Enterprise Storage

• HDS’ HAM-Fisted Announcement did not impress, with many wondering (So Long And Thanks For All The Fish) what exactly the company had announced. But by week’s end (USP-V and Hitachi High Availability Manager) we had figured out How It Works and even had some time for jokes.
• What should be in the cloud? How about some profiling questions nobody’s asking re: cloud applications
• Want your own iSCSI array? StarWind has responded to your comments, 2TB at no cost!
• What Is a Backup? Some great discussion (Backup to the Future) and a solution: When Is A Copy A Backup?
• Howard Marks is also doing a great job with backup and archiving: See Of Backups and Archives, Storing Archival Data – Part Deux, and All Archive Data is Not Alike
• I joined Chris Evans, Marc Farley, and Greg Knierieman for Infosmack Episode #6 – HDS USP-V announcement, EMC non-competes and changes at VMworld
• ‘Nuff said: And people wonder why I hate HP, Google Could Learn a Thing or Two from EMC, Virtualization: Why Microsoft cares

Misc

• Tim O’Reilly took a look at a technology I just didn’t get, but changed my mind with Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?
• Want a crazy car to get your mind off of GM and Chrysler? How about the 500-hp Ariel Atom 500 V8
• A wonderfully long and detailed article: Lessons from the Vaccine–Autism Wars
• Finally, take a look at this amazing video: Louis CK “Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy”

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From The Pile: May 30, 2009
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Enterprise IT

• Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog.
• Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into Vista? – A group post for Gestalt IT suggesting that VMware’s tiered licensing strategy for the vSphere 4 family might cause anguish for customers
• Infosmack Episode 2 – EMC, David Donatelli and Non-Compete Agreements – I joined the StorageMonkeys Infosmack podcast to discuss EMC, Dave Donatelli, and con-compete agreements with Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley of 3Par and StorageRap, and Tony Asaro of the INI Group
• IT utilities, the biggest game in town – Chris Mellor of The Register suggests that the biggest IT vendors are positioning to lock up the IT market.
• The Non-Compete Clause Debate….. - Steve Duplessie muses on the pros and cons of non-compete agreements and what they mean for the IT industry
• Who’s the pot & who’s the kettle? - W. Curtis Preston reacts to the skirmishes between Tony Asaro and the EMC bloggers
• The Only VMware-certified NAS in its Category: Why the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200r Will Resonate with Small Businesses - Jerome Wendt expands on the Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200r
• Don’t focus too much on costs, cloud computing is about business agility - CapGemini reminds us that cloud computing isn’t just about reducing costs
• What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing - The Google Enterprise blog lays down some of the hard facts about building a cloud on your own
• Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System - Chris Evans provides one of the best reviews yet of Sun’s Amber Road open source-based storage systems
• Brocade Pokes Cisco in the Eye, Switches for IBM - A great headline and solid reporting by Om Malik on one of the first reactions to Cisco UCS
• TheInfoPro: Analysis or Marketing? - StorageMonkeys continues their probing of the storage analyst community
• A “Tweeterview” with Stephen Foskett, Nirvanix Consulting Director - Sunshine interviews me about Nirvanix, storage, and my new role

Apple

• Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail – A deep, long post on GMail, IMAP, Mac OS X Mail, and how to get all three to play nicely together.
• Monitor Your Mac Remotely With iStat for iPhone - I love iStat for Mac OS X and the iPhone and had been meaning to write a review. This AppleBlog post is just about what I might have written!

Life

• There Goes Chrysler – NPR’s awesome Planet Money blog reported the breaking news of Chrysler’s bankruptcy
• The Venture Capital Math Problem and The Venture Capital Math Problem (continued) – Fred Wilson points out that there can be no such thing as unlimited venture capital
• Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable? – Has pervasive wireless Ethernet made wired ports unnecessary?
• Interview with Micah Baldwin, Father of FollowFriday – Micah calls me out as someone who is doing interesting things on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
This post was categorized as Everything. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Does data encryption throw storage efficiency out the window? Not always!

One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system.

Many of the advances in capacity utilization put into production over the last few years rely on deduplication of data. This key technology has moved from basic compression tools to take on challenges in the fields of replication and archiving, and is even moving into primary storage. At the same time, interconnectedness and the digital revolution has made security a greater challenge, with focus and attention turning to encryption and authentication to prevent identity theft or worse crimes. The only problem is, most encryption schemes are incompatible with compression or deduplication of data!

Incompatibility of Encryption and Compression

Consider a basic lossless compression algorithm: We take an input file consisting of binary data and replace all repeating patterns with a unique code. If a file contained the sequence, “101110″ eight hundred times in a row, we could replace the whole 4800-bit sequence with a much smaller sequence that says “repeat this eight hundred times”. In fact, this is exactly what I did (using English) in the previous sentence! This basic concept, called run-length encoding, illustrates how most modern compression technology functions.

Replace the sequence of identical bits with a larger block of data or an entire file and you have deduplication and single-instance storage! In fact, as the compression technology gains access to the underlying data, it can become more and more efficient. The software from Ocarina, for example, actually decompresses jpg and pdf files before recompressing them, resulting in astonishing capacity gains!

Now let’s look at compression’s secretive cousin, encryption. It’s only a small intellectual leap to use similar ideas to hide the contents of a file, rather than just squashing it. But encryption algorithms are constantly under attack, so some very smart minds have come up with some incredibly clever methods to hide data. One of the most important advances was public-key cryptography, where two different keys are used: A public key used for writing, and a private key to read data. This same technique can be used to authenticate identity, since only the designated reader would (in theory) have the key required.

Cryptography has become exceedingly complicated lately in response to repeated attacks. Most compression and encryption algorithms are deterministic, meaning that identical input always yields the same output. This is unacceptable for strong encryption, since a known plaintext attack can be used with the public key to reveal the contents. Much work has focused on eliminating residues of the original data from the encrypted version, as illustrated brilliantly on Wikipedia with the classic Linux “tux” image. The goal is to make the encrypted data indistinguishable from random “noise”.

What happens when we mix these powerful technologies? Deduplication and encryption defeat each other! Deduplication must have access to repeating, deterministic data, and encryption must not allow this to happen. The most common solution (apart from skipping the encryption) is to place the deduplication technology first, allowing it access to the raw data before sending it on to be encrypted. But this leaves the data unprotected longer, and limits the possible locations where encryption technology can be applied. For example, an archive platform would have to encrypt data internally, since many now include deduplication as an integral component.

Why do we prefer compression to encryption? Simply because that’s where the money is! If we can cut down on storage space or WAN bandwidth, we see cost avoidance or even real cost savings! But if we “waste” space by encrypting data, we only save money in the case of a security breach.

A Glimmer of Hope

I had long thought this was an intractable problem, but a glimmer of hope recently presented itself. My hosting provider allows users to back up their files to a special repository using the rsync protocol. This is pretty handy, as you can imagine, but I was concerned about the security of this service. What happens if someone gains access to all of my data by hacking their servers?

At first, I only stored non-sensitive data on the backup site, but this limited its appeal. So I went looking for something that would allow me to encrypt my data before uploading it, and I discovered two interesting concepts: rsyncrypto and gzip-rsyncable.

rsync is a solid protocol, reducing network demands by only sending the changed blocks of a file. But, as noted, compression and encryption tools change the whole file even if only a tiny bit has been altered. A few years back, the folks behind rsync (who also happen to be the minds behind the Samba CIFS server) developed a patch for gzip which causes it to compress files in chunks rather than in their entirety. This patch, called gzip-rsyncable, hasn’t been added to the main source even after a dozen years, but yields amazing results in accelerating rsync performance.

The same technique was then applied to RSA and AES cryptography to create rsyncrypto. This open source encryption tool makes a simple tweak to the standard CBC encryption schema (reusing the initialization vector) to allow encrypted files to be sent more efficiently over rsync. In fact, it relies on gzip-rsyncable to work its magic. Of course, the resulting file is somewhat less secure, but it is probably more than enough to keep a casual snooper at bay.

Both of these tools are similar to modern deduplication techniques in that they chop files up into smaller, variable-sized blocks before working their magic. And the result is awesome: I modified a single word in a large word document that I had previously encrypted and stored at the backup site and was able to transfer just a single block of the new file in an instant rather than a few minutes. My only real issue is the lack of integration of all of these tools: I had to write a bash script to encrypt  my files to a temporary directory before rsyncing them. I wish they could be integrated with the main gzip and rsync sources!

If you are interested in trying out these tools for yourself, and if you use a Mac, you are in luck: Macports offers both tools as simple downloads! Just install macports, type “sudo port install gzip +rsyncable” to install gzip with the –rsyncable flag, then type “sudo port install rsyncrypto” and you’re done! I’ll post more details here if there is interest.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Some highlights from the calendar:

• The Storage Decisions conferences in New York and Chicago remain, but the third half-day has been eliminated, leaving them at two days each.
• New this year are one-day Storage Decisions Summits in San Francisco and Toronto. These are multi-track, multi-speaker events, but are more focused, with only the best speakers and topics.
• Although the one-day seminar speakers and dates have not been finalized, newly-independent industry superstar, W. Curtis Preston, appears to be heading up the lions share, with dozens of dates focused on backup and data deduplication.

I’ll post more details when they become available. But until then, check the schedule and mark your calendars. These excellent events are well worth your time!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | TechTarget Posts 2009 Event Schedule
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• How to improve the receptivity of the e-mail archieve message to management to overcome the biases you mentioned? Consider what management is interested in most: They don’t necessarily care about email archiving, but they will respond to well-presented solutions to business objectives like cost avoidance for litigation and e-discovery or future reduced spending on IT infrastructure (storage).
• How do you get things moving when Legal is sponsor and can demonstrate that one lawsuit discovery failure will be the same cost as the project? This would be an ideal scenereo. Legal probably already understands the high cost of e-discovery and potential risk of adverse judgement. Now demonstrate the ways that email archiving can help. But be realistic – an email archiving app will help with e-discovery, but is definitely not a complete solution. You will still need policy and process for hold and discovery, and may even need additional e-discovery tools.
• Have you seen standard or default retention periods for email, and how are they determined? I would not want to suggest standard or “rule of thumb” retention periods. In my experience with many organizations, I have seen such a wide variety of carefully considered retention schedules that I have come to believe that there is no such thing as a standard. However, I would like to suggest not making a too-short maximum (say, less than three months) or else you will drive end users to underground archiving to get around the policy. Such a short retention period can work for certain classes of messages (company picnic, lunch invites, mass mailings), but I can’t imagine a business where no one would need to keep messages longer. Try to be realistic in setting your retention, balancing productivity with compliance. Setting retention periods is an exercise in consensus building, with representatives from IT, Legal, HR, Compliance, and others each contributing their own needs. It’s doable, though – I do it for a living!
• How many years back do people hold on to mail typically? Most organizations lack standards or policies for retention, so their typical retention varies based on employee actions. When they do have retention policies for email, they tend to classify messages (by organization or user, keywords, or through user action) into a few “buckets” with appropriate retention for each. Most have short retention (3 to 9 months) for some content, and longer retention (on the order of a few years) for other types. Most also have a “keep forever” category for special record types.
• Do you have an opinion on whether journaling is better or not for meeting legal requirements? Most legal groups desire the most complete set of messages possible. Both journaling and log shipping should meet this need.
• Have you seen much use for email archiving for supporting Audit to prove that an event was reviewed and approved? Many organizations use email as part of their workflow. In these cases, maintaining a complete set of messages is critical for audit and compliance. Many certainly do use email archives for this purpose, while others prefer to route such approvals to other content management systems to maintain these records.
• Is there a legal argument to be made that getting rid of pst files and having a central archive will help with privacy law issues? Decentralized personal archives like PST files are a privacy nightmare waiting to happen – they are highly mobile, can be copied and viewed easily, and tend to “live” on theft-prone devices like laptops and portable drives. Replacing PST files with a centralized archive has many many benefits, and the reduced risk of privacy breaches is certainly among these. However, most mail clients still maintain offline caches of mail server (and archive) data, so simply replacing PST with an archive will not elimate the privacy risk.
• You might want to mention that accelerating volumes of stored email are not necessarily bad because it is electronic and therefore searchable. Offline stuff dumped into file servers with no meta data is actually more of a nightmare because no one knows who created it or why it is needed (or not). Adding structure to electronic stored information is always valuable, and email archives certainly do make that data much more organized and searchable, along with enabling retention policies to be applied (assuming they exist!) Unstructured data on file servers is indeed a nightmare, and can pose a serious risk. There are other tools to tackle this type of data, however, and they might do a better job than relying on an email archive as a primary repository of critical records.
• Can you elaborate on user training needs? I was under the impression that changes to the end user were minimal. The amount of impact an email archiving system has on end users can vary from minimal to significant, based mostly on how much user interaction is desired for classification. However, even the most unobtrusive system is likely to change certain aspects of user behavior, from PST files to searches to stubbing and deletion of messages. Therefore, training is probably needed with every email archiving implementation.
• Litigation holds can last for YEARS !! Tape is DEAD especially to try to rebuild mail boxes. Tape remains non-dead for certain applications like backup, despite years of prognostication. However, you are correct that e-discovery of data on tape is incredibly difficult and time-consuming for most systems. There are tools to help, but an online archive is vastly more flexible and speedy than recovering backup data from tape. I’ve seen backup-sourced e-discovery costs rise into the millions of dollars, too!
• How important is classification in an archive solution? The importance of classification depends on the business objectives that an archive is meant to serve. However, most implementations will require at least some message classification mechanism in order to determine how long different messages should be retained, since a one-size-fits-all retention schedule is unlikely to meet anyone’s needs. Therefore, it is important to begin developing an overall record retention policy for email when implementing an email archive, and to consider how messages will be classified. Classification of email messages is a complicated topic – worthy of its own webinar at least!
• We are a globally dispersed organization which increases the complexity and cost. Do you feel implementation is an all or nothing scenario or does it make sense to focus on domestic and large campuses and then in a second phase chase funding for remote and international sites? Dispersed organizations face many unique technical challenges, especially when implementing email archiving. Certainly it is better to have some archiving than none at all, but unless your retention requirements are also segmented by geography, focusing on only a single location can be risky. I’d definitely suggest starting with the biggest fish, but you will probably have to get to everyone fairly soon afterward.
• Are there solution that do both email and file data (shared folders) archiving? Yes, some email archiving products also do file archiving. However, some choose to implement these functions separately to keep one from standing in the way of the other – it’s more important to have some archiving than to wait and wait for a complete solution.
• Not to mention, extremely short retention periods for email messages will NOT allow an enterprise to comply with litigation hold needs… Once a litigation hold is ordered, all retention schedules for covered data must be suspended. Therefore, a short retention schedule does not necessarily preclude compliance with a legal hold order. However, unreasonably short retention will not look good in court!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Answering Your Email Archiving Questions
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

If you have experience with this topic, I’d appreciate a comment or email so I can pick your brain!  Whether you’re a vendor or end user, let me know what you think about this topic – maybe you’ll see your name in lights in the April or May issue of Storage Magazine!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Input Needed: How to Back Up Big Filesystems?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Google’s “enhanced” (read “expanded”) storage service amounts to very little. For $20 a year you can have 6 GB of extra space for GMail and Picasa Web Albums. Since the company had been upgrading everyone’s storage for free, this enhancement amounts to a real rollback of expected service enhancement. And it’s practically useless. I’ve been using GMail for years and am only using 280 MB of storage – I don’t need the 2.8 GB they currently offer me, let alone another 6 or more. And I’ve got my own online gallery, so I haven’t used Picasa Web Albums. The one area this might be useful for, Google Docs, isn’t currently covered. And this is nowhere near the “GDrive” rumors of last year! Wake me when it has an (official) drive mapping feature…

Microsoft’s SkyDrive was the other big announcement this week. It offers “drag and drop” uploads, but only from within Internet Explorer. Although the development team thought a real drive mapping in Windows would be a good idea (it’s buried in the comments), it’s not there yet. Although it’s arguably more useful than Google’s “service”, since it can be shared and can store arbitrary file types, SkyDrive still falls short of my needs.

Most other online storage services also fall short, offering special-purpose storage instead of allowing me to store whatever I want. Carbonite and Mozy (and others) are online backup; SmugMug (and Google’s Picasa and lots of other services) do photos. XDrive, the pioneer of online storage, still exists as a service of AOL. It requires a desktop client install, but does offer drive mapping. But XDrive has lots of customer complaints on the web, which makes me worry…

There are other options, too. Yahoo Briefcase offers a staggering 30 MB of space! AllMyData offers “unlimited” storage and backup for $5 per month. Box.net, iomega’s iStorage, MediaMax, and StrongSpace all seem limited to web or other weird interfaces. eSnips.com is kind of a community like MySpace for storage. Mofile seems pretty limited. Omnidrive seems best so far, but it’s still in beta and I worry about the company’s stability. Most web hosting companies also offer storage, often through the painfully slow WebDAV protocol, though Go Daddy’s Online File Folder seems interesting.

One service that really stands out to me as offering just the right mix of end-user focus, usability, and solid support is Apple’s oft-maligned .Mac service. Their iDisk is a mapped drive from any computer, and even though it’s primarily a service for Mac users, it does support Windows, including drive mapping.

So why can’t Google offer this kind of service? Why can’t Microsoft? Or Yahoo? Maybe because too many people would use them, gobbling up expensive capacity and bandwidth? Or maybe because mapped drives don’t have the ability to show ads?  Maybe people just don’t want to store their files online (sorry again, Hu)…

Or I guess I could just get a Mac…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Online Storage? Hardly!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Seriously, you gotta cheer when a “big gorilla” app like NetBackup adds this kind of technology, though. CDP and deduplication were great ideas but needed n application to focus them, and data backup is an excellent place to apply them.

And although the press release doesn’t highlight it, the application-specific recovery enhancements look especially tasty to me. NetBackup leverages VCB in VMware but can do file-level restore, which is awesome. And it can also do document-level or full-database restore in SharePoint from the same image. Over in Exchange land, it claims to be able to restore from snapshots instead of the backup image, speeding (all too frequent) recoveries.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | NetBackup 6.5 Spreads the Love Around
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

1. Offline Storage becomes extinct for most uses

Mark claims that “he cost/availability of network bandwidth, the cost of the people side of tape storage and handling, disk cost declines, multi-site DR, data de-duplication and many more factors” will kill tape eventually. Let’s take some of these in turn…

Network bandwidth, DR, and related tech

Like Hu Yoshida, who claimed we home users would rely on service providers rather than have a terabyte in our home, Mark assumes plentiful and cheap bandwidth. But this is simply not the case for many organizations – bandwidth is one of the biggest IT costs, especially for small companies, and other issues like latency and availability abound. Even with technical fixes like WAFS compression and acceleration, many organizations will not be able to replicate much of their storage for the time being. Unless there is some new blossoming of bandwidth, I don’t see this changing.

Disk cost declines

Yes, disk costs are going down. But tape costs are, too! Today’s tapes are still 1/3 the cost of the same space on disk and have remained thus for the last decade. Tape drives are still expensive, but considering that most organizations still use a “weekly full” schedule, the cost of media becomes their big concern, and tape has disk beat hands-down. Unless we all give up on daily backups for data recovery and start using snapshots, tape will not die. And, although I fervently believe in the rightness of this snapshot-based strategy, I doubt it’ll happen for some time to come.

People costs

This is always the problem with backup systems. Not so much the cost of people, but the reliability of human tape handling. Pour in enough money to make tape handling reliable and you’re pouring a lot into it indeed! But people costs are notoriously hard for IT to recognize, let alone manage or reduce. I don’t see this killing tape any more than it could kill the multitude of other time sinks in the IT world.

2. Flash becomes a viable Tier 1 storage option

Didn’t I just cover this the other day? Here’s the summary – solid-state disks are still way too expensive and way too short-lived for enterprise use. Put some cache in front of a disk and forget SSD. Note to Mark: This is exactly what EMC did in 1992 when they turned the Orion into the Symmetrix.

As for the OLTP angle – I agree that this one application of storage technology needs high performance. And I agree that NAND flash is cheaper than RAM and other technologies. Maybe use NAND as a cache? Or hybrid drives? But this is only a small component of enterprise data.

3. High Capacity/Low Cost Disk becomes the principle “bulk storage” medium

I can’t argue this one. Big fat slow disks are here in the enterprise space and are here to stay. Auto-magic virtualization tech will put the right data on them, and we’ll all hold hands and sing.

4. FCoE SANs become the FC evolution path for OLTP storage

Let’s see – Mark is predicting that FCoE beats FC and iSCSI in the high-end enterprise market. Well, I suppose you could claim that future versions of FC will run over Ethernet hardware, but FCoE?!? That dog is just now getting out of bed – let’s give it more than 3-5 years to rule the world, ok? Oh, and iSCSI still works great to let’s not count it out!

5. Web Storage Applications move away from SCSI and File System protocols and become connected principally via “Object” protocols (e.g. SOAP, REST)

I really wish this would happen. Mark cites Amazon.com’s S3 and EMC’s Documentum as examples of object stores. I think this prediction is really up in the air. I’m glad he didn’t specify exactly which object storage protocol will win, because I suspect it’ll be something we haven’t heard of yet. But I think he’s right that increasingly modular and relational applications found in this “Web 2.0″ world will definitely prefer object storage instead of plain filesystems. Hopefully, enterprise applications will follow, and we’ll all laugh about the old days when we used to try to manage data with no metadata…

So I guess I don’t agree with Mark on a lot of these predictions. I really like what he has to say, for the most part. But it just doesn’t seem realistic to expect them all to come about in 3 to 5 years.

But hey, as they say, opinions are like belly buttons – everyone has one. Even me! Well, actually, I hear “they” use a different body part in this idiom, but this is a family blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Thoughts on Mark Lewis’ Future Storage
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

VCB was a good idea, but implementation experience found it lacking. For one thing, it didn’t support iSCSI, which is a major omission in the world of Windows and VMware! This alone probably accounted for much of the slow uptake of the feature. I can imagine Marc Farly is warming up the blogging software as we speak!

But there were other problems, now fixed. It couldn’t recognize a LUN if it was presented with a different LUN ID than it had on the virtual machine, and it left old snapshots hanging around if the backup failed. I don’t use it, but users complained to me about these issues.

Note that you have to upgrade VirtualCenter and ESX Server at the same time, which may not appeal to everyone…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Big Little VMware Update (VCB and iSCSI!)
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.