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Fall 2015 Server Storage I/O Cloud Virtual Seminars Going Dutch

Storage I/O trends

Fall 2015 Server Storage I/O Cloud Virtual Seminars Going Dutch

StorageIO events, object storage, ssd cloud, virtualization and big data

It’s that time of the year again where the fall 2015 events and activities are underway which also includes a week of sessions in Holland October 13-16. I will be participating in four days of workshop seminars being organized by Brouwer Storage Consultancy in Nijkerk covering server storage decision-making, converged and bulk storage options, software defined storage management, data center infrastructure management and data protection along with industry trends and update sessions.

Brouwer Storage Consultnacy

October 13th: Symposium – Software Defined Storage Management

09:00 -17:00

DOWNLOAD FLYER (Dutch)

REGISTER HERE

FREE Session! Access for end-users only, through invitation or contacting BSC.

Event Location: Hotel & Gasterij De Roode Schuur, Oude Barneveldseweg 98, 3862PS Nijkerk – www.deroodeschuur.nl

Brouwer Storage Making Decision Seminar Workshops

October 14th: Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends V2.015 – What’s New, What’s the buzz, what you need to know about.

09:00 -17:00

DOWNLOAD Abstract/Agenda

REGISTER HERE

Event Location: Golden Tulip Ampt van Nijkerk Hotel, Berencamperweg 4, 3861MC, Nijkerk – www.goldentulipamptvannijkerk.com/en

Brouwer Storage Making Decision Seminar Workshops

October 15th: Symposium – Data Center Infrastructure Management

09:00 -17:00

DOWNLOAD Abstract / Agenda

REGISTER Here

FREE Session! Access, through invitation or contacting BSC.

Event Location: Hotel & Gasterij De Roode Schuur, Oude Barneveldseweg 98, 3862PS Nijkerk – www.deroodeschuur.nl

Going Dutch Storage Seminars

October 16th: "Converged Day" Server and Storage Decision making – How do you want or need your storage packaged?

09:00 -17:00

DOWNLOAD Abstract / Agenda

REGISTER HERE

Event Location: Golden Tulip Ampt van Nijkerk Hotel, Berencamperweg 4, 3861MC, Nijkerk – www.goldentulipamptvannijkerk.com/en

Going Dutch Server Storage I/O

Brouwer Storage Consultnacy

Learn more at the Brouwer Storage Consultancy site here, or getting in touch with them to reserve your seat at these events.

Office: Olevoortseweg 43
3861 MH Nijkerk
The Netherlands

T +31-33-246-6825
C +31-652-601-309
F +31-33-245-8956
E info@brouwerconsultancy.com

Where to read, watch and learn more

Watch for more events, seminars, live video, webinars and virtual trade shows by visiting the StorageIO events page.

StorageIO events, object storage, ssd cloud, virtualization and big data

What this all means and wrap up

Smart server and storage for cloud, virtual and physical or legacy environments starts with being informed, knowing your requirements, options and having insight into industry trends that are applicable to your environment. These sessions are vendor and technology neutral held off-site at hotel venues in Nijkerk Netherlands so no need to worry about the sales teams coming in to sell you something during the breaks or lunch which are provided. There are also opportunities throughout the workshops for engagement, discussion and interaction with other attendees that includes your peers from various commercial, government and service providers among others. Hope to see in Nijkerk to discuss server stowage I/O cloud virtual and other industry trends, technologies, techniques in October.

Ok, nuff said

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

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

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August Server StorageIO Update Newsletter – NVM and Flash SSD Focus

Volume 15, Issue VIII

Hello and welcome to this August 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Summer is wrapping up here in the northern hemisphere which means the fall conference season has started, holidays in progress as well as getting ready for back to school time. I have been spending my summer working on various things involving servers, storage, I/O networking hardware, software, services from cloud to containers, virtual and physical. This includes OpenStack, VMware vCloud Air, AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCS among others, as well as new versions of Microsoft Windows and Servers, Non Volatile Memory (NVM) including flash SSD, NVM Express (NVMe), databases, data protection, software defined, cache, micro-tiering and benchmarking using various tools among other things (some are still under wraps).

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

Cheers GS

In This Issue

  • Feature Topic
  • Industry Trends News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Videos and Podcasts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Recommended Reading List
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Server StorageIO Lab reports
  • New and Old Vendor Update
  • Resources and Links

    • Feature Topic – Non Volatile Memory including NAND flash SSD

    Via Intel History of Memory
    Via Intel: Click above image to view history of memory

    This months feature topic theme is Non Volatile Memory (NVM) which includes technologies such as NAND flash commonly used in Solid State Devices (SSDs) storage today, as well as in USB thumb drive, mobile and hand-held devices among many other uses. NVM spans servers, storage, I/O devices along with mobile and handheld among many other technologies. In addition to NAND flash, other forms of NVM include Non Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM), Read Only Memory (ROM) along with some emerging new technologies including the recently announced Intel and Micron 3D XPoint among others.

    • NVMe: The Golden Ticket for Faster Flash Storage? (Via EnterpriseStorageForum)
    • What should I consider when using SSD cloud? (Via SearchCloudStorage)
    • MSP CMG, Sept. 2014 Presentation (Flash back to reality – Myths and Realities
    • Flash and SSD Industry trends perspectives plus benchmarking tips) – PDF
    • Selecting Storage: Start With Requirements (Via NetworkComputing)
    • Spot The Newest & Best Server Trends (Via Processor)
    • Market ripe for embedded flash storage as prices drop (Via Powermore (Dell))

    Continue reading more about NVM, NVMe, NAND flash, SSD Server and storage I/O related topics at www.thessdplace.com as well as about I/O performance, monitoring and benchmarking tools at www.storageperformance.us.

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    Server Storage I/O Industry Activity Trends (Cloud, Virtual, Physical)

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)

    • PMC Announces NVMe SSD Controllers (Via TomsITpro)
    • New SATA SSD powers elastic cloud agility for CSPs (Via Cbronline)
    • Toshiba Solid-State Drive Family Features PCIe Technology (Via Eweek)
    • SanDisk aims CloudSpeed Ultra SSD at cloud providers (Via ITwire)
    • Everspin & Aupera reveal MRAM Module M.2 Form Factor (Via BusinessWire)
    • PMC-Sierra Scales Storage with PCIe, NVMe (Via EEtimes)
    • Seagate Grows Its Nytro Enterprise Flash Storage Line (Via InfoStor)
    • New SAS Solid State Drive From Seagate Micron Alliance (Via Seagate)
    • Samsung ups the SSD ante with faster, higher capacity drives (Via ITworld)

    View other recent news and industry trends here

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities tips, and announcements.

    • Processor: Comments on Spot The Newest & Best Server Trends
    • Processor: Comments on A Snapshot Strategy For Backups & Data Recovery
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Defining the Future of DR Storage
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Top Ten Tips for DR as a Service
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on NVMe: Golden Ticket for Faster Storage

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

    Vendors you may not have heard of

    Various vendors (and service providers) you may not know or heard about recently.

    • Scala – Scale out storage management software tools
    • Reduxio – Enterprise hybrid storage with data services
    • Jam TreeSize Pro – Data discovery and storage resource analysis and reporting

    Check out more vendors you may know, have heard of, or that are perhaps new on the Server StorageIO Industry Links page here (over 1,000 entries and growing).

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    • IronMountain:  Information Lifecycle Management: Which Data Types Have Value?
      It’s important to keep in mind that on a fundamental level, there are three types of data: information that has value, information that does not have value and information that has unknown value. Data value can be measured along performance, availability, capacity and economic attributes, which define how the data gets managed across different tiers of storage. In general data can have value, unknown value or no value. Read more here.
    • EnterpriseStorageForum:  Is Future Storage Converging Around Hyper-Converged?
      Depending on who you talk or listen to, hyper-converged storage is either the future of storage, or it is a hype niche market that is not for everybody, particular not larger environments. How converged is the hyper-converged market? There are many environments that can leverage CI along with HCI, CiB or other bundles solutions. Granted, not all of those environments will converge around the same CI, CiB and HCI or pod solution bundles as everything is not the same in most IT environments and data centers. Not all markets, environments or solutions are the same. Read more here.

    Check out these resources and links technology, techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

    StorageIO Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    Server Storage I/O Workshop Seminars
    Nijkerk Netherlands October 13-16 2015

    VMworld August 30-September 3 2015

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

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Enmotus FuzeDrive (Server based Micro-Tiering)
    Enmotus FuzeDrive
    • Micro-teiring of reads and writes
    • FuzeDrive for transparent tiering
    • Dynamic tiering with selectable options
    • Monitoring and diagnostics tools
    • Transparent to operating systems
    • Hardware transparent (HDD and SSD)
    • Server I/O interface agnostic
    • Optional RAM cache and file pinning
    • Maximize NVM flash SSD investment
    • Compliment other SDS solutions
    • Use for servers or workstations

    Enmotus FuzeDrive provides micro-tiering boosting performance (reads and writes) of storage attached to physical bare metal servers, virtual and cloud instances including Windows and Linux operating systems across various applications. In the simple example above five separate SQL Server databases (260GB each) were placed on a single 6TB HDD. A TPCC workload was run concurrently against all databases with various numbers of users. One workload used a single 6TB HDD (blue) while the other used a FuzeDrive (green) comprised of a 6TB HDD and a 400GB SSD showing basic micro-tiering improvements.

    View other StorageIO lab review reports here

    Server StorageIO Recommended Reading List

    The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of my books.

    Get Whats Yours via Amazon.com
    While not a technology book, you do not have to be at or near retirement age to be planning for retirement. Some of you may already be at or near retirement age, for others, its time to start planning or refining your plans. A friend recommended this book and I’m recommending it to others. Its pretty straight forward and you might be surprised how much money people may be leaving on the table! Check it out here at Amazon.com.

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thenvmeplace
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    July 2015 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 15, Issue VII

    Hello and welcome to this July 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Its mid summer here in the northern hemisphere which for many means vacations or holidays.

    Content Solution Platforms

    Thus this months newsletter has a focus on content solution platforms including hardware and software that get defined to support various applications. Content solutions span from video (4K, HD and legacy streaming, pre-/post-production and editing), audio, imaging (photo, seismic, energy, healthcare, etc.) to security surveillance (including Intelligent Video Surveillance [ISV] as well as Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance [ISR]).

    StorageIOblog posts

    In case you missed it:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Servers Direct Content Platform
    Servers Direct Content Solution Platform

    An industry and customer trend is leveraging converged platforms based on multi-socket processors with dozens of cores and threads (logical processors) to support parallel or high-concurrent threaded content based applications.

    Recently I had the opportunity by Servers Direct to get some hands-on test time with one of their 2U Content Solution platforms. In addition to big fast data, other content solution applications include: content distribution network (CDN) content caching, network function virtualization (NFV), software-defined network (SDN), cloud rich unstructured big fast media data, analytics and little data (e.g. SQL and NoSQL database, key-value stores, repositories and meta-data) among others.

    Read more about content solution platforms including those Intel powered platforms from Servers Direct in this Server StorageIO Industry Trends Perspective solution brief here.

    View other Server StorageIO lab review reports here

    Closing Comments

    Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – @StorageIO

    Microsoft MVP File System Storage
    VMware vExpert

    In This Issue

  • Industry Trends News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Server StorageIO Lab reviews
  • Events and Webinars
  • Resources and Links

    • StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities and announcements.

    Processor: A Look At Object-Based Storage
    Processor: Newest and best server trends
    PowerMore: Flash not just for performance
    SearchVirtualStorage: Containers and storage
    BizTechMagazine: Simplify with virtualization
    EnterpriseStorageForum: Future DR Storage
    EnterpriseStorageForum: 10 Tips for DRaaS
    EnterpriseStorageForum: NVMe planning

    View more trends comments here

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    A common question I am asked is, “What is the best storage technology?” My routine answer is, “It depends!” During my recent Interop Las Vegas session “Smart Shopping for Your Storage Strategy” I addressed this very question. Read more in my tip Selecting Storage: Start With Requirements over at Network Computing.

    Check out these resources and links on server storage I/O performance and benchmarking tools. View more tips and articles here

    Various Industry Events

    Server Storage I/O Workshop Seminars
    Nijkerk Netherlands October 13-16 2015

    VMworld August 30-September 3 2015

    Flash Memory Summit August 11-13

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars

    BrightTalk Webinar – June 23 2015 9AM PT
    Server Storage I/O Innovation v2.015: Protect Preserve & Serve Your Information

    Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:
    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

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

    Posted on

    May and June 2015 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 15, Issue V & VI

    Hello and welcome to this joint May and June 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Here in the northern hemisphere its summer which means holiday vacations among other things.

    There has been a lot going on this spring and so far this summer with more in the wings. Summer can also be a time to get caught up on some things, preparing for others while hopefully being able to enjoy some time off as well.

    In terms of what have I been working on (or with)? Clouds (OpenStack, vCloud Air, AWS, Azure, GCS among others), virtual and containers, flash SSD devices (drives, cards), software defining, content servers, NVMe, databases, data protection items, servers, cache and micro-tiering among other things.

    Speaking of getting caught up, back in early May among many other conferences (Cisco, Docker, HP, IBM, OpenStack, Red Hat and many other events) was EMCworld. EMC covered my hotel and registration costs to attend the event in Las Vegas (thanks EMC, that’s a disclosure btw ;). View a summary StorageIOblog post covering EMCworld 2015 here along with recent EMC announcements including Acquisition of cloud services vendor Virtustream for $1.2B, and ECS 2.0.

    Server and Storage I/O Wrappings

    This months newsletter has a focus on software and storage wrappings, that is, how your storage or software is packaged, delivered or deployed. For example traditional physical storage systems, software defined storage as shrink-wrap or download, tin-wrapped software as an appliance, virtual wrapped such as a virtual storage appliance or cloud wrapped among others.

    OpenStack software defined cloud

    OpenStack (both the organization, community, event and software) continue to gain momentum. The latest release known as Kilo (more Kilo info here) was released in early April followed by the OpenStack summit in May.

    Some of you might be more involved with OpenStack vs. others, perhaps having already deployed into your production environment. Perhaps you, like myself have OpenStack running in a lab for proof of concept, research, development or learning among other things.

    You might even be using the services of a public cloud or managed service provider that is powered by OpenStack. On the other hand, you might be familiar with OpenStack from reading up on it, watching videos, listening to podcast’s or attending events to figure out what it is, where it fits, as well as what can your organization use it for.

    Drew Robb (@Robbdrew) has a good overview piece about OpenStack and storage over at Enterprise Storage Forum (here). OpenStack is a collection of tools or bundles for building private, hybrid and public clouds. These various open source projects within the OpenStack umbrella include compute (Nova) and virtual machine images (Glance). Other components include dashboard management (Horizon), security and identity control (Keystone), network (Neutron), object storage (Swift), block storage (Cinder) and file-based storage (Manila) among others.

    It’s up to the user to decide which pieces you will add. For example, you can use Swift without having virtual machines and vice versa. Read Drew’s complete article here.

    Btw, if you missed it, not only has OpenStack added file support (e.g. Manila), Amazon Web Services (AWS) also recently added Elastic File Services (EFS) complementing there Elastic Block Services (EBS).

    Focus on Storage Wrappings

    Software exists and gets deployed in various places as shown in the following examples.

    software wrapped storage

    • Cloud wrapped software – software that can be deployed in a cloud instance.
    • Container wrapped software – software deployed in a docker or other container
    • Firmware wrapped software – software that gets packaged and deployed as firmware in a server, storage, network device or adapter
    • Shrink wrapped software – software that can be downloaded and deployed where you want
    • Tin wrapped software – software that is packaged or bundled with hardware (e.g. tin) such as an appliance or storage system
    • Virtual wrapped software

    server storage software wrapping

    StorageIOblog posts

    Data Protection Diaries

    Modernizing Data Protection
    Using new and old things in new ways

    This is part of an ongoing series of posts that part of www.storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ on data protection including archiving, backup/restore, business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BC), data footprint reduction (DFR), disaster recovery (DR), High Availability (HA) along with related themes, tools, technologies, techniques, trends and strategies.
    world backup day (and test your restore) image licensed from Shutterstock by StorageIO

    Data protection is a broad topic that spans from logical and physical security to HA, BC, BR, DR, archiving(including life beyond compliance) along with various tools, technologies, techniques. Key is aligning those to the needs of the business or organization for today’s as well as tomorrows requirements. Instead of doing things what has been done in the past that may have been based on what was known or possible due to technology capabilities, why not start using new and old things in new ways.

    Let’s start using all the tools in the data protection toolbox regardless of if they are new or old, cloud, virtual, physical, software defined product or service in new ways while keeping the requirements of the business in focus. Read more from this post here.

    In case you missed it:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    In This Issue


  • Industry Trends Perspectives News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Recommended Reading List
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Server StorageIO Lab reports
  • Resources and Links

    • Industry News and Activity

    Recent Industry news and activity

    AWS adds new M4 virtual machine instances
    Cisco provides FCoE proof of life

    Google new cloud storage pricing
    HP announces new data center services
    HDS announces new products & services
    IBM enhances storage portfolio

    IBTA announces RoCE initiative
    InfiniteIO announces network/cloud cache
    Intel buying FPGA specialist Altera
    NetApp – Changes CEO

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities and announcements.

    BizTechMagazine: Comments on how to simplify your data center with virtualization
    EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Open Stack and Clouds
    EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Top Ten Software Defined Storage Tips, Gotchas and Cautions
    EdTech: Comments on Harness Power with New Processors
    Processor: Comments on Protecting Your Servers & Networking equipment
    EdTech: Comments on Harness Power with New Processors

    Processor: Comments on Improve Remote Server Management including KVM
    CyberTrend: Comments on Software Defined Data Center and virtualization
    BizTechMagazine: Businesses Prepare as End-of-Life for Windows Server 2003 Nears
    InformationWeek: Top 10 sessions from Interop Las Vegas 2015
    CyberTrend: Comments on Software Defined Data Center and Virtualization

    View more trends comments here

    Vendors you may not heard of

    This is a new section starting in this issue where various new or existing vendors as well as service providers you may not have heard about will be listed.

    CloudHQ – Cloud management tools
    EMCcode Rex-Ray – Container management
    Enmotus FUZE – Flash leveraged micro tiering
    Rubrik – Data protection management
    Sureline – Data protection management
    Virtunet systems – VMware flash cache software
    InfiniteIO – Cloud and NAS cache appliance
    Servers Direct – Server and storage platforms

    Check out more vendors you may know, have heard of, or that are perhaps new on the Server StorageIO Industry Links page here. There are over 1,000 entries (and growing) vendors on the links page.

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    So you have a new storage device or system. How will you test or find its performance? Check out this quick-read tip on storage benchmark and testing fundamentals over at BizTech.

    Check out these resources and links on server storage I/O performance and benchmarking tools. View more tips and articles here

    Webinars

    BrightTalk Webinar – June 23 2015 9AM PT
    Server Storage I/O Innovation v2.015: Protect Preserve & Serve Your Information

    Videos and Podcasts

    VMware vCloud Air Server StorageIO Lab Test Drive Ride along videos.

    Server StorageIO Lab vCloud test drive video part 1Server StorageIO Lab vCloud test drive video part 2
    VMware vCloud Air test drive videos Part I & II

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    Various Industry Events

     

    VMworld August 30-September 3 2015

    Flash Memory Summit August 11-13

    Interop – April 29 2015 Las Vegas (Voted one of top ten sessions at Interop, more here)
    Smart Shopping for Your Storage Strategy

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars

    BrightTalk Webinar – June 23 2015 9AM PT
    Server Storage I/O Innovation v2.015: Protect Preserve & Serve Your Information

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    VMware vCloud Air Test Drive
    VMware vCloud Air
    local and distributed NAS (NFS, CIFS, DFS) file data. Read more here.

    VMware vCloud Air

    VMware vCloud Air provides a platform similar to those just mentioned among others for your applications and their underlying resource needs (compute, memory, storage, networking) to be fulfilled. In addition, it should not be a surprise that VMware vCloud Air shares many common themes, philosophies and user experiences with the traditional on-premises based VMware solutions you might be familiar with.

    View other StorageIO lab review reports here

    Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:
    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcasts along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    VMware vCloud Air Server StorageIOlab Test Drive with videos

    Server Storage I/O trends

    VMware vCloud Air Server StorageIOlab Test Drive with videos

    Recently I was invited by VMware vCloud Air to do a free hands-on test drive of their actual production environment. Some of you may already being using VMware vSphere, vRealize and other software defined data center (SDDC) aka Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI) or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) tools among others. Likewise some of you may already be using one of the many cloud compute or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Centurylink, Google Cloud, IBM Softlayer, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace or Virtustream (being bought by EMC) among many others.

    VMware vCloud Air provides a platform similar to those just mentioned among others for your applications and their underlying resource needs (compute, memory, storage, networking) to be fulfilled. In addition, it should not be a surprise that VMware vCloud Air shares many common themes, philosophies and user experiences with the traditional on-premises based VMware solutions you may be familiar with.

    VMware vCloud Air overview

    You can give VMware vCloud Air a trial for free while the offer lasts by clicking here (service details here). Basically if you click on the link and register a new account for using VMware vCloud Air they will give you up to $500 USD in service credits to use in the real production environment while the offer lasts which iirc is through end of June 2015.

    Server StorageIO test drive VMware vCloud Air video I
    Click on above image to view video part I

    Server StorageIO test drive VMware vCloud Air part II
    Click on above image to view video part II

    What this means is that you can go and setup some servers with as many CPUs or cores, memory, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or flash Solid State Devices (SSD) storage, external IP networks using various operating systems (Centos, Ubuntu, Windows 2008, 20012, 20012 R2) for free, or until you use up the service credits.

    Speaking of which, let me give you a bit of a tip or hint, even though you can get free time, if you provision a fast server with lots of fast SSD storage and leave it sit idle over night or over a weekend, you will chew up your free credits rather fast. So the tip which should be common sense is if you are going to do some proof of concepts and then leave things alone for a while, power the virtual cloud servers off to stretch your credits further. On the other hand, if you have something that you want to run on a fast server with fast storage over a weekend or longer, give that a try, just pay attention to your resource usage and possible charges should you exhaust your service credits.

    My Server StorageIO test drive mission objective

    For my test drive, I created a new account by using the above link to get the service credits. Note that you can use your regular VMware account with vCloud Air, however you wont get the free service credits. So while it is a few minutes of extra work, the benefit was worth it vs. simply using my existing VMware account and racking up more cloud services charges on my credit card. As part of this Server StorageIOlab test drive, I created two companion videos part I here and part II here that you can view to follow along and get a better idea of how vCloud works.

    VMware vCloud Air overview
    Phase one, create the virtual data center, database server, client servers and first setup

    My goal was to set up a simple Virtual Data Center (VDC) that would consist of five Windows 2012 R2 servers, one would be a MySQL database server with the other four being client application servers. You can download MySQL from here at Oracle as well as via other sources. For applications to simplify things I used Hammerdb as well as Benchmark Factory that is part of the Quest Toad tool set for database admins. You can download a free trial copy of Benchmark Factory here, and HammerDB here. Another tool that I used for monitoring the servers is Spotlight on Windows (SoW) which is also free here. Speaking of tools, here is a link to various server and storage I/O performance as well as monitoring tools.

    Links to tools that I used for this test-drive included:

    Setting up a virtual data center vdc
    Phase one steps and activity summary

    Summary of phase one of vdc
    Recap of what was done in phase one, watch the associated video here.

    After the initial setup (e.g. part I video here), the next step was to add some more virtual machines and take a closer look at the environment. Note that most of the work in setting up this environment was Windows, MySQL, Hammerdb, Benchmark Factory, Spotlight on Windows along with other common tools so their installation is not a focus in these videos or this post, perhaps a future post will dig into those in more depth.

    Summary of phase two of the vdc
    What was done during phase II (view the video here)

    VMware vCloud Air vdc trest drive

    There is much more to VMware vCloud Air and on their main site there are many useful links including overviews, how-too tutorials, product and service offering details and much more here. Besides paying attention to your resource usage and avoid being surprised by service charges, two other tips I can pass along that are also mentioned in the videos (here and here) is to pay attention what region you setup your virtual data centers in, second is have your network thought out ahead of time to streamline setting up the NAT and firewall as well as gateway configurations.

    Where to learn more

    Learn more about data protection and related topics, themes, trends, tools and technologies via the following links:

    Server Storage I/O trends

    What this all means and wrap-up

    Overall I like the VMware vCloud Air service which if you are VMware centric focused will be a familiar cloud option including integration with vCloud Director and other tools you may already have in your environment. Even if you are not familiar with VMware vSphere and associated vRealize tools, the vCloud service is intuitive enough that you can be productive fairly quickly. On one hand vCloud Air does not have the extensive menu of service offerings to choose from such as with AWS, Google, Azure or others, however that also means a simpler menu of options to choose from and simplify things.

    I had wanted to spend some time actually using vCloud and the offer to use some free service credits in the production environment made it worth making the time to actually setup some workloads and do some testing. Even if you are not a VMware focused environment, I would recommend giving VMware vCloud Air a test drive to see what it can do for you, as opposed to what you can do for it…

    Ok, nuff said for now

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Modernizing Data Protection = Using new and old things in new ways

    Server Storage I/O trends

    Modernizing Data Protection = Using new and old things in new ways

    This is part of an ongoing series of posts that part of www.storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ on data protection including archiving, backup/restore, business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BC), data footprint reduction (DFR), disaster recovery (DR), High Availability (HA) along with related themes, tools, technologies, techniques, trends and strategies.

    data protection trends

    Keep in mind that a fundamental goal of an Information Technology (IT) organization is to protect, preserve and serve data and information in a cost-effective as well as productive way when needed. There is no such thing as an information recession with more data being generated and processed. In addition to more of it, data is also getting larger, having more dependencies on it being available as well as living longer (e.g. retention).

    Proof Points, No Data or Information Recession

    A quick easy proof point of more data and it getting larger is your cell phone and the pictures it take. Compare the size of those photos today to what you had in your previous generation of smart phone or even digital camera as the Mega Pixels (e.g. resolution and size of data) increased, along with the size of media (e.g. storage) to save those to also grew. Another proof point is look at your presentations, documents, web sites and other mediums with how the amount of rich or unstructured content (e.g. photos, videos) exists on those now vs. a few years ago. Yet another proof-point is to look at your structured little data databases and how there are more rows and columns, as well as how some of those columns have gotten larger or are point to external "blobs" or "objects" that have also gotten larger.

    Industry trend and challenges

    There has been industry buzz the past several years around data protection modernizing, modernizing data protection or simply modernizing backup along with modernizing your data and information infrastructure. Many of these conversations focus around swapping out an older technology in favor of whatever the new industry buzzword trend is (e.g. swap tape for disk, disk for cloud) or perhaps from one data protection, backup, archive or copy tool for another. Some of these conversations also focus around swapping legacy for virtual, cloud or some other variation of software defined marketing.

    Data protection strategy

    The Opportunity to do new things

    What is common with all the above is basically swapping out one technology, tool, medium or technique for another new one yet using it in old ways. For example tape gets swapped for disk, yet the same approach to when, where, why, how often and what gets copied or protected is left the same. Sure some new tools and technologies get introduced.  However when was the last time you put the tools down, took a step back and revisited the fundamental questions of how and why you are doing data protection the way it is being done? When was the last time you thought about data protection as an asset or business enabler as opposed to a cost center, overhead or after thought?

    Data protection tool box
    What’s in your data protection toolbox, do you know what to use when?

    What about modernizing beyond the tools

    One of the challenges with modernizing is that there is a cost involved including people time, staff skills as well as budgets not to mention keeping things running, so how do you go about paying for any improvements? Sure you can go get a data infrastructure or habitat for technology aka data home improvement loan, however there are costs associated to that.

    Big data garbage in = big data garbage out

    What about reducing data protection costs?

    So why not self-fund the improvements and modernization activities by finding and removing costs, eliminating complexity vs. moving and masking issues? Part of this can be accomplished by simply revisiting if you are treating all your applications and data the same from a data protection perspective. Are you providing a data protection service ability to your organization that is based on business wants or business needs? For example, does the business want recovery time objective (RTO) 0 and recovery point objective (RPO) 0 for all applications, while it needs RTO 4 hours and RPO 15 minutes for application-a while application-b requires RTO 12 hours and RPO of 2 hours and application must have RTO 24 hours with RPO of 12 hours?

    As a reminder RTO is how much time, or how quickly you need your applications and data to be restored and made ready for use. RPO is the point in time to where data needs to be protected as of, or the amount of data or time frame data could be lost or missing. Thus RTO = 0 means instant recovery no downtime and RPO = 0 means no loss of data. RTO one day and RPO of ten (10) minutes means applications and their data are ready for use within 24 hours and no more than 10 minutes of data can be lost (e.g. the granularity of protection coverage)., Also keep in mind that you can have various RTO and RPO combinations to meet your specific application along with business needs as part of a tiered data protection strategy implementation.

    With RTO and RPO in mind, when was the last time you sat down with the business and applications people to revisit what they want vs. what they must have? From these conversation you can easily Transition into how long to keep, how many copies in what place among other things which in turn allows you to review data protection as well as start using both old and new technologies, tools and techniques in new ways.

    Where to learn more

    Learn more about data protection and related topics, themes, trends, tools and technologies via the following links:

    Server Storage I/O trends

    What this all means and wrap-up

    Data protection is a broad topic that spans from logical and physical security to HA, BC, BR, DR, archiving (including life beyond compliance) along with various tools, technologies, techniques. Key is aligning those to the needs of the business or organization for today’s as well as tomorrows requirements. Instead of doing things what has been done in the past that may have been based on what was known or possible due to technology capabilities, why not start using new and old things in new ways. Let’s start using all the tools in the data protection toolbox regardless of if they are new or old, cloud, virtual, physical, software defined product or service in new ways while keeping the requirements of the business in focus.

    Keeping with the theme of protect preserve and serve, data protection to be modernized needs to become and be seen as a business asset or enabler vs. an after thought or cost over-head topic. Also, keep in mind that only you can prevent data loss, are your restores ready for when you need them? as well as one of the fundamental goals of IT is to protect, preserve and serve information including its applications as well as data when, where needed in a cost-effective way.

    What say you?

    Ok, nuff said for now

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    April 2015 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 15, Issue IV

    Hello and welcome to this April 2015 Server and StorageIO update newsletter.

    This months newsletter has a focus on cloud and object storage for bulk data, unstructured data, big data, archiving among other scenarios.

    Enjoy this edition of the Server and StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and Podcasts along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Storage I/O trends

    StorageIOblog posts

    April StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    April Newsletter Feature Theme
    Cloud and Object Storage Fundamentals

    There are many facets to object storage including technology implementation, products, services, access and architectures for various applications and use scenarios. The following is a short synopsis of some basic terms and concepts associated with cloud and object storage.

    Common cloud and object storage terms

    • Account or project – Top of the hierarchy that represent owner or billing information for a service that where buckets are also attached.
    • Availability Zone (AZ) can be rack of servers and storage or data center where data is spread across for storage and durability.

      • AWS regions and availability zones (AZ)
      Example of some AWS Regions and AZ’s

    • Bucket or Container – Where objects or sub-folders containing objects are attached and accessed. Note in some environments such as AWS S3 you can have sub-folders in a bucket.
    • Connector or how your applications access the cloud or object storage such as via an API, S3, Swift, Rest, CDMI, Torrent, JSON, NAS file, block of other access gateway or software.
    • Durability – Data dispersed with copies in multiple locations to survive failure of storage or server hardware, software, zone or even region. Availability = Access + Durability.
    • End-point – Where or what your software, application or tool and utilities or gateways attach to for accessing buckets and objects.
    • Ephemeral – Temporary or non-persistent
    • Eventual consistency – Data is eventually made consistency, think in terms of asynchronous or deferred writes where there is a time lag vs. synchronous or real-time updates.
    • Immutable – Persistent, non-altered or write once read many copy of data. Objects generally are not updated, rather new objects created.

      • Object storage and cloud
      Via Cloud Virtual Data Storage (CRC)

    • Object – Byte (or bit) stream that can be as small as one byte to as large as several TBytes (some solutions and services support up to 5TByte sized objects). The object contains what ever data in any organization along with meta data. Different solutions and services support from a couple hundred KBytes of meta-data to MBytes worth of meta-data. In terms of what can be stored in an object, anything from files, videos, images, virtual disks (VMDK’s, VHDX), ZIP or tar files, backup and archive save sets, executable images or ISO’s, anything you want.
    • OPS – Objects per second or how many objects accessed similar to a IOP. Access includes gets, puts, list, head, deletes for a CRUD interface e.g. Created, Read, Update, Delete.
    • Region – Location where data is stored that can include one or more data centers also known as Availability Zones.
    • Sub-folder – While object storage can be accessed in a flat name space for commonality and organization some solutions and service support the notion of sub-folder that resemble traditional directory hierarchy.

    Learn more in Cloud Virtual Storage Networking (CRC) and www.objectstoragecenter.com

    Storage I/O trends

    OpenStack Manila (e.g. Folders and Files)

    AWS recently announced their new cloud based Elastic File Storage (EFS) to compliment their existing Elastic Block Storage (EBS) offerings. However are you aware of what is going on with cloud files within OpenStack?

    For those who are familiar with OpenStack or simply talk about it and Swift object storage, or perhaps Cinder block storage, are you aware that there is also a file (NAS or Network Attached Storage) component called Manila?

    In concept Manila should provide a similar capability to what AWS has recently announce with their Elastic File Service (EFS), or depending on your perspective, perhaps the other way around. If you are familiar and have done anything with Manila what are your initial thoughts and perspectives.

    What this all means

    People routinely tell me this is the most exciting and interesting times ever in servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, backup or data protection, performance, cloud and virtual or take your pick too which I would not disagree.

    However, for the past several years (no, make that decade), there is new and more interesting things including in adjacent areas.

    I predict that at least for the next few years (no, make that decades), we will continue to see plenty of new and interesting things, questions include.

    However, what’s applicable to you and your environment vs. simply fun and interesting to watch?

    Ok, nuff said, for now

    Cheers gs

     

    In This Issue

  • Industry Trends Perspectives News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Server StorageIO Lab reports
  • Resources and Links

    • Industry News and Activity

    Recent Industry news and activity

    View other recent industry activity here

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities and announcements.

    CyberTrend: Comments on Software Defined Data Center and Virtualization

    View more trends comments here

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Check out these resources and links on server storage I/O performance and benchmarking tools. View more tips and articles here

    Various Industry Events

    EMCworld – May 4-6 2015 (Las Vegas)

    Interop – April 29 2015 (Las Vegas)
    Presenting
    Smart Shopping for Your Enterprise Storage Strategy

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars


    BrightTalk Webinar – June 23 2015
    Server Storage I/O Innovation Update

    View other webinars here

    Videos and Podcasts

    Data Protection Gumbo Podcast
    Protect Preserve and Serve Data

    In this episode, Greg Schulz is a guest on Data Protection Gumbo hosted by Demetrius Malbrough(@dmalbrough). The conversation covers various aspects of data protection which has a focus of protect preserve and serve information, applications and data across different environments and customer segments.

    While we discuss enterprise and SMB data protection, we also talk about trends from Mobile to the cloud among many others tools, technologies and techniques. Check out the podcast here.

    Springtime in Kentucky
    With Kendrick Coleman of EMCcode
    Cloud Object Storage S3motion and more

    In this episode, @EMCcode (Part of EMC) developer advocate Kendrick Coleman (@KendrickColeman) joins me (e.g. Greg Schulz) for a conversation.

    Conversation covers what is EMCcode, EMC Federation, Cloud Foundry, clouds, object storage, buckets, containers, objects, node.js, Docker, OpenStack, AWS S3, micro services, and the S3motion tool Kendrick developed.

    S3motion is a good tool to have in your server storage I/O tool box for working with cloud and object storage along with others such as Cloudberry, S3fs, Cyberduck, S3 browser among many others. You can get S3motion for free from git hub here Check out the companion blog post for this podcast here.

    StorageIO podcast’s are also available via Server Storage I/O audio podcastServer Storage I/O video & at StorageIO.tv

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    AWS S3 Cross-Region Replication

    AWS S3 Cross region replication
    Moving and Replicating Buckets/Containers, Sub folders and Objects (Click on Image to read about AWS Cross-Region Replication)

    View other StorageIO lab review reports here

    Resources and Links

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Data Protection Gumbo = Protect Preserve and Serve Information

    Storage I/O trends

    Data Protection Gumbo = Protect Preserve and Serve Information

    Recently I was invited to be a guest on the podcast Data Protection Gumbo hosted by Demetrius Malbrough (@dmalbrough).

    Data Protection Gumbo Podcast Description
    Data Protection Gumbo is set up with the aim of expanding the awareness of anyone responsible for protecting mission critical data, by providing them with a mix of the latest news, data protection technologies, and interesting facts on topics in the Data Backup and Recovery industry.

    Data Protection Gumbo Also available on

    Protect Preserve and Serve Applications, Information and Data

    Keep in mind that a fundamental role of Information Technology (IT) is to protect, preserve and serve business or organizations information assets including applications, configuration settings and data for use when or where needed.

    Our conversation covers various aspects of data protection which has a focus of protect preserve and serve information, applications and data across different environments and customer segments. While we discuss enterprise and small medium business (SMB) data protection, we also talk about trends from Mobile to the cloud among many others tools, technologies and techniques.

    Where to learn more

    Learn more about data protection and related trends, tools and technologies via the following links:

    Data Protection Gumbo Also available on

    What this all means and wrap-up

    Data protection is a broad topic that spans from logical and physical security to high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BR), archiving (including life beyond compliance) along with various tools, technologies, techniques. Keeping with the theme of protect preserve and serve, data protection to be modernized needs to become and be seen as a business asset or enabler vs. an after thought or cost over-head topic. Also, keep in mind that only you can prevent data loss, are your restores ready for when you need them?

    Check out Demetrius Data Protection Gumbo podcast, also check out his Linkedin Backup & Recovery Professionals group. Speaking of data protection, check out the www.storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ page for more coverage of backup/restore, HA, BC, DR, archiving and restated themes.

    Ok, nuff said, for now..

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    S3motion Buckets Containers Objects AWS S3 Cloud and EMCcode

    Storage I/O trends

    S3motion Buckets Containers Objects AWS S3 Cloud and EMCcode

    It’s springtime in Kentucky and recently I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Kendrick Coleman to talk about S3motion, Buckets, Containers, Objects, AWS S3, Cloud and Object Storage, node.js, EMCcode and open source among other related topics which are available in a podcast here, or video here and available at StorageIO.tv.

    In this Server StorageIO industry trends perspective podcast episode, @EMCcode (Part of EMC) developer advocate Kendrick Coleman (@KendrickColeman) joins me for a conversation. Our conversation spans spring-time in Kentucky (where Kendrick lives) which means Bourbon and horse racing as well as his blog (www.kendrickcoleman.com).

    Btw, in the podcast I refer to Captain Obvious and Kendrick’s beard, for those not familiar with who or what @Captainobvious is that is made reference to, click here to learn more.


    @Kendrickcoleman     & @Captainobvious

    What about Clouds Object Storage Programming and other technical stuff?

    Of course we also talk some tech including what is EMCcode, EMC Federation, Cloud Foundry, clouds, object storage, buckets, containers, objects, node.js, Docker, Openstack, AWS S3, micro services, and the S3motion tool that Kendrick developed.

    Cloud and Object Storage Access
    Click to view video

    Kendrick explains the motivation behind S3motion along with trends in and around objects (including GET, PUT vs. traditional Read, Write) as well as programming among related topic themes and how context matters.

    S3motion for AWS S3 Google and object storage
    Click to listen to podcast

    I have used S3motion for moving buckets, containers and objects around including between AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and Microsoft Azure as well as to/from local. S3motion is a good tool to have in your server storage I/O tool box for working with cloud and object storage along with others such as Cloudberry, S3fs, Cyberduck, S3 browser among many others.

    You can get S3motion free from git hub here.

    Amazon Web Services AWS

    Where to learn more

    Here are some links to learn more about AWS S3, Cloud and Object Storage along with related topics

    Also available on

    What this all means and wrap-up

    Context matters when it comes to many things particular about objects as they can mean different things. Tools such as S3motion make it easy for moving your buckets or containers along with objects from one cloud storage system, solution or service to another. Also check out EMCcode to see what they are doing on different fronts from supporting new and greenfield development with Cloud Foundry and PaaS to Openstack to bridging current environments to the next generation of platforms. Also check out Kendricks blog site as he has a lot of good technical content as well as some other fun stuff to learn about. Look forward to having Kendrick on as a guest again soon to continue our conversations. In the meantime, check out S3motion to see how it can fit into your server storage I/O tool box.

    Ok, nuff said, for now..

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    March 2015 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

     

     

    Volume 15, Issue III

    Hello and welcome to this March 2015 Server and StorageIO update newsletter. Here in the northern hemisphere at least by the calendar spring is here, weather wise winter continues to linger in some areas. March also means in the US college university sports tournaments with many focused on their NCAA men’s basketball championship brackets.

    Besides various college championships, March also has a connection to back up and data protection. Thus this months newsletter has a focus on data protection, after all March 31 is World Backup Day which means it should also be World Restore test day!

    Focus on Data Protection

    Data protection including backup/restore, business continuance (BC), disaster recovery (DR), business resiliency (BR) and archiving across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

    Data Protection Fundamentals

    A reminder on the importance of data protection including backup, BC, DR and related technologies is to make sure they are occuring as planned. Also test your copies and remember the 4 3 2 1 rule or guide.

    4 – Versions (different time intervals)
    3 – Copies of critical data (including versions)
    2 – Different media, devices or systems
    1 – Off-site (cloud or elsewhere)

    The above means having at least four (4) different versions from various points in time of your data. Having three (3) copies including various versions protects against one or more copies being corrupt or damaged. Placing those versions and copies on at least two (2) different storage systems, devices or media if something happens.

    While it might be common sense, a bad April Fools recovery joke would be finding out all of your copies were on the same device which is damaged. That might seem obvious however sometimes the obvious needs to be stated. Also make sure that at least one (1) of your copies is off-site either on off-line media (tape, disk, ssd, optical) or cloud.

    Take a few moments and to verify that your data protection strategy is being implemented and practiced as intended. Also test what is being copied including not only restore the data from cloud, disk, ssd or tape, also make sure you can actually read or use the data being protected. This means make sure that your security credentials including access certificates and decryption occur as expected.

    Watch for more news, updates industry trends perspectives commentary, tips, articles and other information at Storageio.com, StorageIOblog.com, various partner venues as well as in future newsletters.

    StorageIOblog posts

    Data Protection Diaries
    Are restores ready for World Backup Day?
    In case you forgot or did not know, World Backup Day is March 31 2015 (@worldbackupday) so now is a good time to be ready. The only challenge that I have with the World Backup Day (view their site here) that has gone on for a few years know is that it is a good way to call out the importance of backing up or protecting data.
    world backup day test your restore

    However it’s also time to put more emphasis and focus on being able to make sure those backups or protection copies actually work.

    By this I mean doing more than making sure that your data can be read from tape, disk, SSD or cloud service actually going a step further and verifying that restored data can actually be used (read, written, etc).

    The problem, issue and challenges are simple, are your applications, systems and data protected as well as can you use those protection copies (e.g. backups, snapshots, replicas or archives) when as well as were needed? Read more here about World Backup Day and what I’m doing as well as various tips to be ready for successful recovery and avoid being an April 1st fool ;).

    Cloud Conversations
    AWS S3 Cross Region Replication
    Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several enhancements including a new Simple Storage Service (S3) cross-region replication of objects from a bucket (e.g. container) in one region to a bucket in another region.

    AWS also recently enhanced Elastic Block Storage (EBS) increasing maximum performance and size of Provisioned IOPS (SSD) and General Purpose (SSD) volumes. EBS enhancements included ability to store up to 16 TBytes of data in a single volume and do 20,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). Read more about EBS and other AWS server, storage I/O  enhancements here.
    AWS regions and availability zones (AZ)
    Example of some AWS Regions and AZs

    AWS S3 buckets and objects are stored in a specific region designated by the customer or user (AWS S3, EBS, EC2, Glacier, Regions and Availability Zone primer can be found here). The challenge being addressed by AWS with S3 replication is being able to move data (e.g. objects) stored in AWS buckets in one region to another in a safe, secure, timely, automated, cost-effective way.

    Continue reading more here about AWS S3 bucket and object replication feature along with related material.

    Additional March StorageIOblog posts include:

    Server Storage I/O performance (Image licensed from Shutterstock by StorageIO)

     

     

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    In This Issue

    • Industry Trends Perspectives News
    • Commentary in the news
    • Tips and Articles
    • StorageIOblog posts
    • Events and Webinars
    • Recommended Reading List
    • StorageIOblog posts
    • Server StorageIO Lab reports
    • Resources and Links

     

    Industry News and Activity

    Recent Industry news and activity

    EMC sets up cloudfoundry Dojo
    AWS S3, EBS IOPs and other updates
    New backup/data protection vendor Rubrik
    Google adds nearline Cloud Storage
    AWS and Microsoft Cloud Price battle

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities and announcements.

    Processor: Enterprise Backup Solution Tips
    Processor: Failed & Old Drives
    EnterpriseStorageForum: Disk Buying Guide
    ChannelProNetwork: 2015 Tech and SSD
    Processor: Detect & Avoid Drive Failures

    View more trends comments here

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    So you have a new storage device or system. How will you test or find its performance? Check out this quick-read tip on storage benchmark and testing fundamentals over at BizTech.

    Keeping with this months theme of data protection including backup/restore, BC, DR, BR and archiving, here are some more tips. These tips span server storage I/O networking hardware, software, cloud, virtual, performance, data protection applications and related themes including:

    • Test your data restores, can you read and actually use the data? Is you data decrypted, proper security certificates applied?
    • Remember to back up or protect your security encryption keys, certificates and application settings!
    • Revisit what format your data is being saved in including how will you be able to use data saved to the cloud. Will you be able to do a restore to a cloud server or do you need to make sure a copy of your backup tools are on your cloud server instances?

    Check out these resources and links on server storage I/O performance and benchmarking tools. View more tips and articles here

    Various Industry Events

    EMCworld – May 4-6 2015

    Interop – April 29 2015 (Las Vegas)

    Presenting Smart Shopping for Your Storage Strategy

    NAB – April 14-15 2015

    SNIA DSI Event – April 7-9

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars

    December 11, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Performance

    December 10, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Decision Making

    December 9, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Virtual Server and Storage Decision Making

    December 3, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Data Protection Modernization

    Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Datadynamics StorageX
    Datadynamics StorageX

    More than a data mover migration tool, StorageX is a tool for adding management and automation around unstructured local and distributed NAS (NFS, CIFS, DFS) file data. Read more here.

    View other StorageIO lab review reports here

    Recommended Reading List

    This is a new section being introduced in this edition of the Server StorageIO update mentioning various books, websites, blogs, articles, tips, tools, videos, podcasts along with other things I have found interesting and want to share with you.

      • Introducing s3motion (via EMCcode e.g. opensource) a tool for copying buckets and objects between public, private and hybrid clouds (e.g. AWS S3, GCS, Microsoft Azure and others) as well as object storage systems. This is a great tool which I have added to my server storage I/O cloud, virtual and physical toolbox. If you are not familiar with EMCcode check it out to learn more…
    • Running Hadoop on Ubuntu Linux (Series of tutorials) for those who want to get their hands dirty vs. using one of the All In One (AIO) appliances.
      • Yellow-bricks (Good blog focused on virtualization, VMware and other related themes) by Duncan Epping @duncanyb

    Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:
    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Enjoy this edition of the Server and StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcasts along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Data Protection Diaries: Are your restores ready for World Backup Day 2015?

    Data Protection Diaries: Are your restores ready for World Backup Day 2015?

    This is part of an ongoing data protection diaries series of post about, well, cloud and data protection and what I’m doing pertaining to World Backup Day 2015 along with related topics.

    In case you forgot or did not know, World Backup Day is March 31 2015 (@worldbackupday) so now is a good time to be ready. The only challenge that I have with the World Backup Day (view their site here) that has gone on for a few years know is that it is a good way to call out the importance of backing up or protecting data. However its time to also put more emphasis and focus on being able to make sure those backups or protection copies actually work.

    By this I mean doing more than making sure that your data can be read from tape, disk, SSD or cloud service actually going a step further and verifying that restored data can actually be used (read, written, etc).

    The Problem, Issue, Challenge, Opportunity and Need

    The problem, issue and challenges are simple, are your applications, systems and data protected as well as can you use those protection copies (e.g. backups, snapshots, replicas or archives) when as well as were needed?

    storage I/O data protection

    The opportunity is simple, avoiding downtime or impact to your business or organization by being proactive.

    Understanding the challenge and designing a strategy

    The following is my preparation checklist for World Backup Data 2015 (e.g. March 31 2015) which includes what I need or want to protect, as well as some other things to be done including testing, verification, address (remediate or fix) known issues while identifying other areas for future enhancements. Thus perhaps like yours, data protection for my environment which includes physical, virtual along with cloud spanning servers to mobile devices is constantly evolving.

    collect TPM metrics from SQL Server with hammerdb
    My data protection preparation, checklist and to do list

    Finding a solution

    While I already have a strategy, plan and solution that encompasses different tools, technologies and techniques, they are also evolving. Part of the evolving is to improve while also exploring options to use new and old things in new ways as well as eat my down dog food or walk the talk vs. talk the talk. The following figure provides a representation of my environment that spans physical, virtual and clouds (more than one) and how different applications along with systems are protected against various threats or risks. Key is that not all applications and data are the same thus enabling them to be protected in different ways as well as over various intervals. Needless to say there is more to how, when, where and with what different applications and systems are protected in my environment than show, perhaps more on that in the future.

    server storageio and unlimitedio data protection
    Some of what my data protection involves for Server StorageIO

    Taking action

    What I’m doing is going through my checklist to verify and confirm the various items on the checklist as well as find areas for improvement which is actually an ongoing process.

    Do I find things that need to be corrected?

    Yup, in fact found something that while it was not a problem, identified a way to improve on a process that will once fully implemented enabler more flexibility both if a restoration is needed, as well as for general everyday use not to mention remove some complexity and cost.

    Speaking of lessons learned, check this out that ties into why you want 4 3 2 1 based data protection strategies.

    Storage I/O trends

    Where to learn more

    Here are some extra links to have a look at:

    Data Protection Diaries
    Cloud conversations: If focused on cost you might miss other cloud storage benefits
    5 Tips for Factoring Software into Disaster Recovery Plans
    Remote office backup, archiving and disaster recovery for networking pros
    Cloud conversations: Gaining cloud confidence from insights into AWS outages (Part II)
    Given outages, are you concerned with the security of the cloud?
    Data Archiving: Life Beyond Compliance
    My copies were corrupted: The 3-2-1 rule
    Take a 4-3-2-1 approach to backing up data
    Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networks – Chapter 8 (CRC/Taylor and Francis)

    What this all means and wrap-up

    Be prepared, be proactive when it comes to data protection and business resiliency vs. simply relying reacting and recovering hoping that all will be ok (or works).

    Take a few minutes (or longer) and test your data protection including backup to make sure that you can:

    a) Verify that in fact they are working protecting applications and data in the way expected

    b) Restore data to an alternate place (verify functionality as well as prevent a problem)

    c) Actually use the data meaning it is decrypted, inflated (un-compressed, un-de duped) and security certificates along with ownership properties properly applied

    d) Look at different versions or generations of protection copies if you need to go back further in time

    e) Identify area of improvement or find and isolate problem issues in advance vs. finding out after the fact

    Time to get back to work checking and verifying things as well as attending to some other items.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Cloud conversations: If focused on cost you might miss other cloud storage benefits

    Storage I/O trends

    Cloud conversations: If focused on cost you might miss other cloud storage benefits

    Drew Robb (@robbdrew) has a good piece (e.g. article) over at InfoStor titled Eight Ways to Avoid Cloud Storage Pricing Surprises that you can read here.

    Drew start’s his piece out with this nice analogy or story:

    Let’s begin with a cautionary tale about pricing: a friend hired a moving company as they quoted a very attractive price for a complex move. They lured her in with a low-ball price then added more and more “extras” to the point where their price ended up higher than many of the other bids she passed up. And to make matters worse, they are already two weeks late with delivery of the furniture and are saying it might take another two weeks.

    Drew extends his example in his piece to compare how some cloud providers may start with pricing as low as some amount only for the customer to be surprised when they did not do their homework to learn about the various fees.

    Note that most reputable cloud providers do not hide their fees even though there are myths that all cloud vendors have hidden fees, instead they list what those costs are on their sites. However that means the smart shopper or person procuring cloud services needs to go look for those fee’s and what they mean to avoid surprises. On the other hand if you can not find what extra fee’s would be along with what is or is not included in a cloud service price, to quote Jenny’s line in the movie Forest Gump, "…Run, Forest! Run!…".

    In Drew’s piece he mentions five general areas to keep an eye on pertaining cloud storage costs including:

    • Be Duly Diligent
    • Trace Out Application Interaction
    • Avoid Fixed Usage Rates
    • Beware Lowballing
    • Demand Enterprise Visibility

    Beware Lowballing

    In Drew’s piece, he includes a comment from myself shown below.

    Just as in the moving business, lowballing is alive and well in cloud pricing. Greg Schulz, an analyst with StorageIO Group, warned users to pay attention to services that have very low-cost per GByte/TByte yet have extra fees and charges for use, activity or place service caps. Compare those with other services that have higher base fees and attempt to price it based on your real storage and usage patterns.

    “Watch out for usage and activity fees with lower cost services where you may get charged for looking at or visiting your data, not to mention for when you actually need to use it,” said Schulz. “Also be aware of limits or caps on performance that may apply to a particular class of service.”

    As a follow-up to Drew’s good article, I put together the following thoughts that appeared earlier this year over at InfoStor titled Cloud storage: Is It All About Cost? that you can read here. In that article I start out with the basic question of:

    So what is your take on cloud storage, and in what context?

    Is cloud storage all about removing cost, cost cutting, free storage?

    Or perhaps even getting something else in addition to free storage?

    I routinely talk with different people from various backgrounds, environments from around the world, and the one consistency I hear when it comes to cloud services including storage is that there is no consistency.

    What I mean by this is that there are the cloud crowd cheerleaders who view or cheer for anything cloud related, some of them actually use the cloud vs. simply cheering.

    What does this have to do with cloud costs

    Simple, how do you know if cloud is cheaper or more expensive if you do not know your own costs?

    How do you know if cloud storage is available, reliable, durable if you do not have a handle on your environment?

    Are you making apples to oranges comparisons or simple trading or leveraging hype and fud for or against?

    Similar to regular storage, how you choose to use and configure on-site traditional storage for high-availability, performance, security among other best practices should be applied to cloud solutions. After all, only you can prevent cloud (or on premise) data loss, granted it is a shared responsibility. Shared responsibility means your service provider or system vendor needs to deliver quality robust solution that you can then take responsibility for configure to use with resiliency.

    For some of you perhaps cloud might be about lowering, reducing or cutting storage costs, perhaps even getting some other service(s) in addition to free storage.

    On the other hand, some of you might be

    Yet another class of cloud storage (e.g. AWS EBS) are those intended or optimized to be accessed from within a cloud via cloud servers or compute instances (e.g. AWS EC2 among others) vs. those that are optimized for both inside the cloud as well as outside the cloud access (e.g. AWS S3 or Glacier with costs shown here). I am using AWS examples; however, you could use Microsoft Azure (pricing shown here), Google (including their new Nearline service with costs shown here), Rackspace, (calculator here or other cloud files pricing here), HP Cloud (costs shown here), IBM Softlayer (object storage costs here) and many others.

    Not all types of cloud storage are the same, which is similar to traditional storage you may be using or have used in your environment in the past. For example, there is high-capacity low-cost storage, including magnetic tape for data protection, archiving of in-active data along with near-line hard disk drives (HDD). There are different types of HDDs, as well as fast solid-state devices (SSD) along with hybrid or SSHD storage used for different purposes. This is where some would say the topic of cloud storage is highly complex.

    Where to learn more

    Data Protection Diaries
    Cloud Conversations: AWS overview and primer)
    Only you can prevent cloud data loss
    Is Computer Data Storage Complex? It Depends
    Eight Ways to Avoid Cloud Storage Pricing Surprises
    Cloud and Object Storage Center
    Cloud Storage: Is It All About Cost?
    Cloud conversations: Gaining cloud confidence from insights into AWS outages (Part II)
    Given outages, are you concerned with the security of the cloud?
    Is the cost of cloud storage really cheaper than traditional storage?
    Are more than five nines of availability really possible?
    What should I look for in an enterprise file sync-and-share app?
    How do primary storage clouds and cloud for backup differ?
    What should I consider when using SSD cloud?
    What’s most important to know about my cloud privacy policy?
    Data Archiving: Life Beyond Compliance
    My copies were corrupted: The 3-2-1 rule
    Take a 4-3-2-1 approach to backing up data

    What this means

    In my opinion there are cheap clouds (products, services, solutions) and there are low-cost options as well as there are value and premium offerings. Avoid confusing value with cheap or low-cost as something might have a higher cost, however including more capabilities or fees included that if useful can be more value. Look beyond the up-front cost aspects of clouds also considering ongoing recurring fees for actually using a server or solution.

    If you can find low-cost storage at or below a penny per GByte per month that could be a good value if it also includes many free access, retrieval GETS head and lists for management or reporting. On the other hand, if you find a service that is at or below a penny per GByte per month however charges for any access including retrieval, as well as network bandwidth fees along with reporting, that might not be as good of a value.

    Look beyond the basic price and watch out for statements like "…as low as…" to understand what is required to get that "..as low as.." price. Also understand what the extra fee’s are which most of the reputable providers list these on their sites, granted you have to look for them. If you are already using cloud services, pay attention to your monthly invoices and track what you are paying for to avoid surprises.

    From my InfoStor piece:

    For cloud storage, instead of simply focusing on lowest cost of storage per capacity, look for value, along with ability to configure or use with as much resiliency as you need. Value will mean different things depending on your needs and cloud storage servers, yet the solution should be cost-effective with availability including durability, secure and applicable performance.

    Shopping for cloud servers and storage is similar to acquiring regular servers and storage in that you need to understand what you are acquiring along with up-front and recurring fee’s to understand the total cost of ownership and cost of operations not to mention making apples to apples vs. apples to oranges comparisons.

    Btw, instead of simply using lower cost cloud services to cut cost, why not also use those capabilities to create or park another copy of your important data somewhere else just to be safe…

    What say you about cloud costs?

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Top vblog voting V2.015 (Its IT award season, cast your votes)

    Top vblog voting V2.015 (Its IT award season, cast your votes)

    Storage I/O trends

    It’s that time of the year again for award season:

    • The motion picture association Academy awards (e.g. the Oscars)
    • The Grammys and other entertainment awards
    • As well as Eric Siebert (aka @ericsiebert) vsphere-land.com top vblog

    Vsphere-land.com top vblog

    Eric has run for several years now an annual top VMware, Virtualization, Storage and related blogs voting now taking place until March 16th 2015 (click on the image below). You will find a nice mix of new school, old school and a few current or future school theme blogs represented with some being more VMware specific. However there are also many blogs at the vpad site that have a cloud, virtual, server, storage, networking, software defined, development and other related themes.

    top vblog voting
    Click on the above image to cast your vote for favorite:

    • Ten blogs (e.g. select up to ten and then rank 1 through 10)
    • Storage blog
    • Scripting blog
    • VDI blog
    • New Blogger
    • Independent Blogger (e.g. non-vendor)
    • News/Information Web site
    • Podcast

    Call to action, take a moment to cast your vote

    My StorageIOblog.com has been on the vLaunchPad site for several years now as well as having syndicated content that also appears via some of the other venues listed there.

    Six time VMware vExpert

    In addition to my StorageIOblog and podcast, you will also find many of my fellow VMware vExperts among others at the vLaunchpad site so check them out as well.

    What this means

    This is a people’s choice process (yes it is a popularity process of sorts as well) however also a way of rewarding or thanking those who take time to create and share content with you and others. If you take time to read various blogs, listen to podcasts as well as consume other content, please take a few moments and cast your vote here (thank you in advance) which I hope includes StorageIOblog.com as part of the top ten, as well as being nominated in the Storage, Podcast and Independent blogger categories.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    February 2015 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 15, Issue II

    Hello and welcome to this February 2015 Server and StorageIO update newsletter. The new year is off and running with many events already underway including the recent USENIX FAST conference and others on the docket over the next few months.

    Speaking of FAST (File and Storage Technologies) event which I attended last week, here is a link to where you can download the conference proceedings.

    In other events, VMware announced version 6 of their vSphere ESXi hypervisor and associated management tools including VSAN, VVOL among other items.

    This months newsletter has a focus on server storage I/O performance topics with various articles, tips, commentary and blog posts.

    Watch for more news, updates and industry trends perspectives coming soon.

    Commentary In The News

    StorageIO news

    Following are some StorageIO industry trends perspectives comments that have appeared in various print and on-line venues. Over at Processor there are comments on resilient & highly available, underutilized or unused servers, what abandoned data Is costing your company, align application needs with your infrastructure (server, storage, networking) resources.

    Also at processor explore flash based (SSD) storage, enterprise backup buying tips, re-evaluate server security, new tech advancements for server upgrades, and understand cost of acquiring storage.

    Meanwhile over at CyberTrend there are some perspectives on enterprise backup and better servers mean better business.

    View more trends comments here

    Tips and Articles

    So you have a new storage device or system.

    How will you test or find its performance?

    Check out this quick-read tip on storage benchmark and testing fundamentals over at BizTech. Also check out these resources and links on server storage I/O performance and benchmarking tools.

    View recent as well as past tips and articles here

    StorageIOblog posts

    Recent StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    In This Issue

  • Industry Trends Perspectives
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts

    • Events & Activities

    EMCworld – May 4-6 2015

    Interop – April 29 2015

    NAB – April 14-15 2015

    Deltaware Event – March 3 2015

    Feb. 18 – FAST 2015 – Santa Clara CA

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars

    December 11, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Performance

    December 10, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Decision Making

    December 9, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Virtual Server and Storage Decision Making

    December 3, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Data Protection Modernization

    November 13 9AM PT – BrightTalk
    Software Defined Storage

    Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    StarWind Virtual SAN
    starwind virtual san

    Using less hardware with software defined storage management. This looks at the needs of Microsoft Hyper-V ROBO and SMB environments with software defined storage less hardware. Read more here.

    View other StorageIO lab review reports here.

    Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:
    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Enjoy this edition of the Server and StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcasts along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved