LUN Archives – Gestalt IT

Are You a Hypervisor Hugger or a Storage Stalwart?

November 14, 2011 By Stephen Foskett Leave a Comment

The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting their vote while the rest flounder. But the storage industry must wake up and embrace the divide.

Filed Under: Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage Tagged With: Atomic Test and Set, Computer history, DAS, Enterprise storage, features, Gestalt IT, hypervisor, JBOD, LUN, Microsoft, NAS, NFS, ODX, Policy-Driven Storage, SAN, Storage DRS, VAAI, VASA, vCenter, Virtual Storage, vmware, VMworld, vSphere

The Assymetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) mode on CLARiiON

March 26, 2010 By Bas 2 Comments

I’ve noticed that I have been getting a lot of search engine hits relating to the various features, specifications and problems on the EMC CLARiiON array. One of the searches was related to a feature that has been around for a bit. It was actually introduced in 2001, but in order to give a full explanation I’m just going to start at the beginning.

Filed Under: Featured, Storage Tagged With: Alan Shugart, ALUA, CLARiiON, CX3, EMC, FLARE 26, gestaltit, logical unit numbers, LUN, NCR, SASI, SCSI, Seagate, T10, T11, T13

FAST: Features, Drawbacks, Applications and some Questions

December 11, 2009 By Devang Panchigar Leave a Comment

FAST (FULLY AUTOMATED STORAGE TIERING). FAST made a debut in the storage market yesterday (12/08/09). Finally after the market buzz we got a preview of the product in terms of its features, functionality, characteristics, possible shortcomings and use cases. This blog post focuses on the features, the drawbacks and some applications around FAST. By no means is this a comprehensive or an exhaustive list of the above.

Filed Under: Storage Tagged With: "in-the-box", "out-of-box", 5874, Advanced Tiering Storage management, Atmos, ATSM, average I/O, Celerra NS, Centera, CKD, CLARiiON, configuration, CX4, Data center, Drives, FAST, FAST LUN Migrator, FBA, Fibre, flash, Fully Automated Storage Tiering, IOPS, LUN, Mainframe, multitenancy, Naviseccli, Navisphere Analyzer, Open Systems, policy, Private Clouds, Rainfinity file management / VE, Rainfinity File management appliance, Raw capacity, Release 29, SATA, SLA, storage groups, Symcli, Symmetrix Management Console, Symmetrix V-Max Thick provisioning, vblock, virtual provisioning

EMC V-Max FAST: Coming in December … And 2010!

August 17, 2009 By Stephen Foskett Leave a Comment

EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) was one of the most welcome annoucements made during the Symmetrix V-Max introduction. It would be a significant modernization of EMC’s Symmetrix line, and would be one of the first unique features of the Symmetrix V-Max line. But many, including me, were disappointed to learn in May that FAST [...]

Filed Under: Server Virtualization, Storage Tagged With: Compellent, EFD, EMC, Enterprise storage, Enterprise Storage Forum, Everything, FAST, Gestalt IT, LUN, SSD, Symmetrix, thin provisioning, tiered storage, V-Max, virtual provisioning, Virtual Storage

FAST and Furious

April 15, 2009 By Martin Glassborow 4 Comments

Whilst HDS and EMC throw rocks at each other with regards to whether it is better to build custom parts or take things off the shelf and just use custom when you require. I think we should look beyond the hardware and look at what is coming down the line to us.

Filed Under: All, Storage Tagged With: caching, EMC, enterprise, FAST, gestaltit, HDS, LUN, migration, performance, spindles, SSD, V-Max, vmware

Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4

March 31, 2009 By Stephen Foskett Leave a Comment

VMware has cranked out another update to their flagship enterprise product, ESX 3.5. The last update came out in early November, 2008, and included some major new functionality. What’s in store this time to intrigue storage folks? Not much.

Filed Under: All, Server Virtualization, Storage Tagged With: 3.5, 3PAR, 82598, AHCI, ATA, Broadcom, CERC, driver, Emulex, Enterprise storage, ESX, Gestalt IT, HP, i, ICH10, ICH7, ICH9, IDE, Intel, LSI, LUN, MegaRAID, NetApp, NetXtreme, NPIV, PMC, PXE, QLogic, RAID, RDM, SAS, SATA, SCSI, Smart Array, SnapDrive, SSD, StorageTek, Sun, Update 4, Virtual Storage, VMFS, vmware, VSS, Windows, Windows Server 2003

Just another feature…

March 24, 2009 By Martin Glassborow Leave a Comment

Wide-striping is now just another feature; it’s a very important feature but just another feature now. 3Par took wide striping and made it useable; EMC’s historic implementation using metas and hypers was painful and with the large arrays of today it becomes a full time job to performance manage an array. 3Par made it easy and much kudos to them for doing so. I think 3Par’s legacy will be the ease of management that they have brought to the Enterprise array (and thin provisioning).

Filed Under: All, Storage Tagged With: Compellent, cost, DMX, efficiency, EMC, LUN, meta, performance, wide striping

Protocols, Religions and Heresy!

March 7, 2009 By Martin Glassborow Leave a Comment

I’ve just come back from a NetApp training course; good course and recommended for anyone who wants to pick up some storage fundamentals, it covers all the NetApp bases and by the end of it, you should be fairly confident to do pretty much all the day-to-day routine tasks that you might be asked to do as an administrator of a NetApp array.

Filed Under: All, Featured, Storage Tagged With: 10 gigabit, 4 gigabit, CEE, DCE, FC, FCoE, gigabit, iSCSI, iSCSI initiator, LUN, Microsoft, NetApp, network storage, OnTap, SAN, san storage, storage area network, Windows

Don’t Be Blinded by the Flash!

February 16, 2009 By Martin Glassborow Leave a Comment

At the moment, Enterprise Flash disks are all being used as faster spindles; as faster replacements to spinning rust. In the same way that I could remove my laptop/pc drive and replace it with a SSD; I can do it in an array at some extortionate price.I know there’s been a fair amount of tweaking to get them into the various arrays but it doesn’t appear to be the proverbial rocket science! So can we have some rocket science now?

Filed Under: All, Storage Tagged With: EFD, flash, LUN, SSD, Sun, ZFS

Is DMX The Worst Array for Wastage?

February 13, 2009 By Chris Evans Leave a Comment

As part of my work with Storage Fusion, I’m reporting on capacity and utilisation figures for different array vendors. Part of this includes analysing exceptions and wastage. DMX and Symmetrix seem to have more issues than any other platform. Is this by design?

Filed Under: Storage Tagged With: BCV, DMX, DMX-5, EMC, Fibre Channel, LUN, masking, SRDF, Symmetrix, TimeFinder, USP, XP, zoning