Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

TechTarget recently uploaded three podcast versions of my SAN School series from Storage Decisions last year.  These are audio-only, but I might be able to dig up the accompanying slides.  If you’re interested in this, please leave a note below or contact me through email.

So without further ado, I present three lessons on SAN storage:

• SAN School Lesson One: Building a SAN - In this first lesson of SAN School, I discuss the different types of storage arrays, switches, and software that make up a storage network.
• SAN School Lesson Two: SAN Architecture and Topology - In lesson two, I discuss the evolution of SANs from standalone entities, to islands and beyond. Discover techniques that can make a substantial difference in the way data is moved and processed, as well as in your company’s consolidation plans.
• SAN School Lesson Three: SAN Management and Security - In this Podcast, I explain what the options are for management tools. I cover array management, change management, virtualization and more to help you manage your environment. 

Real Video: Where the SAN Stands

Curious about the current state of SAN technology?  Stephen Bigelow of TechTarget interviewed me (last summer) about SAN options, and the video is now live on their BitPipe site.

Topics covered include combined iSCSI and FC SANs, ups and downs of modular storage and oversubscribed switches, next-generation SAN management applications, storage virtualization, and best practices for SAN design.

Here’s a snip - the three best practices for SAN design are as follows:

1. Choose reliable high-quality hardware
2. Build dual redundant networks
3. Protect management interfaces

Watch the whole video (it’s 17 minutes long) and let me know what you think!

Even though storage virtualization technologies have been on the market for 20 years or more, and numerous companies have tried to sell it as a product in its own right for at least half that long, many are still unsure of what to do with the technology.  A great new piece by Dave Raffo, News Director at SearchStorage.com, discusses the wide variety of virtualization solutions and the real impact they can have.

Dave called me for this piece, and I was pleased with the question.  Truth be told, there really are compelling benefits from virtualization, but most folks have been waiting for a real “must have” killer application for the technology.  In order for this tech to make the impact it should, we in the industry have to change some of our thinking:

• Storage virtualization means more than just Fibre Channel block aggregation.  There are great applications inside servers and arrays and in the NAS world, too.
• Speaking of NAS, Microsoft DFS is probably the most-implemented storage virtualization product, and just about every NAS array has cool aggregation and migration features.
• Virtualization is a feature, not a product.  HDS has seen the amazing potential for block virtualization in migration and storage flexibility, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
• Storage and server virtualization go well together - so well, in fact, that ESG reports that 24% of those who have implemented the latter are also using the former!

Whether you were at the show or missed it, most of the presentations from Storage Decisions in Chicago are now available for download.  These can be a great resource for internal communication and strategy - share the insights from the show to help make a case for change!

Most of the sessions were worthwhile, but I’d like to highlight a few of the sessions that I attended:

• Rich Castagna’s What Storage Managers Are Buying - always a highlight of the show, Storage Magazine’s survey results
• W. Curtis Preston’s Deduplication: The Perfect Solution to the Perfect Storm - it’s nice to have some sanity brought to the feverish talk of deduplication
• Ray Lucchesi’s Virtual DR - highlighting the value brought to disaster recovery from server virtualization (I missed this at the show)
• Marc Staimer’s Hidden Gotchas of Server Virtualization - I missed this one too, but Marc is brilliant and the content is right on

My two sessions are also available:

• Deep Dive Into Email Archiving Solutions - wherein I present my eleven points of differentiation and extoll the virtues of email archiving
• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Storage Virtualization (In One Hour) - Overstuffed with content from my storage virtualization seminar

Now that my TechTarget Virtual Seminar on email archiving is finished, I wanted to share the questions and answers from the session here.  You will eventually be able to catch a recorded version of the presentation on TechTarget’s searchexchange.com site, and I’ll post when it’s out.

Interestingly, most questions revolved around justifying the purchase of email archiving solutions.  I didn’t capture all of the questions, but will try to summarize the justification-related ones here.

How can a small company archive email?

Although email archiving is expensive, it is critical to almost any organization.  Luckily, there are options for most people.  At the most minimal, you can roll your own archive by “forking” messages into a redundant email system using mail forwarding rules.  Many folks use open source UNIX mail servers for this since they’re especially inexpensive.  Next, consider Exchange 2007’s managed folders as a way to build a basic but fully-supported archiving system.  Another idea is to think about a managed service - many of these are much less expensive to set up than building a solution in house.  Finally, look around and you might find that there are indeed much more affordable products than the “big names” many people have heard about.

Archiving solutions tend to be very expensive for enterprises, what is the trade-off?

Archiving solutions are very expensive indeed. They are difficult to justify on purely cost (IT infrastructure) basis. You must bring the legal and business people to the table and get their buy-in to justify the cost. Simply put, email archiving is expensive but e-discovery is much more expensive. With the backing of the legal organization, the cost justification looks much more positive.

What should be considered to account for email archiving for D/R scenarios?

Another great question! Many managed solutions include integrated DR for the system, but may not capture messages during a disaster or communications interruption. Local solutions tend to rely on conventional DR concepts like synchronous replication. Again, this technology (and especially the telecom to support it) is very expensive, but the cost can be justified for some when balanced against legal risks.

I’ll post more Q&A from my upcoming Storage Virtualization Seminars in Atlanta and San Francisco as well as my Storage Decisions appearances in the coming months.

One of the surest of sure things in the storage industry right now is the potential for email archiving solutions.  There are literally dozens of products out there, with prices and functionality for pretty much any application.  And the growing demand for letigation hold and search has made this an essential technology for any organization - just ask the President!.

So how will you make your choice?  I previously talked about the essential differentiators, and now I’ve refined these into a more complete list I’m calling “The Eleven Essential Elements of Email Archiving”.  I capitalize this because it is the basis for much of my recent writing and speaking:  I just wrapped up an article for Storage magazine on the subject, to be published next month, and spoke on the topic at Storage Decisions in Chicago.

If you missed the show last week (or really really liked it!) and can’t wait for the magazine, may I suggest tuning in tomorrow for TechTarget’s Email and File Archiving Virtual Seminar?  You can catch my session at 1:30 Eastern, with a live Q&A session following.  Or you can tune in at 9 AM for the whole day-long extravaganza, featuring sessions from other good folks from Contoural and elsewhere.

I arrived in beautiful Chicago today for the Storage Decisions show at the Hilton here.  What a great event this is - loads of interested and committed storage users and some of the best minds in the business get together to talk about how we all do this thing we call storage!

I was glad to see Jon Toigo here - while I may not always agree with him, he certainly has vast experience in the storage industry.  And I appreciate his role as the iconoclast of storage.  We both agree that the real action in the industry happens at a whole different layer than just storing and moving bits.

Before sitting down with Jon, I was pleased to chat with my good friends, Curtis Preston and Bill Peldzus, both of whom have, over the years, proved themselves advocates of end user concerns.

I’ll also be looking for Greg Schulz, Mark Staimer, Arun Taneja, and Steve Duplessie and his crew from ESG.  See what I mean about the best minds in the industry?

Of course, the hotel is crawling with TechTarget’s staff, including Rich C and Rich F from Storage magazine, Dave Raffo from SearchStorage.com, and Amy, Lindsey and the folks who run the show.

If you’re here, please do come up and introduce yourself.  If not, there are three more shows scheduled for this year!

Ever been to the TechTarget Storage Decisions conference?  It’s my favorite trade show, since it’s totally focused on end users - instead of being a product showcase, Storage Decisions is all about what real people need to do with their enterprise storage infrastructure.  Sure, there’s lots of technical product talk, but none of the speakers work for the hardware or software companies.  And did I mention that attendance is free?

If this sounds good to you, then now is the time to register for the Chicago show, coming up from May 13 through 15.  If you can attend, I strongly recommend coming in the day before the show so you don’t miss the kickoff on Tuesday morning.

As for me, I’ve got two sessions at the show this year, both on Wednesday the 14th.  Come in the morning for my Deep Dive Into Email Archiving Products, incorporating lots of the ideas I got from my Storage Magazine article and Webcast on the subject.  That afternoon, I’ll be presenting a shortened version of my Storage Virtualization Seminar, covering everything you wanted to know about virtualization technology in an hour instead of a day!  I’ll also be at the Ask the Experts Booth on the show floor on Tuesday evening if you’d like to come up and introduce yourself.

If you can’t make Chicago in May, how about Toronto in June, New York in September, or San Francisco in November?

One of the hits from my TechTarget storage virtualization seminar this week was a discussion of the relative merits of different storage protocols. Sounds deadly, but this can be quite a religious issue for folks, and it generated lively debate. I’m firmly in the “do what works” camp - there is no always-right protocol, and they all can work.

In the interests of all, I’d like to point out two delicious sources of VMware storage protocol wisdom:

An internal paper from VMware’s performance folks titled Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance shows that, as expected, Fibre Channel has the lowest CPU overhead and best overall throughput. But, no surprise to anyone who’s tested alternatives, iSCSI and NFS also work pretty darn well! And you can knock that extra CPU load right down to the FC level with an iSCSI HBA.

Next up is a best practices paper from Network Appliance that is chock full of VMware storage goodness. If you’re curious about the potentials of NFS storage for VMDKs, this paper is a must-read! I’m pretty impressed with what VMware over NFS has to offer.

By the way, my next seminars are June 24 and 26 in Atlanta and San Francisco, respectively. I’ll also be presenting some related content at Storage Decisions in Chicago in May and Toronto in June.

Update:  Marc Farley talks back - isolate your networks, people!

ZFS really piques my interest, so I just had to include it in my TechTarget storage virtualization seminar series.

Here’s a quick primer for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, and thus are wondering why anyone would get stoked over a filesystem!

ZFS (originally “zettabyte file system” but now just ZFS) takes the essential technolgy from file systems and volume managers and stirs it together into one important new way to manage storage.  It’s an open source project started and managed by Sun, using the CDDL license (so Richard Stallman wouldn’t approve).  It’s loved by both Sun and Apple which makes it much more important.

See, ZFS will probably replace UFS (on Sun), HFS+ (on Mac), and every other file system and volume management product out there, especially on these platforms.  And I expect to see it appear on Linux once the tricky bits are resolved (which have to do with licensing not technology…)

ZFS creates a truly flexible, extensible, and full-featured pool of storage across systems and disks.  No more (of the old) arcane syntax, commands, ridiculous GUIs (ahem, Sun), and unnatural limitations of old system storage management.  With ZFS, you add some disks, get some space, and use it.  But it gets cooler than that…

ZFS “zpools” (file systems) live on “vdevs” with striping and optional RAID-Z/Z2 (which is double-parity kinda like RAID-6).  And, get this, every block is protected with checksums to ensure that the rapidly rising incidence of disk errors won’t bite you.  Want capacity?  128-bit addresses mean near-infinite space (in theory).  Oh, yeah, and all blocks are “copy-on-write” for snapshots and clones, something that barely works on most desktops and workstations.

But alas, there are some limitations…  Adding (and especially removing) vdevs is hard (read: maybe impossible) depending on how your storage was set up.  Stacked RAID is impossible, so no “Z+Z2″ for you!  And, until Sun integrates Lustre, there is no clustering support.

And then there’s the fact that Sun and Network Appliance are actively suinging each other over the fact that the technology in ZFS has ended up looking an awful lot like their bread and butter super file system, WAFL.

So there you have it.  If you’ll be in Washington DC on March 4, or Durham NC on March 6 and are interested in this topic, and the wider world of storage and server virtualization, I’d love for you to register and attend this free seminar!