• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Download My Free E-Book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts”!

Download My Free E-Book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts”!

April 4, 2017 By Stephen 1 Comment

I’ve got a lot to say about storage, as you might have noticed from reading my blog. So I finally sat down and wrote a book on enterprise storage. Now you can download the e-book for free, thanks to support from my friends at SolarWinds!

The book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts“, is intended as an introduction to the field of enterprise storage for technical audiences. It’s not some grand discourse on how storage ought to be done. Rather, it’s an overview of what you need to know about enterprise storage.

I start with some storage basics: The difference between memory and storage, a discussion of storage media, and the perennial topic of block vs. file storage. Then I talk about scaling storage arrays and the capabilities that enterprise arrays bring to the table. In a dozen pages, you’ll know enough to have meaningful conversations with storage vendors.

Then I shift gears, talking about performance and capacity. I begin with throughput vs. latency and the implications of parallel and serial storage access. Then I go into queueing, caching, and streaming and the difference between asynchronous and synchronous access. This will help you to understand how storage works in production.

The next section focuses on understanding storage usage. Storage administrators spend much of their time measuring and analyzing capacity, and this question of utilization is essential. We then talk about optimization of capacity and the trade-off between capacity and performance. If you’re looking at storage management software, this section is for you.

Finally, I wrap up with a discussion of storage best practices: Managing and monitoring storage, storage system sizing and planning, storage design considerations, and data protection fundamentals. This is a very-brief summary of the rules of thumb I’ve come to rely on after decades in enterprise storage.

The whole book is under 30 pages long, and I am very proud to have produced this concise treatment of enterprise storage. I urge you to download the book and give it a read! And I welcome your feedback!

Note: Somehow, the sidebar entitled “Flash Storage” has the wrong text. Here’s the correct sidebar text: “We’ll be talking a lot about flash memory later. Although this is dynamic, solid-state, and read/write, it has special characteristics that make it ill-suited as primary system memory. Plus, it’s non-volatile. Therefore, even though it’s technically memory, we typically use it as storage!”

This e-book is sponsored by SolarWinds, who also handled the formatting, illustrations, and design. I encourage you to learn more about SolarWinds products and check out their thwack technical community, and especially the Geek Speak blog!

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Nimble Storage Rolls Out an All-Flash Array
  • macOS Sierra Includes a New Apple File System, APFS
  • Storage is Getting Cloudier!
  • Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack
  • ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Everything, Features, Personal Tagged With: e-book, ebook, enterprise storage, PDF, SolarWinds

Primary Sidebar

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny – they should be setting the example of transparency.

Edward Snowden

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro

November 11, 2018

The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

November 9, 2018

Add a Mirror to an Existing ZFS Drive

December 11, 2017

How To Remove Raw Images From Apple Photos and iCloud

July 24, 2017

Recalling An HP MediaSmart Server To Active Duty

July 21, 2017

Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

July 19, 2017

ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

July 10, 2017

Co-Processors, GPGPU, and Heterogeneous Computing

June 26, 2017

What is OCuLink?

June 22, 2017

Storage is Getting Cloudier!

June 21, 2017

Symbolic Links

  • How Reliable are SSDs?

  • Today I Am Retiring From NetApp

  • Atmosic and the Power of RF?

    Tom Hollingsworth

  • How the data science profession is growing in value and impact across the business world

    Dana Gardner

  • IPv6 in Enterprise , Should we still talk about it?

    Orhan Ergun

Featured Posts

Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack

May 2, 2016

How To Keep Your Family Activities In Sync With A Shared Google Calendar

April 18, 2010

Scaling Storage At The Client

November 25, 2013

Thoughts on the Modern Miracle of 3D Printing

July 28, 2015

The Myths of Standardization

December 15, 2011

10 Mysteries The Lost Finale Definitively Settled

May 25, 2010

The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

November 9, 2018

Generation 3 drobo: Fall In Love All Over Again

April 9, 2015

The Fat Middle: Today’s Enterprise Storage Array

August 31, 2014

What More Could Alan Turing Have Accomplished?

October 7, 2012

Copyright © 2019 · Log in