Infostor Lab Review: DataCore SANmelody January 22, 2009
Posted by Yves Peeters in I/O Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage.Tags: Datacore, SANmelody, storage
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The crew at Infostor recently put DataCore SANmelody through its paces in their lab and have just published a comprehensive review of their test methodology and findings.
In brief, their conclusions/key findings were:
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Full virtualization of direct-attached and SAN-connected storage
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Simplified SAN infrastructure management through automation of storage administration tasks using the Windows MMC
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SANmelody caching boosted I/O throughput by 33% running IOmeter
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Round-robin LUN distribution of server I/O traffic benchmarked at 50,000 IOPS using 8KB reads with no I/O bottlenecks
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No single point of failure with support for snapshots, synchronous mirroring, and synchronous replication
The full article can be viewed here (p.29).
Citrix Xenserver with Netapp storage – considerations October 10, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Data Center Management, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, desktop virtualization.Tags: Citrix, Netapp, storage, XenServer
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As you might know Citrix XenCenter gives you the ability to manage your Netapp storage boxes through a ONTAP connector. On the Citrix site there is an interesting article on the integration, the sorts of installs supported, … read the report.
VMware VDI – Storage considerations October 9, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Storage Virtualization & Storage, desktop virtualization.Tags: storage
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VMware released its latest guide regarding storage considerations when it comes to VMware VDIs, unfortunately the report is not that in-depth and the conclusions are ratter vague:
1. Design choices for a production VMware VDI implementation should be based on an understanding of the disk needs of the virtual machines. Windows XP or Vista clients have radically different needs from virtual machines that provide server functions: The disk I/O for clients is more than 90% read and is rather low (7 MBtyes/sec or 112 IOPS per 20 virtual machines). In addition, very little disk space is needed beyond the operating system and application installations because all end-user data should be stored in existing network-based centralized storage, on file servers or on NAS devices.
2. Once the disk size, throughput, and IOPS needs of a given VMware VDI deployment are understood, the choices of storage protocol, array type, disk types, and RAID types follow directly. Thin provisioning, data deduplication, and cloning can drastically lower the on-disk needs in terms of disk space required.
3. The most important consideration in storage decisions may not necessarily be technical but often financial. Can existing datacenter resources be reused? What is the value proposition and return on investment of acquiring an entirely new storage environment?
Read the short report.
IBM slashes storage for VMware VDIs September 18, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: IBM, storage, VDI, VMware, VSO
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IBM has developped a component that slashe storage with up yo 80% compared to the standard VMware VDI solution. This technology, the Virtual Storage Optimizer (VSO), uses an algorithm developed by IBM Research, and will form part of IBM’s Virtual Infrastructure Access (VIA) services, in which IBM experts virtualize clients’ IT infrastructure.
IBM’s VSO leverages the snapshotting capability of VMware’s VDI to create an ultra-efficient storage system. It takes the same approach as incremental backup — a master image of a clone is created and stored on the back end, each user gets a personalized workspace with all relevant applications, and only changes made by users are saved. (personal note: This sounds like Citrix Provisioning Server)
3PAR Announces Compatibility with Microsoft Hyper-V September 9, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: 3PAR, Hyper-V, storage
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3PAR, announced today support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. 3PAR Utility Storage and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V work together to give IT organizations the ability to deliver software and hardware as a service through server and storage virtualization as part of a complete utility computing environment. 3PAR Utility Storage and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V are designed to deliver a more agile and resilient infrastructure with significantly enhanced capacity utilization and cost efficiency.
Full article here
LeftHand Networks supports Microsoft’s virtualization strategy September 8, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: Hyper-V, LeftHand Networks, storage
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LeftHand Networks, the leading provider of highly available iSCSI SANs that optimize virtual environments, today announced support for Microsoft’s virtualization strategy and set of virtualization solutions. LeftHand Networks iSCSI SAN solutions provide high availability and non-disruptive storage management, capabilities that become vital as customers seek to optimize the efficiencies and cost advantages of virtualized infrastructures.
Emulex announces support for Hyper-V September 8, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: Add new tag, Emulex, FCoE, Fibre Channel, Hyper-V, storage
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Emulex Corporation today announced that its LightPulse family of Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) support Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.
More info here.
Top 10 Storage Vendors to watch … on one …s July 28, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: storage, VKernel
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Storage is clearly one of the corner-stones of virtualization, wether you are working with a low impact virtualization solution or high impact virtualization solution. Furthermore complexity is also one of the factors that has an influence. furthermore storage should be understood completely in order to maximise the investment and provide a high performance virtualization solution.
The staff at BytesAndSwitch has released its list with “newbies to watch”, on one there is VKernel on which we posted a while ago. Their flagship product “Chargaback Virtual Appliance” meters how much computing power and stroage the VMs use. full article here.
Seanodes introduces Exanodes VM – converting DAS to Networked storage June 18, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: Exanodes VM, Seanodes, storage
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Seanodes, the inventor and leading developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today introduced the latest version of its award-winning software, Exanodes™ – Virtual Machine Edition, which offers easy connectors and integration with server virtualization solutions to extend their capabilities to application servers’ internal disks by converting direct attached storage into networked storage.
Symantec and Citrix take on VMware with Block Storage … poll June 10, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: Citrix, storage, Symantec, VMware
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… Symantec Corp. is extending its partnership with Citrix Systems Inc. by offering a combination of its Storage Foundation software with Citrix’s XenServer hypervisor under its Veritas brand.
Symantec introduced Veritas Virtual Infrastructure today at Symantec Vision, which is due out in the fall. Symantec has allowed the XenServer hypervisor to use Storage Foundation for storage management under an arrangement disclosed last year. Now Symantec executives say its new product will be a better approach than VMware Inc.’s Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) for server virtualization in large environments. “Today’s [VMware] solutions force guest OS images to be put in one big bucket, called VMFS,” said Rob Soderberry, senior vice president of Symantec’s storage and availability management group.
Our question to you: What do you believe is the best storagemethod in Virtualization:
- (a) VMFS
- (b) Block Storage
- (c) Other …
Feel free to post your answerd an opinion by commenting on this post.
The influence of virtualization on your storage June 9, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: research, storage
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Resently the Enterprise Strategy Group conducted a survey regarding the influence of virtualization on the used storage, … .
More than 60% of those companies that implemented server virtualization saw an increase in the required storage:
- 39% had no change
- 15% needed between 1 and 10% additional space
- 21% had an increase of 11 to 20%
if you look into the type of storage used you get:
- 86% of the storage in network attached somehow, 14% is non network-attached.
- 21% run on fibre channel SAN
- 14% run on DAS
- 10% run on NAS
- 4% run on iSCSI SAN
Other questions covered are: What are the biggest challenges when implementing server virtualiation with storage? Has your organisation deployed a storage virtualization solution in conjunction with its virtual server environment? … More info here.
