Data is getting bigger, virtualization is expanding, and data protection applications are ill-prepared to deal with it. This much we can all agree on. But Symantec’s introduction of “V-Ray,” which the company describes as “X-Ray vision into … virtual environments” has just left me puzzled. Is this “marketecture” or some sort of technology or product?
Storage Foundation
The Bridge: Veritas Thin (Provisioning) API
Thin provisioning needs communication to function, and zero page reclaim is only the array side of the story. WRITE_SAME helps reduce I/O load, but the server needs to use it. Wouldn’t it be nice if the operating system, file system, or volume manager would use these commands to help recover capacity?
Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
On the storage side, arrays can only use the information they have to deallocate: The data that’s stored on them. They don’t know what application is using it, what file system it is. But, somewhere along the line, someone had a big idea and said, “wait a second, what if we look for pages that are all zeros?” We’ll talk about pages a bit later, but for now, let’s talk about zeros. A zero is kind of a smoke signal coming up from over the hills that says, “there’s nothing valuable here.”
Symantec’s Thin API: The Plot Thickens
Last week, I lauded Symantec for introducing an API in Storage Foundation which will interact with the thin storage capabilities of supported arrays. Since then, I’ve learned more about this capability, and I am writing this update to share that knowledge. As I noted last week, the press release was a bit hard to follow and […]