Storage benchmarking is what I like to call a “dark art”.

Let’s be honest, the reason File Virtualization is hot is because every compute environment is running into the unavoidable realities of exploding data growth in all directions - spreading like a virus across the network and in the data center.

In the realm of storage appliances (NAS or application specific appliances) the technology evolution usually equates to things like more capacity (bigger drives), faster throughput, more IOPS, better availability, and easier management/provisioning, etc… but is that it?

We’ve recently had some questions coming through the Ask the Storage Advisors link about networked storage in the home.

Let’s face it… finding the “right” data is hard, but there is an answer.

If some of the new indexing applications live up to the hype …. ILM may actually have a chance…

The problem is all in the math. Most of us that have been in the storage industry know that the way the hard drive vendors “market” the drive capacities is fundamentally inaccurate.

These backup services are quite convenient. It does require an Internet connection, which just about everyone has now.

…in my opinion this is a prime example of people being lazy or stupid!

The toughest question for any storage administrator to answer is, “What kind of performance do you NEED?”

There’s been lots of talk about RAID 6 as it compares to RAID 5 and the reliability benefits that are gained by SATA drives when using RAID 6 – so I’ve decided NOT to talk about that anymore!
Instead I thought I’d discuss two other RAID levels out there and available to folks. RAID 5EE […]

…I profess that, unequivocally, iSCSI has indeed changed the face of storage networking - forever!

I’m not going to go into the values of having applications and services available over the web – I think that’s a personal preference for each individual and company to have to decide.

It’s true I tell you – you can absolutely deploy SAS and SATA drives within the same physical enclosure… but be careful!

There are a number of ways that IT Pros deal with remote site data protection – some are good and some are not so good…

Finally these “third class citizens” (SATA drives) can get a little respect with a little help from RAID 6.

I’ve heard many questions lately about SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). Simple questions like, “What’s SAS?” or, “Why should I consider SAS?” This information can be found with simple web searches. Adaptec has a good section on the website dedicated to the education of SAS and will answer these questions easily and the […]

After all of the efforts over the years to agree on a standard with really no end result that the end users can see, hear, feel and touch – how could we really think that a standard could ever possibly prevail?

…an IT Manager asked me what I thought of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and it’s effects on Fibre Channel.

In an effort to insight a riot with one of my fellow Storage Advisors I want to talk about “Virtual” Tape Library (VTL) options.

One of the things I really like about WAFS is that it compliments existing storage infrastructures.

There are other posts from my fellow Storage Advisors that go into the gory details of RAID, its importance, and the varying levels of RAID available to customers today. This post is far less technical than that and more literal. To that I ask: When is RAID not RAID?

Let’s first start out by examining the acronym “RAID”. Since RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” you’d think that all RAID levels are “Redundant”, right? Wrong! RAID level 0 (zero) has no redundancy at all. In fact RAID 0, although having the RAID characteristic of stripping data across all disks, does not maintain any redundancy or parity of data…

First, it’s probably worth a quick definition of what snapshots are for those that thought I was talking about some tawdry pictures.

A definition offered by SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association http://www.snia.org/) says,”A fully usable copy of a defined collection of data that contains an image of the data as it appeared at the point in time at which the copy was initiated. A snapshot may be either a duplicate or a replicate of the data it represents.” In practical terms snapshots are a point-in-time copy of a dataset. In some cases it may be a read only copy and in others it may be completely writable. Generally, it is a way to have a local backup copy of data that doesn’t take up double the amount of space. More on how snapshots work and their inherent benefits another time though…

So much of what the storage industry focuses on is around the high dollar, high end, and high touch enterprises. While certainly the most sophisticated in their infrastructures they are also the most “beefed up” with expertise and staff to handle these very complex environments.

Now what about the rest of the world? What about the small doctors offices, law offices, graphics design companies, consultancy firms, retail stores and everything else in between? There is lots of data being generated and the need for a reliable storage infrastructure is just as important to the small business owner as it is for the largest of enterprises. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s all relative. Generally, storage and the protection of the data on it is very important…

I remember when all you had to do was choose which tape drive or library you were going to use to backup your data. Media capacity and speed had to be considered – and, of course your budget. Now with all the options for disk-based backup; snapshots, replication and mirroring techniques, Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL), and the latest three letter acronym in storage (CDP – Continuous Data Protection), does that old archaic tape technology still have a place? I think so… doesn’t it?

Let’s dig a little deeper. With disk-based backup techniques you can replicate data asynchronously on a scheduled basis; you can mirror data real-time; you can migrate older data to lower cost storage based on policies; or you can simply make the disk look just like a tape. There are even some products out there that let you remove disk drives after backup just like tape media for offsite storage…

There’s lots of information on the new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) standard just coming online - but one of the questions that keeps coming to mind for me has little to do with the technical merits of SAS but instead what is the best host interconnect with all the different options that now exist.

There’s hardly an argument that SAS as a drive interconnect isn’t the next logical step and the best replacement for the aging parallel SCSI. With SATA and FC drives capping the low-end and high-end drive markets respectively - SAS surely has a home in the middle. Internal host connections are pretty straight forward - Internal host drives plug into their respective drive interconnects: FC to FC, SATA to SATA and SAS to SAS. (We won’t talk about the compatibility of SATA II and SAS in this post - but that’s certainly a cool feature…)