Windows Storage Server-Based Systems Step Into 2008

Windows Storage Server is one of the most interesting products from Redmond, a specialized version of Windows Server with integrated storage target capabilities, including iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and single-instance storage (file-level deduplication). Although Windows Server 2008, with its many storage feature updates, was released last year, the updated version of Windows Storage Server was still under construction until last month. But Windows Storage Server 2008 is available to manufacturers today.

Protocols, Religions and Heresy!

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.

Scalability in the cloud

We think of web apps as what belongs in the “cloud”. Virtualization is changing this so that both small and enterprise apps are a fit. To me there can be an internal cloud and an external cloud. As virtualization continues to evolve, we will see the lines blur between both.

P2V strategy for a Physical Server with an iSCSI Partition

Most physical to virtual migrations (P2V) of servers end up as virtual machines with the partitions encapsulated in virtual disk (.vmdk or .vhd) files. But what if the physical server already has a partition that’s configured through an iSCSI connection to the SAN, and what if that’s the same SAN that the new VM will [...]