Resilient Storage Networks Book by Greg Schulz

StorageIO Group Industry Trends, Perspectives and Analyst Reports, Videos, Podcasts

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Industry Links

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

Industry trends and perspective look at FCoE

If you have not yet heard of the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology or one of the vendor marketing terms including Data Center Ethernet (DCE), I/O Virtualization (IOV), Converged Network Architecture (CAN) or Data Center Fabrics leveraging a hybrid premium Ethernet with low latency and Quality of Service (QoS), rest assured, you will soon. This StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective looks at what FCoE is, why it is important to be aware of and where it may fit in your environment in the future.

Scalable Storage for Unstructured Data

Enabling Scalable Storage Performance, Availability and Capacity for unstructured data and Web 2.0 applications

The growth of structured and unstructured data continues at an explosive rate in most environments resulting in a constantly expanding data footprint requiring data and storage management resources. Similarly, the relative ease of use of NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing based storage, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), has led to a proliferation of NAS and Windows file servers (similar to how the ease of use of personal computers (PCs) has resulted in desktop and server sprawl) and a resulting urgency to consolidate to maximize resource usage and IT management tasks.

MAID 2.0: Energy Savings without Performance Compromises

Energy Savings for Secondary and Near-line Storage Systems

Not all Green Storage is created equal. There are business benefits to aligning the most energy efficient storage to meet different data and application requirements. All storage vendors are claiming some form of “green” or some power, cooling and floor space savings. This industry trends and perspectives brief looks at a category of storage using intelligent power management (IPM) to support secondary and near-line or off-line data needs, comparing performance with energy savings, to enable you to be the judge of who is the “greenest” of them all.

Achieving Energy Efficiency using FLASH SSD

Leveraging SSD as part of a tiered storage building block to support server and storage consolidation to achieve energy efficiency

Reducing energy consumption is an important topic for many IT data centers. While there is a lot of discussion about reducing energy by doing less, another form of energy efficiency is doing more with less power for green storage. This paper looks at how solid state disk (SSD) and, in particular, FLASH based SSD can be incorporated into an energy-efficiency or green storage strategy as part of a tiered storage architecture to address power and environmental concerns while reducing server and storage I/O performance bottlenecks.

The Many Faces of MAID Storage Technology

A look at how Massive or Monolithic Array of Idle Disks (MAID) is evolving and being implemented in various storage solutions

This paper looks at MAID technology in general along with some current implementations along with benefits, caveats and what to look for and consider when evaluating MAID enabled technology to support primary, secondary and off-line data storage requirements to address energy efficiency and green storage needs.

Enabling comprehensive data protection for VMware

Issues and solutions to enable complete data protection and application availability for virtual server and storage environments.

Server and storage virtualization are complementary technologies that support day-to-day business along with high-availability, business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) needs in a virtual data center environment. This paper looks at the issues and requirements for comprehensive data protection beyond simple server “crash consistent” restart in a VMware environment and addresses the importance of application-aware enabling data protection technologies.

Business Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction (MP3)

A brief podcast audio (MP3) look at why and how reducing your data footprint provides a positive benefit to your business and application service objectives

This is a short MP3 or podcast version of the popular white paper report in PDF form pertaining to the "Business Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction" to improve IT resource usage and help enable a green data center and green storage via data and storage management effectiveness.

Analysis of EPA Report to Congress (Law 109-431) (PDF)

A perspective on the EPA Report to Congress addressing public law 109-431 pertaining to IT datacenter electrical power consumption

On August 1, 2007 the United States environmental protection agency (EPA) responding to public law 109-431 presented a 130 page report (plus 14 pages of executive summary and 67 pages of appendices and other supporting documents) to the U.S. congress addressing IT datacenter electrical energy consumption and associated issue. The EPA conducted a series of webcasts on August 9^th 2007 covering the report, its findings, recommendations and plans for moving forward. This is a synopsis of the EPA report to congress with comments by the StorageIO group as to what the EPA report means for green storage.

Scaling Storage with Clustering - Video
Tech target video tech talk - Greg Schulz looks at clustered storage as a technique to scale both I/Os to meet transaction processing and bandwidth along with other cluster storage scaling benefits for both SAN and NAS environments.

Business Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction (PDF)

A look at why and how reducing your data footprint provides a positive benefit to your business and application service objectives including address green storage needs

The information necessary to support your business in timely and effective decision making and in maintaining a competitive advantage has an impact on your data footprint. This paper looks at various techniques, and, in particular, how data compaction compression technologies can be applied to various types of data and IT functions to help reduce your data foot print to improve energy consumption and green storage and, enhance existing storage resource utilization while addressing other IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) inefficiencies as well as enhancing overall application service levels.

Business and Application Aware DPM

A look at the evolving landscape of data protection management (DPM and Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM)

Data protection management (DPM) provides timely insight and analysis of data protection activities, including cross domain event correlation and analysis for problem resolution and planning purposes to optimize IT resource management. This paper looks at the expanded focus and shifting landscape of DPM and its role in enabling cost effective IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) and service enhancement.

Video - (Download may take a few moments)

Remote office branch office (ROBO) data protection

Discussion covering issues and challenges with timely data protection of ROBO and distributed data

ROBO, SMB, distributed backup, NAS, replication, mirroring, D2D, WAFS, WADM, WAAS, WADS, CDP.

Decrypting Enterprise Storage Security

A look at enterprise storage system security strategies, options and issues for data at rest and in-flight.

Data security, encryption, key management, security strategy, aligning technology to specific needs and requirements.

Addressing Storage Management Challenges

A look at addressing storage and data management challenges using ultra scalable NAS

Data and storage management challenges, point-in-time (pit) snapshot copy, iSCSI, virtualization, ultra scalable NAS, iSCSI, high performance, clustered storage, replication, thin provisioning, policy based automated data migration.

Video - (Download may take a few moments)

Remote site data protection with replication

Discussion pertaining to issues and challenges with providing timely data protection for remote sites.

Remote and branch office data protection options, NAS, WAFS, WADS, WADM, WAAS, mirroring and replication, remote backup.

Podcast - (Download may take a few moments)

Server and storage I/O performance gap

A discussion around issues and challenges with data center and storage consolidation and I/O performance gap challenges.

Storage I/O performance bottlenecks and data center challenges, response time, performance, throughput, latency, service level and quality of service.

September 2006

Data Protection Management (DPM)

A look at the benefits of DPM for timely and effective data protection management

Backup reporting, cross domain event correlation, root cause analysis, modeling, performance and capacity planning, configuration and policy validation, data protection management (DPM), storage management software tools

August 2006

Data Center I/O Performance Issues and Impacts

A look at I/O performance bottlenecks and their impact on time sensitive applications

Data center and I/O performance bottlenecks, storage and performance management, consolidation, improving time sensitive applications, I/O acceleration vs. bandwidth acceleration, SAN and NAS