin.info that looks at topics including Ethics in IT among others. Check out his new book Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability (CRC Press 2017).

    Brendan Gregg has a great site for Linux performance related topics here.

    Greg Knieriemen has a must read weekly blog, post, column collection of whats going on in and around the IT and data infrastructure related industries, Check it out here.

    Interested in file systems, CIFS, SMB, SAMBA and related topics then check out Chris Hertels book on implementing CIFS here at Amazon.com

    For those involved with VMware, check out Frank Denneman VMware vSphere 6.5 host resource guide-book here at Amazon.com.

    I often mention in presentations a must have for anybody involved with software defined anything, or programming for that matter which is the Niklaus Wirth classic Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs that you can get on Amazon.com here.

    Another great book to have is Seven Databases in Seven Weeks which not only provides an overview of popular NoSQL databases such as Cassandra, Mongo, HBASE among others, lots of good examples and hands on guides. Get your copy here at Amazon.com.

    Watch for more more items to be added to the book shelf soon.

    Events and Activities

    Recent and upcoming event activities.

    Nov. 2, 2017 – Webinar – Modern Data Protection for Hyper-Convergence
    Sep. 21, 2017 – MSP CMG – Minneapolis MN
    Sep. 20, 2017 – Webinar – BC, DR and Business Resiliency (BR) tips
    Sep. 14, 2017 – Fujifilm IT Executive Summit – Seattle WA
    Sep. 12, 2017 – SNIA Software Developers Conference (SDC) – Santa Clara CA
    Sep. 7, 2017 – Wipro SDX – Enabling, Planning Your Software Defined Journey
    August 28-30, 2017 – VMworld – Las Vegas

    See more webinars and activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Useful links and pages:
    Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
    storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
    objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
    OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
    storageio.com/downloads – Various presentations and other download material
    storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
    thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
    thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
    storageio.com/converge – Various CI, HCI and related SDS topics
    storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
    VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio.

    Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

    July 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructures Update Newsletter

    Volume 17, Issue VII

    Hello and welcome to the July 2017 issue of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    It has been busy time with a lot going on, so let’s get right to this months topics which include software defined, data infrastructures, server, I/O networking, storage and related topics.

    Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

    A quick update following up from the June newsletter is that my new book is now available via Amazon.com, CRC Press and other venues in hardcopy hardcover as well as electronic versions. Visit storageio.com/book4 to learn more including view table of contents, preface, how organized among other items.

    In This Issue

    Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

    Some recent Industry Activities, Trends, News and Announcements include:

    Arcserve who gained their independence from CA a few years ago has now acquired Zetta to expand its data protection solution portfolio for legacy, software defined virtual and cloud data infrastructure environments.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) solution provider Compuverde has been awarded a US Patent for optimal server selection in software defined data centers (SDDC).

    The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) announced its April 2017 integrators list including RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) along with other recent plugfest updates. Learn more about IBTA and related topics at www.infinibandta.org

    Next Platform has an interesting piece about a slump in the High Performance Computing (HPC) also known as High Profit Compute (for financial firms among others) along with Super Compute (SC) industry sector. Some of the vendors in the HPC and SC space include AMD, Cisco, Cray, DDN, Dell EMC, Fujifilm, IBM, Intel, HPE/SGI, Mellanox, NetApp, Oracle, Seagate and Western Digital (WD) among others. Check out the piece over at Next Platform here.

    To beef up its storage solution offerings, Cray has done a deal with Seagate who is one of their suppliers of HDDs as well as software defined storage software (ClusterStore) and related systems. In this new deal, Cray will get (e.g. now own) Lustre based ClusterStore storage solution which besides the intellectual property (IP) including software, around 100 or so workers will shift from being Seagate to becoming Cray employees. Note that Seagate acquired ClusterStore solution as part of its acquisition a few years ago of Xyratex (enclosures and Lustre storage system software).

    Meanwhile Seagate CEO Stephen Luczo is steeping down from his top leadership position after posting poor earnings and more job cuts. We have heard that HDDs are dead for decades, yet they continue to be consumed, granted with ups and downs, lately more downs for Seagate than its competitor Western Digital (WD). Seagate has dabbled in flash solid state devices (SSDs) ranging from drives to cards including acquisition of the flash business from LSI/Avago a few years ago, along with some partnerships. As a component supplier, does Seagate need to take a bold move and get closer or do a deal with one of the nand flash or other persistent memory chip makers? Or, does Seagate need to continue to move up the stack with solutions building on their previous deals buying Xyratex (enclosure and ClusterStor), Evault (data protection software), DotHill (storage systems), LSI/Avago flash (flash cards)? Lets see what happens with Seagate both from a big picture as well as more focused product, technology, portfolio perspective.

    Watch for a flurry of NVMe, along with flash SSD and other non-volatile memory (NVM), persistent memories along with storage class memories over the next few weeks. Keep in mind that If Answer is NVMe, what are the questions? Also watch for a flurry of software defined, cloud, virtual and related news towards the end of the month and into September.

    Just for fun, Mike Acton (@mike_acton) has an interesting read on Introductory bullshit detection for non-technical managers that you can check out here. Over at Coding Horror there is another interesting read on the notion of paying down your technical debt, check it out here.

    Check out other industry news, comments, trends perspectives here.

    Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Who Will Rule the Storage World?
    Via SearchDataCenter: Comments on Dell EMC Cisco VxBlock news

    View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here

    Server StorageIO Featured White Paper Report

    This months featured Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure content is a new white paper industry trends perspective report looking at Weka.IO Matrix Multi-Dimensional Software Based Storage (e.g. software defined storage). In this report, we look at WekaIO Matrix, an elastic, flexible, highly scalable easy to use (and manage) software-defined (e.g. software-based) storage solution. WekaIO Matrix enables radically simple software defined storage that is flexible elastic scaling with stability and without compromise.

    Weka.io Matrix software defined storage

    • Matrix is a new storage solution that:
    • Installs on bare metal, virtual or cloud servers
    • Has POSIX, NFS, SMB, and HDFS storage access
    • Adaptable performance for little and big data
    • Tiering of flash SSD and cloud object storage
    • Distributed resilience without compromise
    • Removes complexity of traditional storage

    Read more in this StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective (ITP) Report compliments of WekaIO by clicking here. Visit www.weka.io to learn more about WekaIO and their Matrix solution.

    View more Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure White Papers, Lab Reports, Solution Briefs, Research, Polls, Surveys and additional content here on our portfolio page.

     

    Server StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    • Intel Announces New Xeon Processors for Software Defined Data Infrastructures
      Intel announced a new family of Xeon Scalable Processors (aka Purely) that for some workloads Intel claims to be on average of 1.65x faster than their predecessors. Note your real improvement will vary based on workload, configuration, benchmark testing, type of processor, memory, and many other server storage I/O performance considerations.

    • Who Will Be At Top Of Storage World Next Decade?
      It is safe to say that each new year will bring new trends, techniques, technologies, tools, features, functionality as well as solutions involving data storage as well as data infrastructures. This means a usual safe bet is to say that the current year is the most exciting and has the most new things than in the past when it comes to data infrastructures along with resources such as data storage.

    • Zombie Technology Life after Death Tape Is Still Alive
      A Zombie Technology is one declared dead yet has Life after Death such as Tape which is still alive, despite having declared dead for decades.

    In Case You Missed It #ICYMI

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

    Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via IDG/NetworkWorld: Ensure your data infrastructure remains available and resilient
    Via IDG/NetworkWorld: Whats a data infrastructure?
    Via InfoStor: Object Storage Is In Your Future
    Via InfoStor: Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
    Via InfoStor: SSD Trends, Tips and Topics

    View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here

    Events and Activities

    Recent and upcoming event activities.

    Sep. 21, 2017 – MSP CMG – Minneapolis MN

    Sep. 14, 2017 – Fujifilm IT Executive Summit – Seattle WA

    Sep. 12, 2017 – SNIA Software Developers Conference (SDC) – Santa Clara CA

    Sep. 7, 2017 – TBA – Enabling, Planning and Executing Your Software Defined Journey

    August 28-30, 2017 – VMworld – Las Vegas

    June 22, 2017 – Webinar – GDPR and Microsoft Environments

    May 11, 2017 – Webinar – Email Archiving, Compliance and Ransomware

    See more webinars and activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Useful links and pages:
    Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
    storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
    objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
    OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
    storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
    thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
    thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
    storageio.com/converge – Various CI, HCI and related SDS topics
    storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
    VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio.

    Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.