Entries categorized under “Storage Management”

Moving unstructured data onto lower cost tiers of storage is an initiative on almost every enterprise organization's "to-do" list. But convincing a business unit or department to "volunteer" to move its data to a lower cost tier is not always as easy as it seems, especially when doing so may possibly put production applications at risk. (read more)

Ask almost any system administrator what he or she spends the majority of their working day doing and the response almost always includes managing changes and updates to their systems. It is for this reason that over three (3) years ago Symantec introduced its complimentary web-based Symantec Operations Readiness Tool (formerly known as Veritas Operations Services). Now with this month's latest release, Symantec extends the benefits that the Operations Readiness Tool provides to Storage Foundation, NetBackup and Storage Foundation for Windows users. (read more)

One of the trends in the upcoming decade in storage management is already taking shape: Automation. This trend is driven in large part by the new storage management features that have been introduced in the previous decade to address specific application challenges, but that have - in the process - created their own set of challenges in managing these features. It is these challenges that today's release of Veritas Operations Manager 3.1 is designed to address. (read more)

Symantec's decision to decouple DMP from its parent Storage Foundation puts concerns about other dependencies that all multi-pathing software solutions have to rest. Currently, a standalone version of DMP is available for Solaris, AIX and Red Hat and SuSe Linux. Beginning in Q4 2010, Symantec will also make DMP available as a standalone product for HP-UX and Windows. This now frees customers to deploy DMP without a requirement to first deploy Storage Foundation or VxFS. (read more)

We can all get caught up in the hoopla of new and slick storage technology features and lose sight of some the most important and basic details that keep our storage fabrics up and humming. Among these are the Fibre Channel cabling infrastructures and the distance limitations incurred by continued increases in FC speeds. (read more)

In the past two months I have probably received more calls from end-users inquiring as to what steps they should take to re-architect their backup infrastructures than I have in the past two years. Yet what I find encouraging is that they are no longer just asking me for point solutions or short term fixes. Rather they are looking for architectures that they can put in place that will solve their immediate pain points while leaving them well-positioned for the future. (read more)

Over the last twelve months a trend towards implementing flash drives as a new tier of memory has emerged. Driven by the lower cost of flash when compared to RAM plus the growing realization that not all of an application's data requires the performance boost that flash provides, more organizations are looking to deploy flash as a new tier of memory. (read more)

Organizations have a proclivity to look at storage arrays primarily in the context of how much storage capacity do they offer. But as storage arrays add features such as deduplication and thin provisioning, storage efficiency is taking on new importance as an evaluation criteria when selecting a storage array. This is raising questions as to what role, if any, that a storage array's storage efficiency features should play in the final buying decision. (read more)

Substantial technical differences exist between how the interfaces of storage clouds are presented, managed and secured. But from a business point of view, a cloud is a cloud is a cloud and the sooner that the technical challenges associated with managing these different storage clouds from a single platform are overcome, the sooner that businesses can ramp up their cloud storage adoption. (read more)

In a previous blog entry, I took a look at how Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) combined with Veritas Cluster File System (CFS) - Veritas CFS High Availability - enables organizations to achieve faster failover without the associated complexity and costs. Despite these advantages, organizations that are already using an HA solution such as Oracle RAC still may be reticent to switch as they need more concrete business and technical reasons to justify such a switch to Veritas CFS. But here's the good news: There is an unequivocal answer to the "To RAC or Not to RAC" question. (read more)

The real news this past week out of EMC World is not that EMC has decoupled its VMAX or Symmetrix controller heads from its back end disk drives, added some bells and whistles to it and called it "VPLEX". The big news in my mind is that this decoupling puts the storage industry on notice that EMC has officially begun its transformation from a disk vendor into a provider of storage intelligence. (read more)

Two general techniques have now emerged that reclaim storage on thinly provisioned volumes: zero page reclamation and file system-based, intelligent storage reclamation. Both techniques identify when blocks are freed on a thinly provisioned volume and mark them as available for reclamation and restoration to the storage array's general storage pool. However there are other factors that come into play that should influence when organizations select intelligent versus zero page reclamation as their preferred method of storage reclamation. (read more)

Upon arriving at Symantec Vision on Wednesday morning, it quickly became evident that the messaging at this year's event focused on how the business world is shifting from a Systems-Centric View (policies and governance is done according to the physical devices on which they reside such as servers, networking and storage) of data management to an Information Centric View (policies and governance are set independent of what storage device on which the data resides). (read more)

When thin provisioning first started to gain some traction 5-8 years ago and show up as a feature on storage arrays, it is unlikely that many grasped how it was laying the foundation for the automated recapture of stranded storage capacity. Fast forward to today and we now see this happening with increasing frequency. The latest evidence of this is today's announcement from 3PAR that highlights how Oracle database users can achieve ongoing capacity savings when placing their Oracle databases on thinly provisioned 3PAR InServ Storage Server volumes. (read more)

The more I study how the AO feature leverages the underlying units of data (called "regions") with 3PAR systems, the more I understand its practical application in data center environments. Specifically, it does more than just automate the placement of data on the appropriate storage tier but automates it in such a way that it creates new operational efficiencies for IT managers. (read more)

Last week I blogged about the issues that were top of mind with users who were in attendance at the quarterly Omaha VMware Users Group (VMUG) meeting. Those challenges specifically included data protection, I/O bottlenecks and iSCSI SANs but notice that their issues can largely be traced back to an ineffective storage management strategy as the root of their issues. (read more)

No one disputes that solid state drives (SSD) are poised to play a larger role in networked storage environments. But with the price per terabyte (TB) of SSDs still running a factor of 10-15x greater than high performance FC and SAS drives, the ROI for SSD has to be pretty clear for an organization to justify its deployment. Providing that justification for SSDs should now get a little easier thanks to a new solution announced today from FalconStor Software and Violin Memory. (read more)

Over the last few years thin provisioning has steadily moved into the main stream of storage management - so much so that not only has it found its way onto many leading storage systems but into operating systems as well. Clearly one of the largest endorsements of using thin provisioning at the operating system level came last year when VMware announced its inclusion of thin provisioning as an option within vSphere. (read more)

Capacity savings guarantees are still a relative rarity but can be more easily found as technologies like deduplication and thin provisioning find their way onto primary storage systems. However the bloom can quickly come off the rose when one starts to dig into the details associated with these guarantees. That's why 3PAR's recent 50% capacity savings guarantee announcement stands in stark contrast to other similar guarantees as its savings are not just a one-time event but potentially keep going and going and going. (read more)

Enterprise users are facing some tough choices right now as solid state drives (SSDs) begin to proliferate in the datacenter. Not only must they sort through the performance benefits and documented drawbacks of typical SSDs, they must also determine which SSDs are suitable for use in mission critical applications. But as they do, new evidence is emerging that an SSD's classification as "enterprise ready" is not determined by an SSD's use of "MLC" or "SLC" but rather if it possesses the ability to detect and correct soft errors as they occur. (read more)

Server virtualization is clearly becoming the end game for all size data centers. But as they virtualize their physical servers using Microsoft Windows Server 2008, new challenges emerge that range from managing each virtual machine's storage to effectively scaling up the number of the virtual machines (VMs) on each physical machine. This is where Virsto One, the newly introduced storage virtualization software from Virsto Software, comes into play. (read more)

Right now a major re-alignment is taking shape in the computer industry driven in large part by enterprises questioning the value of heterogeneous hardware and software solutions. Heterogeneity originally lowered upfront procurements costs but over time it created new levels of complexity when it came time to make these disparate solutions work well together. These difficulties are leading more providers to build end-to-end solution offerings that is raising questions about the role that independent enterprise software providers like Symantec will provide in this new world. (read more)

The dramatic changes that are currently sweeping through the storage industry are once again preparing to reshape the look of tomorrow's enterprise data centers. Among these changes, features and/or products like high availability, solid state drives (SSDs), server virtualization and thin provisioning are emerging as the predominant ones that IT managers are well under ways towards wide spread adoption. But as the implementation of these features begin, they create new storage management 'gotchas'. (read more)

As customers add more storage capacity in the form of disk drives to a storage system, they might also want to take advantage of the additional performance benefits that these new disk drives can deliver. The 3PAR array is architected in such a way that as resources are added to the system, the performance of all volumes improves. To achieve this, the volume needs to span as many disk drives in the storage system as possible - existing and new. While accomplishing this is simply done with its Dynamic Optimization, 3PAR saw an opportunity for policy management and multi-volume automation to further accelerate such tasks. (read more)

High-profile case studies about companies such as Google and Amazon document how they are leveraging the cost reductions that clustered virtualized servers make possible to improve reliability, scalability, performance and capacity. But as the clustering of virtualized servers becomes more prevalent for these reasons, the overhead associated with storage administration in these environments only increases. Provisioning storage volumes to clustered virtualized servers calls for more upfront planning; it takes longer due to the complexity involved; and, the probability of human error becomes difficult to avoid. (read more)