File Management

The Abstracts

Contemporary Data Protection Best Practices With iSCSI Storage Arrays

Network-Attached Storage (NAS) moves file awareness into the storage system, providing consistent service to all application platforms. File awareness enables NAS to take a more active part in protecting data than block-based storage, but also creates unique challenges. This tutorial categorizes threats to NAS data, and presents the options available for protecting it. Because NAS systems have become a favorite locus for iSCSI block server implementations, the tutorial also examines how iSCSI block storage can take advantage of NAS data protection techniques. The target audience is individuals whose responsibilities include data protection in organizations whose enterprise data storage strategies include NAS and NAS-based iSCSI.

Comparisons of Different WAN Acceleration Technologies

Access to data hosted in central data centers has been a continuous challenge for application users in remote branch offices. WAN-related performance problems associated with bandwidth and latency usually pressure IT managers to deploy file and application servers in the branch offices themselves, in order to maintain application performance and end-user productivity. But maintaining and backing-up remote server and storage assets outside of the data center is not only expensive, it also creates significant security risks. This session explores new approaches involving disk-based deduplication, TCP protocol optimization, and application-level chattiness mitigation to address this long-standing productivity vs. cost-efficiency issue. We will compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of these new approaches with more traditional methods of addressing this problem.

• Understand why many applications perform poorly over the WAN in an environment with high atency and/or limited bandwidth.
• Examine the pros and cons of compression, caching, adding WAN bandwidth, and understand why none of these measures adequately solves the essential problem.
• Explore how TCP protocol optimization, application-level chattiness mitigation, and new disk-based deduplication approaches can dramatically improve performance over the WAN and enable greater centralization of storage resources.

Advanced Data Sharing - Survey of Networked File Systems and File Servers

With all of the new advances in file systems and file server technology how do you know which ones are the best for you?  This presentation will provide a framework for evaluating file systems approaches and a look at how each approach is evolving.

Topics discussed will include: survey of local, SAN, clustered, NAS, global, and wide area file systems, how application characteristics should affect your choice of file systems, as well as performance, scalability, ease of use, data management, deployment and maintenance and cost considerations