Stepping out of a subway car is an entirely different matter when it's moving!

Mobility of virtual machines is a sticky wicket. As open systems infrastructure becomes increasingly virtualized, administrators and managers wish to use the technology to balance workload, ease migration, and provide better availability. Although technology is improving, actually moving virtual machines is not always a piece of cake. Let’s lay down a baseline of information so we may begin a discussion on the true nature of virtual machine mobility.

Mobility of What?

Let us consider first the question of what exactly is being moved. Systems administrators often focus on “the machine”, which encompasses the operating system and configured state of the virtual machine itself. But the true “mass” of the system is its stored data. Hypervisor vendors have come up with different techniques of moving these two essential elements, reflecting the unique characteristics of each.

• The virtual machine is an instance of an operating system along with its state and configuration. Mobility of virtual machines requires all of this to be preserved, along with any I/O channels. Live migration of virtual machine requires that any active network sessions be maintained, along with RAM content, registers and buffers, and so many other elements.
• The virtual machine image (commonly referred to as “storage”) is the static content addressed by a virtual machine. Typically a VMDK or similar virtual disc image, it must be accessible to the virtual machine at all times. Live migration of a virtual machine image is tricky, but perhaps not quite as complex as live migration of a running operating system.

VMware, Microsoft, and others recognize these 2 distinct elements to be migrated, and have come up with a variety of complementary technologies for each:

• vMotion is VMware’s virtual machine migration solution, and has continually evolved with each iteration of the hypervisor. DRS leverages vMotion to automate mobility. VMware has also created Storage vMotion and Storage DRS as complements to handle mobility of virtual machine images.
• Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration is conceptually similar to vMotion, though newer and less full-featured. With Hyper-V 3.0, Microsoft will introduce Storage Live Migration as a complementary technology akin to Storage vMotion. Most other virtual machine managers also support some form of live migration, though live migration of storage is less common.

Mobility in What State?

One of the key benefits of virtual machine technology is the ability to “run anywhere” on dissimilar hardware. From the very beginning, hypervisors have provided the ability to create a universal virtual machine image that would run on a variety of supported platforms.

This leads to one of the key values of server virtualization in the data center: Disaster recovery. The ability to take a virtual machine image and system state and bring it online after a disaster is a true revolution for open systems IT. The benefits of the single usage of server virtualization technology easily justify the investment to many businesses.

But this sort of “cold” migration seems passé when compared to the live or “hot” migration possible with technologies like VMware vMotion. Live migration is much more difficult, since active client sessions must be preserved in activity must not be greatly interrupted.

This is the second great question that must be asked when considering virtual machine mobility: In what state will the virtual machine be moved? Will it be a cold, powered down image of the system? A suspended or paused operating system image? Or a full, running machine?

Mobility to Where?

Once we have decided whether we are discussing virtual machine migration or movement of storage resources, we must consider the scope of the movement. The ability to move a virtual machine from one member of the cluster to another has now become fairly common. But what about systems that are not related in a cluster? Or that are spread over great distances?

• The nice thing about clusters is that they share resources before and after a virtual machine is moved. It is practical to move the running virtual machine, its storage, or both independently and to expect that performance will not dramatically suffer as a result. The cluster can also preserve network connections, and even I/O state, without much impact on clients or other external elements.
• It is a bit more difficult to move systems within a data center, since one must maintain the I/O connections that might be interrupted. It is fairly trivial to configure an IP network and storage array to allow multiple machines to access the same iSCSI or NFS storage resources. It is a little more difficult to configure Fibre Channel (and, by extension, FCoE) SAN’s to handle this sort of dynamic movement, but it is not impossible. Although moving a running machine from one network port to another could cause client access to be interrupted, technologies like VXLAN allow these sessions to continue, and improved network switching technology should reduce performance impact.
• Moving the machine to a different data center is another matter entirely. Stretching a layer-2 Ethernet LAN or Fibre Channel SAN across a metro or greater distance, while possible, will always be problematic. IP routing is flexible, but it takes time for changes to propagate when live machines are moved. And it is difficult to keep storage in sync over long distances due to the amount of time it takes for information to transit. Again, all of these challenges are being addressed in various ways, but they’re still hard!

Stephen’s Stance

Moving cold virtual machine images from system to system, or even across great distances, is one of the main selling points of server virtualization. But it becomes much more difficult to manage movement of virtual machines that are still running, especially outside cluster or across WAN links. When talking about virtual machine mobility, it is important to consider what is being moved, the state it is in, and where it is going.

Note: This discussion is part of “Building Virtual Infrastructure”, my new seminar series with Truth in IT.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2012. |
Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?


This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Features, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?
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VMFS Upgrade

Once of the good pieces of news to come out is that the VMFS changes in vSphere are minimal.  vSphere 4.0 introduces a minor point release (3.3.0 to 3.3.1) with some subtle changes,  so much so that it’s not really been documented anywhere.  Most of the changes with VMFS are actually delivered within the VMFS driver at the VMKernel level,  this is where most of the I/O improvements and features such as thin provisioning have been delivered as part of vSphere.

Upgrading VMFS was a major step in the upgrade from VMFS 2 to VMFS 3,  good to hear that there are no major drivers to upgrade VMFS as part of your vSphere upgrade.  Any new VMFS datastores created with the new vSphere hosts will of course be VMFS 3.3.1 however this is backwardly compatible with earlier versions of ESX 3.x.  If you really want to move onto the new version of VNFS, format some new datastores and use Storage vMotion to move your VM’s onto the new VMFS 3.3.1 datastores.

Thin Provisioning

Thin provisioning is one of the areas that excites me most about the new vSphere release.  I conducted a very quick survey of my employers development and system test ESX environments recently and found that currently we were only utilising 48% of virtual storage that had been provisioned.  It’s easy to see where immediate savings can be made simply by implementing vSphere and thin provisioning.  I’ll be using that in the cost benefits case for sure!

Thin provisioning is nothing new,  it has been available at the array level for a while now, so one of the big questions is where should I thin provision?  Well that really depends what kind of environment you have I suppose.  Smaller customers will benefit greatly from VMware thin provisioning as they probably don’t own arrays capable of TP.  Bigger companies on the other hand might well benefit from carrying out both as they have both the skill sets and the equipment to full utilise it at both levels.

Chad Sakac has written a superb article entitled “thin on thin where should you do thin provisioning vsphere 4.0 or array level” which goes deep into the new thin provisioning features and the discussions around what’s the best approach. I strongly suggest people give it a read,  it explains pretty much all you need to know.

Storage vMotion

The Storage vMotion in ESX 3.5 had a few limitations which vSphere addresses.  It’s now fully integrated with vCenter as opposed to being command line based in the previous version,  it allows for the moving of a VM between different storage types, i.e. FC, ISCSI or NFS.  One excellent usage of Storage vMotion is the ability to migrate your thick vm’s and change them to thin VM’s.  Perfect for reclaiming disk space and increasing utilisation without downtime, brilliant!

Storage vMotion has also been enhanced from an operational perspective. Previously storage vmotion involved taking a snapshot of a disk,  copying the parent disk to it’s new location and then taking the child snapshot and re-parenting the child disk with the parent.  This process required the 2 x the CPU and memory of the VM being migrated in order to ensure zero downtime.  In vSphere 4.0 Storage vMotion uses change block tracking and a process very similar to how vMotion deals with moving active memory between hosts.  The new Storage vMotion conducts an iterative process scanning what blocks have been changed, each iterative scan should result in smaller and smaller increments and when it gets down to a small enough size it conducts a very quick suspend / resume operation as opposed to using the doubling up resources method that it previously needed to.  Making it faster and more efficient than it was in it’s previous incarnation.

Para Virtualised SCSI

Para Virtualised SCSI (PVSCSI) is a new driver for I/O intensive virtual machines. VMware compare this to the vmxnet adapter,  which is an enhanced and optimised network driver providing higher performance.  PVSCSI is similar, it’s a specific driver that offers higher I/O throughput, lower latency and lower CPU utilisation within virtual machines. Figures discussed by Paul Manning on the recent Vmware community podcast included 92% increase in IOPS throughput and 40% decrease in latency when compared to the standard LSI / BUSLogic virtual driver.

A caveat of this technology is that the guest OS still has to boot from a non PVSCSI adapter (LSI / Buslogic),  you would look to add your PVSCSI adapter for your additional data virtual disks.  Currently only Windows 2003, Windows 2008 and RH Linux 5 have the software drivers to take adavantage of this new adapter.

Update  - Chad Sakac has posted a new EMCWorld I/O Performance comparison of the vSphere PVSCSI adpater vs the LSI SCSI adapter, check out the link for more details.

VMware Storage Book

Paul Manning mentioned on the recent podcast that VMware are planning a book dedicated to Virtualisation and storage in an attempt to consolidate the amount of documentation out there on Storage configuration and best practice.  Currently users need to look through 600 pages of the SAN Config guide and vendor guidelines. VMware would hope to try boil this down to a much more manageable 100 – 150 pages.

If you can’t wait that long, Chad Sakac has written the storage chapter in Scott Lowe’s new vSphere book which I believe is available for pre-order on Amazon

vSphere Storage WhitePaper

Paul Manning who I’ve mentioned in this blog post has written a great 10 page white paper explaining all of these features in more detail along with some of the more experimental features I haven’t mentioned.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMW_09Q1_WP_vSphereStorage_P10_R1.pdf

© Craig for Gestalt IT, 2009. | vSphere 4.0 – What’s new in vSphere Storage
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What is Thin Provisioning?

Thin Provisioning in it’s simplest form is only using the disk space you need.  Traditionally with virtual machines if you create a 500GB virtual disk it will use 500GB of your VMFS datastore. With Thin Provisioning you can create a 500GB virtual disk, but if only 100GB is in use only 100GB of your VMFS datastore will be utilised. Credit to Chad Sakac for the diagrams below.

How does it work in vSphere?

Thin Provisioning is being heralded as something new with vSphere,  when in truth it was already available in VI3.  In VI3 creating a thin provisioned disk involved using vmkfstools and was also not a production supported VM configuration.  Now in vSphere the creation of thin provisioned disks can be carried out from the VI Client (see below) and is a supported production configuration for a VM.

It’s as simple as checking a check box, the results are pretty good to.  Below you can see I have created two thin provisioned VM’s on my new ESX4i host and you can see the provisioned space and the used space stats being shown in the VI Client.

What are the benefits?

The thin provisioning  feature is perfect for my home lab environment where disk space is at a premium, but how does it translate into real world implementations of ESX.  Well I for one have been looking at exactly this to identify what benefits could be achieved within my employers ESX estate. A quick audit found that our development and system test ESX environment was running at 48% disk utilisation,  so straight away thin provisioning would save us 52% on storage capacity used. Paul Manning of VMware mentioned on a recent communities podcast that on average vSphere would save users 50% on storage.   This is possibly not such a big thing when your talking about test environments, but when you move up to production SAN Storage, saving 50% on an expensive SAN array is a very real and tangabile cost saving.  One that people should definately take into account when making a cost benefit case for buying or upgrading to vSphere.

What are the potential downsides?

One of my personal concerns with thin provisioning is the potential overhead on any write activity that would requires the extension of the VMDK file.  To me there is an obvious VMFS operation that needs to take place there which would add to the overall time to complete the disk write.  When there is a requirement to expand a disk, the VMDK files will increase in increments based on the block size of the underlying VMFS partition, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB or 8MB.  So the overhead may be smaller if your VMFS has been formatted with a bigger block size, i.e. for a 16MB write it only has to expand 2 blocks when the VMFS block size is 8MB but would have to expand 16 blocks if it was formatted with the 1MB block size.  I can imagine this percieved overhead could put people off using thin provisioned disks for certain production based environments, especially those where there is a lot of write I/O activity,  SQL Server or Exchange for example.  To counteract that though,  the improvements in the VMware I/O Stack should compensate for this performance overhead.  This could potentially leave you in a situation where you’ve reduced a VM’s storage footprint and still have performance equal to that experienced in VI3,  possibly not a bad trade off.  I’d also expect people running their VMware environment on enterprise SAN technologies from the likes of EMC or NetApp to notice minimal performance impact with thin provisioning as SAN memory caches help take up the strain.

Another downside is if you want to use VMware Fault Tolerance to protect a VM then you cannot use thin provisioned disks.  To be honest this is a small issue as Fault Tolerance protection is most likely going to be on virtual machines that are important to your organisation.  These machines are probably the ones you wouldn’t thin provision in the first place for performance reasons.

Thin provisioning creates it’s own unique problem in that what we’re basically doing here is over provisioning the storage.  You need to keep a very close eye on thin provisioning as it’s quite feasabile that your VMFS datastore could fill up and your virtual machines fall over.  Not what you want to come into on a Monday morning,  or any morning for that matter.  So you need to monitor your storage and ensure that there is enough free space.  One of the simplest ways to do this is through the use of the new alarms in vSphere that allow you to alert on datastore usage and datastore over provisioning.  These should keep you from filling a datastore and killing your VM’s or ESX Servers

One gotcha that you should watch out for is VM swap files, as these are usually stored with your virtual machines vmdk files in the VMFS datastore.  In VI3 the swap file was not deleted when a VM was powered down,  in vSphere the swap file is deleted on power down and recreated when the VM is powered up.  You should be aware of this when over provisioning storage as you could get into a situation whereby you find you can’t power on a VM because there isn’t enough space for the swap file to be created.  This becomes more likely as servers and VM configuration maximum’s increase,  if you have a VM with 20GB of RAM it’s going to need 20GB of disk space for the swap file.  if you have 256GB of RAM in your vSphere host and you allocate it all out to VM’s then you need to think about the 256GB of disk capacity required to service virtual machine swap files.

Storage vMotion

If you’ve already got a VI3 environment then the chances are that your VM’s aren’t thin provisioned,  how on earth are you going to take advantage of this new feature? Well if you have purchased a vSphere edition that supports storage vMotion then you can of course migrate the underlying storage and have it thin provisioned during the move.  This should allow existing VI3 customers to claim back a lot of space,  as I mentioned before I found that our development and test VI environments were only 48% utilised.  If I storage vmotion all those VM’s and thin provision at the same time I will free up about 1.5TB of storage that wasn’t being used in the first place.

I’ve included a video below which demonstrates the Storage vMotion and thin provisoning features in vSphere quite nicely, enjoy!

© Craig for Gestalt IT, 2009. | VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning
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VMware officially launched their next-generation (version 4) enterprise family of products today under the “vSphere 4″ name. As I’ve been doing for the last few major ESX releases, I’m focusing this post on the storage changes present in vSphere 4.

For more information on earlier updates, see my articles:

• Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 2
• Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3
• Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4
  

One first step is VMware’s whitepaper, “What’s New in VMware vSphere 4: Storage“.

Licensing and Availability of Features

The most important change at a glance is in the licensing model for VMware.

• A new low-end “standard” level includes all of the components a small business might need, including thin provisioning of storage, at a very attractive price.
• The “advanced” level includes advances in the area of data protection.
• At the “enterprise” level, live migration of storage is enabled.
• Top of the heap is “enterprise plus”, which enables the intriguing plug-in third-party multipathing support previously rumored.
• Enterprise customers with current support will get vStorage thin provisioning and data protection when they upgrade.

Each step up the licensing ladder enables important new storage features (source: VMware)

Thin Provisioning

One of the most widespread storage features is native thin provisioning. VMware ESX 4 will allocate storage in 1 MB chunks as capacity is used. This isn’t really completely new – similar support was enabled by default for virtual disks on NFS in VI 3, and thin provisioning could be enabled on the command line for block-based storage as well. It was also present in VMware’s desktop products, including my own copy of Fusion. And ESX allows thick-to-thin conversion during Storage VMotion.

The difference with vSphere 4 is that thin provisioning is fully supported and integrated into every version of ESX. Although many storage arrays now also offer thin storage, the addition of native, integrated thin provisioning right in ESX is huge. This alone will be a major capacity (and thus, cost) savings feature! VMware claims 50% storage savings in their lab tests.

Dynamic Expansion of VMFS Volumes

VMFS volumes can now grow (and, in some cases, shrink) online without resorting to spanning to a new LUN. Under vSphere 4, VMFS volumes can grow to take advantage of expanded LUNs (up to 2 TB per LUN). The old method still works as well, and multi-LUN spanned VMFS volumes can grow when any of their LUNs is expanded.

Enhanced Storage VMotion

Like thin provisioning, Storage VMotion has been elevated to first-class status, supported just about everywhere you’d want it. It’s in all the likely spots within vCenter.

Storage VMotion gives serious storage flexibility now, enabling (almost) any-to-any migration of VMFS volumes: Pick up a Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or NFS disk image and move it to another datastore running any of those protocols to convert live. And you can do thick-to-thin provisioning at the same time.

Under the hood, the whole infrastructure has been revised. Storage VMotion leverages VMware’s change block tracking instead of disk snapshots now, speeding up the migration process and reducing the (formerly excessive) memory and CPU requirements of Storage VMotion in 3.5. This is the same technology leveraged by vSphere’s High Availability features, by the way.

Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA)

Only “Enterprise Plus” licensees will get to use it, but the vSphere family also sports a new pluggable storage architecture (PSA) which will initially be leveraged to deliver vendor-specific multipath support. Note that the native multipath support in vSphere continues to be round-robin fail-over only – it will not load balance I/O across multiple paths or make more intelligent decisions about which paths to use.

vSphere 4′s Pluggable Storage Architecture allows third-party developers to replace ESX’s storage I/O stack (source: VMware)

As you may gather from this VMware illustration (but would probably miss since it’s not all that comprehensible), there are two classes of third-party plug-ins:

1. Basic path-selection plugins (PSPs) will merely optimize the choice of which path to use, ideal for active/passive type arrays
2. Full storage array type plugins (SATPs) will allow load balancing across multiple paths in addition to path selection for active/active arrays

EMC also announced PowerPath/VE for vSphere, integrating their popular multi-platform path management software directly into ESX. It’s not clear at this point whether PowerPath will require an Enterprise Plus license (or if it will come with one) or if it will work with all editions, but I’m sure that will be clarified soon. My EMC contacts do tell me that PowerPath/VE is licensed on a per-socket basis (like VMware of yore) and that EMC sales reps have some room to get creative on licensing.

iSCSI Software Initiator Enhancements

It’s harder to claim it as a new feature, but the iSCSI software initiator has also been tweaked and tuned to use less CPU time and deliver better throughput. The iSCSI configuration process has also been smoothed out so one no longer needs to have a live Service Console connection in order to communicate with an iSCSI target. And changes made in the general tab are now global, so they’ll propagate down to each target. Bi-directional CHAP is also added, so the target can now be authenticated in addition to the initiator.

vSphere also includes a paravirtualized iSCSI driver (PVSCSI) which works like vmxnet to present a higher-performance iSCSI adapter within certain supported guest OSes.

More information on multipathing iSCSI can be found at Yellow Bricks and in Chad Sakac’s mega-post on the topic.

High-Performance I/O

vSphere really pours on the I/O power. They claim a 3x increase, to “over 300,000 I/O operations per second”, but mentioned in the launch that they’ve gotten to 400,000 in some workloads. This is really amazing, and if it’s true in real-world use means that VMware ESX can now host just about any application you can think of.

It’s funny, but just a few weeks before the announcement VMware’s Chief Data Center architect, Scott Davis, told me at Storage Networking World that vSphere would double I/O performance. I thought this was a bold statement at the time, but VMware went further in their official documents, claiming 3x improvement. Now we have an on-stage admission that it could be up to 4x! This is serious stuff, folks: Can VMware really do 400,000 IOPS?

One question is whether these IOPS improvements require the new VMDirectPath I/O for Storage, which binds a physical Fibre Channel HBA to a single guest OS, or if they’re generalized across all systems.

vCenter Improvements

vCenter now includes more storage information:

• Each VM and ESX in the inventory has a tab showing storage information and allowing users to set alarms on storage use – setting capacity alarms becomes extremely important when thin provisioning is used!
• vCenter inventory has a view showing datastore details
• There’s also a nice storage topology map

Data Protection APIs

VMware also enhanced the APIs for consolidated backup (VCB) into “vStorage Data Protection”. Available only with Advanced or Enterprise licenses, these APIs allow enterprise backup vendors to develop specific integration with VMware without VCB in the middle.

Conclusion

vSphere is loaded with storage improvements, though many seem like incremental updates rather than new features. Admins will welcome thin provisioning support, and the full integration of Storage VMotion is certainly welcome, but I think the changes to vCenter will be most noticeable. I’ll be looking into EMC’s PowerPath/VE and the amazing I/O improvements as we move forward and learn more about the next ESX!

Duncan Epping posted much more vSphere Linkage on his Yellow Bricks blog if you’re interested in non-storage features.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family
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TechTarget's annual Storage Product of the Year awards have been announced!

The mainstream media is still digesting the Oscar awards, but we in storage had our own announcement this week: TechTarget’s (now PDF) Storage magazine announced their Storage Products of the Year award for 2008.

Without further ado, the awards and my reaction!

Disk and disk subsystems

A category of much annual contention, the gold award went deservedly to the�BlueArc Titan 3200. BlueArc’s product range is small, with just a few systems on offer, but the 3200 was indeed a major upgrade. The bronze-placed�Hitachi Data Systems�AMS 2000�might easily have taken the top award as well, however, introducing major advancements in the midrange market. Taking silver was the news-making�Intel X25-E SATA Solid-State Drive.

The placement of disk drives in the same category as SAN and NAS storage systems, however, highlights something of a categorization problem for this award. Should Seagate, STEC, and Intel really be battling it out with the very systems that use their drives? I’d like to see separate component and array categories in the future.

Overlooked finalists in this category were EMC’s CLARiiON CX4, IBM’s XIV,�Isilon’s X-Series, 3PAR’s T-Class, and�Xiotech’s Emprise 7000. Any of these might have placed, and 3PAR, IBM, and Xiotech might have taken gold with a different set of judges. Looking at this broad list, however, highlights the difficulty in this award. BlueArc, HDS, and Intel deserved praise, but the rest should be recognized as well!

Storage management tools

VMware�takes a deserved gold award for�Storage vMotion, certainly the MVP in storage software this year if one considers adoption and impact.�Silver went to NetApp’s Deduplication�technology, the first (and still only) deduplication certified for primary storage use.�Bronze went to CloudNAS from�Nirvanix, an addition that allowed the storage service provider to offer services using standard NAS protocols.

EMC’s integration of VMware with ControlCenter 6.1 deserved recognition as well, as did Mimosa’s updated NearPoint 3.5. One really overlooked product is SANPulse Technologies‘ SANlogics 2.0 – go check it out and let me know if you think it deserved to place!

Networking equipment

If you haven’t experienced Riverbed’s gold-winning Optimization System (RiOS) 5.0, you might not understand just what the big deal is. 5.5 might win again next year, with solid updates to accelerate even tough WAN traffic like encrypted MAPI and signed SMB.

The silver award went to Brocade’s DCX Backbone, but time will tell if this is a wiser choice than rival Cisco’s updated MDS. I suppose if we compare only the updated DCX to what little Cisco did to the MDS last year, Brocade clearly gets the nod. But I might have skipped both products to let�IBM’s�updated�SAN Volume Controller (SVC)�have a place on this list. It added thin provisioning last year and remains IBM’s best storage product.

Bronze-winning�NetEx HyperIP 5.5�could easily have taken top honors – it’s a real value for the money in WAN acceleration! Compared to Riverbed on features it doesn’t look like much, but compare price quotes and see if your head doesn’t spin!

Backup and disaster recovery software and services

VMware�continued their roll with a gold medal for�Site Recovery Manager 1.0. Like Storage vMotion, SRM came out strong to widespread acclaim, and is likely to have a major impact in the coming years. A solid choice.

FalconStor�claims silver with their�Network Storage Server (NSS) 6.0�platform. I’m puzzled by the placement of this product in the backup and DR category, but what can you do? Bronze went to�Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange, a product I don’t know much about. Must be good, though!

Backup hardware

Data Domain�is everywhere lately, and their�DD690 Deduplication Storage System�picked up a gold medal here. I hear that these things are selling like crazy, though, which I’m sure Data Domain is happier with than the award!�Permabit�took silver with their�Enterprise Archive Data Center Series. Lots of folks who know more about the backup space than I have had good things to say about it, as well as the bronze-winning�Quantum DXi7500.

Although backup isn’t my thing, I wanted to point out that�Cleversafe deserved mention with their, well, clever�Dispersed Storage Network.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Reacting to the 2008 Storage Products of the Year
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