Search Term Reviews: October 15th Edition

It’s been awhile since I last did a review of what people are searching for (July 30th was the last time…wow) so, let’s see what’s new.

Search Term #1: EMC NX4

Not really suprised here.  Honestly, take the Celerra NS-20, cut the price signficantly, allow blended SAS/SATA drive trays,

Is FCoE a viable option for SMB/Commercial?

Image via Wikipedia

Since I work in the SMB/Commercial space as a TC, I routintely am exposed to mixed fabric environments.  With the advent of iSCSI, we’ve seen a proportional shift towards iSCSI as a reduced-cost block storage fabric.  Legacy (2Gb/s) fibre still has presence in specific markets but the uptake of 4Gb/s fibre has been slowing down.  With FCoE being announced as the next logical evolution of converged fabrics and 8Gb/s FC and 10G iSCSI working their way to availability, does FCoE make sense for SMB/Commercial markets?

Future Storage Systems: Part 4: Operating System – Conceptual Overview

In the previous Future Storage System articles, we’ve covered the basic hardware foundation for what I envision to be a powerful future-oriented storage solution for the commercial midrange.  However, as you’re probably aware, hardware is meaningless without software to provide the operational capabilities that are needed to mange information.  In this article, I will focus on a general design for an extensible software layer (an OS) that will provide future-oriented capability expansion as well as robust analytics, capabilities, and integration with business continuity principles.  As always, please reference the diagram below.

Future Storage System - Operating System - Conceptual

Future Storage Systems: Part 3b – I/O Expansion Node

In Part 3a, we discussed the possibility of a purpose-driven Compute Node based on the Torrenza initiative for the Future Storage system.  This expansion node made use of Hypertransport as a “glue” between the base storage compute node and the expansion node (of computation or I/O flavours) that could be added.  The advantages of that topology were simple:  hot add support for additional processing power, additional I/O bandwidth within the system, and additional computing power for the array OS (which we’ll cover in a later article).  In this overview, we’ll take a look at another variation on an expansion node: an I/O expansion node that will add additional front-end ports and/or functionality to the base system.  We will be referencing the diagram below. (Apologies in advance for the image shearing off in the lower right hand corner).

Hypertransport I/O Expansion Topology

Future Storage Systems: Part 2 – Detailed Node View

So, in my article yesterday, I gave a global view of a very simple storage system for the future. Since I LOVE this type of conjecture and theoretics (is that a word?), I decided to take this a step further and flesh out some of the other intricacies of the design.  Check out the image below and then click through to read the rest.

Fleshing out the Hypertransport Storage System

Why wouldn’t the following work? (Future Storage System: Part 1)

So, I’ve been toying around with this in my mind for some time.  Essentially, I’ve tried to understand the basic “Storage Processor” limitation of current storage systems and propose an admittedly simplistic design to get around some of the difficulties.  The biggest hurdle, in my mind, is to have cache coherency, low latency memory access to other nodes in a “cluster,” and have a communications “bus” between nodes that is extensible (or at least will grow bandwidth with more devices on the signal chain).  Staring at that problem, then, look at the image below.

A case for Hypertransport connected nodes...

Quick VMWare Links

Image via CrunchBase

I get asked a lot of questions regarding VMWare setup, etc. and I thought I’d take the time to push this out to the front page on the blog.

This is for Virtual Infrastructure 3: 3.5 Update 2/3:

Main Documentation Page:

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pages/vi_pubs_35u2.html

Quick Start Guide:

Quick Start Guide

Installation Guide:

Installation Guide

Basic Systems Admin Guide:

Systems Administration Guide

Virtual Center Installation Guide:

Virtual Center 2.5 Installation Guide

Virtual Machine Backup Guide:

Virtual Machine Backup Guide

Server Config Guide:

Server Config Guide

iSCSI and Fibre Config Guides:

iSCSI & Fibre Channel

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NX4: bringing NAS to the masses…

So you’re reading this at 12:01AM on Tuesday, August 26th…to paraphrase “Captain Awesome” from Chuck (on NBC), “Early morning group hug? AWESOME!”

Anyhow, let’s get straight to the point here: the NX4 is here. It has arrived in all of its SAS/SATA disk goodness. It brings with it CIFS/NFS capabilities, iSCSI for IP-based block level access, and 4Gb/s Fibre Channel for those moments where massive bandwidth and low latency are priorities. Sounds good, huh? Let’s toss in IP-based and Fibre replication facilities, auto volume management (for thin provisioning), and writable Celerra snaps and you’ve rounded out the solution completely. Did I mention that you’re going to layer this on top of the category-busting (sales-wise) AX4-5?

EMC CX4 is ALIVE!

Image via Wikipedia

Is it just me or have we been waiting for this for a while? 😉  Today is officially the EMC Clariion CX4 public GA (general availability) date.  Good news: they’re shipping TODAY!  No paper launches, folks…this is immediate availability.  The other good news: you get to do more with your storage; faster, cheaper, stronger, more flexible, etc.  Let me rip through some highlights for you:

a.) Cache and SP Processor increases.  Across the board, processor “speeds” and cache sizes have been increased.  Now, this may appear somewhat odd in that the CX4-120, for example, only has two dual core 1.2ghz processors, but, when you consider that the onboard L2 cache is greater in size (and Woodcrest processors were HANDILY more powerful than the older Nocona Xeons), it actually has more innate processing power than the previous generation processors.  Cache sizes, when coupled with the 64 bit FLARE OS for the array, allow for better allocation and utilization within the array. 

Search Term Tuesday – June 3rd Edition

Note: I’m trying to tighten up the layout of content on the landing page, so, I’ll be using excerpts more and more.

Continuing from last week, this edition of Search Term Tuesday will tackle the most important searches (or at least highest ranked statistically) that landed you at this blog.

Search Term #1: cx3-10 create raid group