Storage Management

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The Abstracts

Server and Storage Consolidation With iSCSI Arrays
David Dale
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This presentation, an update to a very popular SNIA Tutorial, outlines the benefits of iSCSI-connected storage, contrasting deployment models. As iSCSI has a natural affinity to virtualization, this presentation will also cover virtual server environments. After a summary of iSCSI-based SAN benefits and typical deployment scenarios, emerging and future technologies and capabilities are considered, including higher speed Ethernet and FCoE. The presentation then provides a detailed description of iSCSI SAN configurations, capabilities, options and best practices.
Learning Objectives

• Provide IT managers, administrators and architects with up-to-the minute best practices and deployment considerations for iSCSI storage consolidation solutions.
• Explain where iSCSI fits among other networked storage solutions, with examples of typical deployments. This will include iSCSI's particular attractiveness for Server Virtualization environments
• Provide a roadmap of the latest advances in the world of Ethernet-connected storage, including 40/100GbE, DCB, FCoE and iSCSI

Understanding High Availability in the SAN
Mark Fleming
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This session will appeal to those seeking a fundamental understanding of High Availability (HA) configurations in the SAN. Modern SANs have developed numerous methods using hardware and software to assure high availability of storage to customers. The session will explore basic concepts of HA, move through a sample configuration from end-to-end, investigate HA and virtualization, and discuss some of the challenges and pitfalls faced in testing HA configurations.

Learning Objectives

• To gain a fundamental understanding of High Availability concepts.
• To understand how High Availability can be applied to virtual environments.
• To understand some of the challenges and pitfalls associated with testing High Availability configurations.

How to Eliminate Configuration Drift Risk
Gil Hecht
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In today's highly stressed IT environments, unanticipated and unwanted downtime still happens. A high availability (HA) infrastructure for processors and storage is one of your best protections. Yet, even an HA infrastructure can drift as configuration changes are implemented, manual adjustments are made, new releases of software and firmware are applied, and underlying business processes evolve. The result is that too many IT organizations are falling short of meeting their uptime requirements. In response, a new class of disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) solutions have recently emerged that are designed to provide customers with the ability to identify and proactively correct these potential threats, thus eliminating this risk of downtime and ensuring that service level (SLA) objectives are met.

Learning Objectives

• How to choose the best DR/HA management solution for your unique environment – including what questions to ask your vendor regarding installation, integration and monitoring/manageability features and functionality.
• How to utilize a DR/HA management solution to detect infrastructure optimization opportunities, such as unallocated or unused storage that can be reclaimed, changes to replication configurations that will result in lower bandwidth consumption, as well as information and applications stored on expensive disk resources that can be archived to lower cost alternatives.
• How to transition DR and HA testing from an expensive and time consuming point-in-time event to a continuous ongoing capability that provides dramatic budgetary savings as well.

Notes and Lessons Learned from a Field Engineer
Robert Smith
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Lessons and tidbits learned from an engineer with experience both on the phones and in-person at customer sites. Topics include <storage> performance analysis, troubleshooting, and management issues. Some lessons learned by working critical situations and lessons learned from those.

Open Source and Standards: A Marriage Made in Heaven
Hope Hines
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As those with IT responsibilities attempt to balance increased demands with increased costs, the topic of open source solutions usually enters the conversation. However, this very familiar term is still wrapped in a high degree of misunderstanding. This session will cover the best practices necessary for identifying the need for open source, evaluating open source options and integrating solutions based on standards like SMI-S and Cloud. The presentation also will examine the risks and benefits companies face when developing these products, and why open source and standards are a marriage made in IT heaven.

Learning Objective #1: Identifying the need for open source
• Understand how open source decreases the time-to-market
• Evaluate how open source lowers the total cost of ownership
• Learn how open source requirements are driven by end users

Learning Objective #2: Evaluating open source options
• Review the various pricing and business models
• Examine how the open source model produces more robust products
• Determine how the combination of open source and standards results in an interoperable solution

Learning Objective #3: Integrating standards-based open source solutions
•Review end user benefits for standards-based solutions
•Benefit from experiences several companies faced when integrating these solutions
•Identify shortcuts and tools that can assist in rapid deployment
•Learn how open source and standards help manage storage networking environments

iSCSI SANs: Ideal Applications, Large and Small
Jason Blosil, Gary Gumanow
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Current IT trends in technologies such as server virtualization, are offering additional reasons to deploy shared storage. Yet, nearly 50% of the storage deployed is still DAS. This presentation will outline reasons to move to shared storage and will focus on how iSCSI offers an ideal solution for SANs both large and small. IP SANs with iSCSI offer a number of advantages to organizations including flexibility, lower cost, and simplified management. Many applications are ideally suited for iSCSI including, server virtualization, infrastructure applications, storage consolidation, and business applications.

Learning Objectives

• Why iSCSI - What is iSCSI and why it the fastest growing network storage protocol on the market?
• Which applications are well suited for IP SANs and why.
• What are the key features and value proposition of iSCSI, including comparisons to DAS.

SAS & SATA Combine to Change the Storage Market
Marty Czekalski, Terry Gibbons
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Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) allows systems to be built that accommodate large numbers of either SAS and/or SATA hard disk drives. This presentation, intended for OEM, System Builders and End-Users, describes the capabilities of the SAS interface, overview of it’s technical capabilities, how it’s designed to interoperate with SATA drives and when combined, how these technologies can be combined to deliver some very compelling storage solutions. Also included will be an update of the new capabilities included in 6Gb/sec SAS as well as the new SAS connectivity roadmap.

Learning Objective

Learn about SAS and SATA technology