Truthful talks to listen while free.
Friday, August 27, 2010
(Personal) Good Pastime – 1
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Hitachi makes storage kit, server kit & networking kit!
Storage kit - http://www.hds.com
Networking kit - http://www.alaxala.com/en
Not all available in all the regions yet. Hope it will be
Monday, June 14, 2010
Hitachi Data Systems Geek Day 0.9
It is all about talking and talking about the greatness of Hitachi storage innovations.
Friday, March 26, 2010
the next Hitachi Data Systems' USP refresh
SearchStorage.com: So what can we expect HDS to focus on with the next big USP refresh?
Yoshida: Well, I'll give you a hint. We've announced ourdynamic provisioning capability. When we implemented dynamic provisioning, we created the concept of a page — you get a pool of RAID groups and divide them up into pages, and do thin provisioning based on the page dynamically because it's all pre-formatted. This page concept is game-changing for us. Now we will manage storage based upon pages rather than volumes and files. That, I think, will be a focus on future products.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1415232,00.html
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Oracle and Informix I/O profiling - 1
This is an interesting subject in database and storage industry. Today number of I/O auto optimization techniques are evolving such as Oracle ASM at the database front and Dynamic/Thin provisioning at the storage front. Manual I/O designing and optimization for database are already a legacy subject?
Sometimes, we have to cope with the legacy. So I start listing the possible physical storage structure of Oracle and Informix.
Trick is the design of LUN (or volume)? Size, RAID level, Number of spindles … for different I/O profiles of database structures. Theory knowledge on database product and experience may come in handy here.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
List of High-End/Enterprise storage systems
One of my customers asked me a list of enterprise storage systems. Interestingly I could list only five :-) This is the full list.
- 3PAR InServ T400
- 3PAR InServ T800
- EMC Symmetrix DMX-4
- EMC Symmetrix V-Max
- HDS USP VM
- HDS USP V
- HP StorageWorks XP20000
- HP StorageWorks XP24000
- IBM DS8100 Turbo
- IBM DS8300 Turbo
- IBM DS8700 Turbo
- NetApp (FAS Series) FAS6040
- NetApp (FAS Series) FAS6080
- Sun StorageTek 9985V
- Sun StorageTek 9990V
IT Infrastructure Solution Evaluation
Selecting an IT infrastructure solution is always a challenge. I was listing some of the possible criteria to differentiate solutions. I have seen many such solution selections, some of them are decided on personal/organizational relationships, political reasons :-). Whichever the key decision criteria, some technical backing is mandatory. May be this list (I will keep on adding/modifying it) would help someone in some way.
1. System Requirements and Compliance – Answers are binary type – (Yes/No)
Sample criteria:-
- Need a certified Unix OS?
- Need to comply with regulations for digital records (Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Securities and Exchange Commission rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA))?
- Need to comply with "EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers”?
- Need to comply with "TIA-942 Datacenter Infrastructure Standard”?
2. Solution Architecture Features – Answers are descriptive – (% marks can be given)
Sample criteria:-
- How far solution logically tired?
- How far solution physically tired?
- How far horizontally scalable?
- How far vertically scalable?
- How far inter-dependencies between building blocks (servers, VMs, storage arrays/trays ...etc) avoided?
- How easy to manage the solution?
- How much control and tracking enabled for the solution?
Sample criteria:-
- How many professionals/customers approved/implemented?
- Presence of similar solution implementations?
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Typical model of a Data Center - local mid/enterprise customer
Above diagram is a typical model of a data center - local mid/enterprise customer.
Local SMB customers developing data center for production and DR sites are indecisive with the network design. Once they decide routers, switches and cabling arrangements, it is hard to change the network architecture here and there.
When it comes to a new installation, customer needs to plan the correct place for the new infrastructure in his data center model.
Installation engineer has three repetitive network related questions for any customer.
- What is your Management network IPs for the new servers/storage?
- What is your User Access LAN IPs (hostnames, gateways, network ...etc) ?
- What is your Private Data (inter server/nodes) network IPs (cluster interconnects …etc)?
Essentially, any data center should have above three Ethernet networks with required expandability, isolation and access control (security).
This is one of the simple facts in data center architecting and there are many more such as edge/core design, end of the rack / top of the rack and list goes on.