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Home » Education » SNIA Tutorials » 2007 SNIA Tutorials » Spring » Storage

The Abstracts

Storage

Jump straight to an abstract:

• Storage Consolidation With IP Storage
• 'Green' Storage
• Desktop, Nearline and Enterprise Disk Drives, Delta By Design
• The Storage Evolution: From Blocks, Files and Objects to Object Storage Systems
• Object-based Storage Device (OSD) - Architecture and Systems
• NAS and iSCSI Technology Overview
• Storage Performance Testing
• Storage Protocol Analyzers: Not Just for R&D Anymore
• Hardware Compression in Storage Networks and Network Attached Storage
• Accelerating Application Performance - Tier 0

Storage Consolidation With IP Storage

David Dale Download

This session will appeal to IT managers, administrators and architects interested in best practices and deployment considerations of storage consolidation solutions available with IP Storage technologies today. This presentation outlines the benefits of networked storage, contrasting the different options. It then goes into detail on iSCSI-based SAN configurations, options and best practices. Finally, the latest developments and capabilities are considered, including 10Gb Ethernet.

Learning Objectives

• Update of highly popular SNIA tutorial
• Overview of current technology capabilities and best practices
• Roadmap of new capabilites expected to impact the market in the next 12 months

'Green' Storage

SW Worth Download

The next few years will bring widespread awareness of the environmental impacts (especially energy costs) associated with data storage. Already several regulations and initiatives (e.g. ROHS, WEEE, Energy Star) affect manufacturers of storage components or computers. There are also some innovative storage technologies specifically targeted towards energy conservation, including MAID, along with the well-known alternatives of removable storage (tape and optical). Several vendors have also begun to offer data on power use, energy consumption, and cooling loads in response to competitive pressures from other vendors and customers. Some vendors and consultants are offering energy modeling as part of their TCO analysis, either for competitive reasons or as part of their professional services portfolio. This SNIA Tutorial will quickly review basic engineering topics relevant to understanding 'Green', including stuff you may have successfully avoided, such as environmental chemistry, thermodynamics, energy vs. power, and heat transfer. We will review current problems in data center design, including increasing computational and storage density and the resulting energy and cooling issues. Conceptual models sufficient to understand or even develop energy budgets will be taught. All of this will converge on a basic model for TCO that includes energy modeling.

Learning Objectives

Understand what various groups mean by 'Green', especially as this term relates to storage network components and systems.

Understand some of the factors that should (or will) motivate your interest in 'Green' storage, including regulation, competition, and TCO.

Understand why 'Opex' (Operating expenses) can outweigh 'Capex' (Capital expense) in TCO models, and how 'Green' factors increasingly influence Opex.

Desktop, Nearline and Enterprise Disk Drives, Delta by Design

Willis Whittington Download

For the past twenty five years the storage marketplace has been divided into two major categories namely “Desktop” and “Enterprise”. Recently, a third player variously known as “Nearline”, “Reference” or “Business Critical” has evolved to provide a low cost, high capacity storage solution for Enterprise data that no longer needs to exist in a high availability transactional processing environment but must maintain 24 x 7 availability as a reference or backup resource. Each of these classes of drives requires a unique and specific set of attributes to fulfill its role. This presentation will explore these differences and explain why you need to use the right drive for the right application.

The Storage Evolution: From Blocks, Files and Objects to Object Storage Systems

Christian Bandulet Download

In light of the enormous increase in storage requirements (capacity, scalability, performance, compliance, concurrency, migration, security, Object Storage Systems seem to be a natural extension of traditional block- and file-based technologies.

This tutorial will discuss advanced file-based technologies (NAS, NAS Aggregation/Virtualization, NAS Clustering) and emerging object-based technologies ( e.g. SCSI-3 OSD extensions).

While Object-based Storage Devices (OSDs) are tightly linked the SCSI-3 architecture model Object Storage Systems translate the object-based paradigm to the next higher layers in the I/O stack and combine the basic SCSI-3 OSD paradigm with advanced data processing technologies. There are many possible incarnations of Object Storage Systems such as Content Addressable/Aware Storage (CAS) and Object Storage Servers. Federations of Objects Storage Systems with a Global Namespace create a single data image enhancing the RAID concept to a Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Nodes (RAIN).

Object Storage Systems will also morph into Intelligent Storage Nodes (ISN) which are hybrids of servers and storage (Storver). ISNs can take different storage personalities (OSD, NAS, VTL, CAS, and provide complex data services (semantics, search, virtual files systems, CDP, encryption, capacity optimization, compliance, migration, transformation, security. They are also programmable and can be customized according to specific requirements.

All the described technologies will complement each other and provide building blocks for sophisticated storage solutions.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the basic principles and restrictions of block-, file- and object-based data access
• Understand how different emerging technologies will merge into Object Storage Systems.
• Understand how the further development of Object Storage Systems will create Intelligent Storage Nodes blurring the distinction between server and storage.

Object-based Storage Device (OSD) - Architecture and Sysems

Erik Riedel Download

The Object-based Storage Device (OSD) interface standard moves select low-level storage, space management, and security functions into storage devices (disks, subsystems, appliances) to enable the creation of scalable, self-managed, protected and heterogeneous shared storage for storage networks. The OSD-1 command set was ratified by ANSI in 2004 after many years of work in the SNIA OSD Technical Work Group including storage device, storage subsystem, and software companies, with help from several universities and research groups. Work on command set extensions to be standardized as OSD-2 is currently underway. Systems are being designed and built that use OSD devices in scalable NAS systems (via proprietary solutions today, with standards being developed at the IETF for pNFS) and for CAS systems (via an XAM to OSD mapping at the SNIA). This tutorial will briefly describe the key details of the OSD interface; outline how systems using OSD-enabled devices are being designed and built today; and how OSD-enabled systems will be used.

NAS and iSCSI Technology Overview

Wolfgang Singer Download

Requirements for additional storage are booming. There is a strong trend that most of today's storage will be consolidated and 'networked'. This presentation shows the different approaches to 'Storage Networking'. Topics discussed will include:

• What are the differences between SAN, NAS, NAS Gateways and iSCSI
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of these technologies
• Which problems does NAS solve
• Why is NAS better than a standard file server

Storage Performance Testing

Woody Hutsell Download

Conducting storage performance tests is essential to selecting storage for tiered environments. Some applications require endless hours of constant data acquisition, while others experience peak bursts of small block I/O. The best storage device for one application is almost never the right storage device for another. This session will provide an in-depth technical discussion of storage performance testing.

Learning Objectives

• Role of storage benchmarks in Storage Performance Testing.
• Role of IOMeter and other storage benchmarking tools when evaluating storage performance.
• Role of operating system performance monitoring tools for judging storage performance.

Storage Protocol Analyzers: Not Just for R&D Anymore

Brandy Barton Download

In recent years, a growing number of data centers have begun to employ the use of traditional R&D analysis tools, such as protocol analyzers, into their production SAN environments. Reasons for this adoption have been cited as protecting the ROI of the SAN, decreasing downtime, reducing the risk of outages and preventing lost or corrupt data. This session also serves as a complement to the SNIA Hands-on Lab entitled SAN Monitoring and Troubleshooting.

Learning Objectives

• Identify the benefits of various tools/methods used to troubleshoot and maintain a SAN.
• Describe how protocol analyzers work in general. Discuss installation options and best practices for instrumenting a SAN with efficient troubleshooting and monitoring in mind.
• Identify key SAN issues that are uncovered by protocol analyzers. Conduct a few live trace captures to illustrate how to uncover the root cause of common issues like bottlenecks and application timeouts.

Hardware Compression in Storage Networks and Network Attached Storage

Tony Summers Download

This tutorial will educate participants on the benefits and algorithmic details on lossless data compression in Storage Networks and Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. A brief history and background will be presented on various algorithms in use today. Participants will gain knowledge of where data compression occurs in the system and what the benefits are. Performance data will be presented on different algorithms and data types. Technological advances will be discussed and how they affect system level solutions when implementing lossless data compression.

Learning Objectives

• How does hardware compression work in storage networks and in storage appliances.
• Understanding the performance and value of hardware compression.
• System implementation challenges related to hardware compression

Accelerating Application Performance - Tier 0

Rick Gillett Download

Traditional tiered storage, or Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approaches seek to move lower priority files to lower performing, less expensive disk in an effort to save on storage and backup costs. Today however, users can expand this conventional cost savings approach to include migration of data to higher performance memory based devices for the specific purpose of optimizing performance. By utilizing a new 'Tier 0' approach, specific data sets can now be moved to higher performance, memory-based platforms, resulting in dramatic improvement in applications performance.

Learning Objectives

• What is Tier 0, including specific examples of Tier 0 device configurations and associated performance test results.
• Process for moving filesets to a high-performance device to achieve application throughput of up to 30 times greater than compared to the same file set residing on a well-accepted traditional NAS system.