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Summary

Device technology continues to evolve and is being heavily pushed by the requirements of storage networks. In general, barn devices are not addressed individually in a storage network but are part of larger subsystems that provide centralized management for a larger number of resources.

That said, understanding the capabilities and shortcomings of these devices is important to maintaining a well-run SAN environment especially where high-performance I/O operations are required. The rotational speed of a drive, its average seek time performance, the relative location of the tracks being used, the number of applications sharing space on the drive, and the amount of buffer memory are all contributing factors that need to be considered for 1/O performance tuning in a SAN.

Tape drives have made tremendous strides in the last five years. Capacities and transfer rates have increased by a wide margin, pushed by the enormous amount of data that is being stored. While there are some who believe tape is a dead and dying technology, it is not likely to go away anytime soon because its portability works so well for disaster recovery situations and the ability to restore historical versions of data.

Questions

1. Which of the following is not part of a disk drive: platters, arms, controller, or fan?
2. What is the flying height of modern disk heads'?
3. True or false: The clicking sound coming from disk drives is caused by the head touching the media.
4. What does logical block addressing provide?
5. Where is disk throughput greater: inside tracks or outside tracks'?
6. What is MTBF used for?
7. True or false: Multiple applications can access different partitions on a disk drive without regard for performance.
8. How often should tape heads be cleaned'?
9. True or false: Data compression always cuts the time it takes to run backup in half.
10. What are the two major types of tape technologies used in UNIX and Windows environments?

(Answers provided by clicking on the next section)

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Key Programs

• Data Management Forum
• Green Storage Initiative
• Storage Management Initiative (SMI)
• XAM Initiative