Virtualization/Standards

The Abstracts

Storage Networking Standards: Recent Developments

David Black Download

Interoperability standards play a vital role in customer adoption and advancement of storage networking technologies and systems.  Storage networking is based on a broad spectrum of standards (developed by multiple standards organizations) in areas such as Fibre Channel (INCITS T11), SCSI (INCITS T10), iSCSI (IETF), and storage management (SNIA, IETF).  The current state and future direction of standards development can provide useful insights into technology developments.  This tutorial covers storage networking standards and the role that the resulting standardized interfaces and functionality play in networked storage infrastructure.  The tutorial presenter is a member of the SNIA Technical Council who is actively involved in development of many storage networking standards. 

Learning Objectives

1. Explain the types of storage networking standards (e.g., network data protocol, drive interface, management protocol) using examples of each type
2. Describe recent developments in storage networking  standards that are of interest
3. Describe where to get more information on storage networking standards

 

Virtualization I - What, Why, Where and How?

Rob Peglar Download

Storage Virtualization is one of the buzzwords in the industry, especially with the increased acceptance of Storage Networks.  But besides all hype, there is a lot of confusion, too. Companies are using the term virtualization and its characteristics in various and different forms. This tutorial describes the reasons and benefits of virtualization in a technical and neutral way. The audience will understand the various terms and will receive a clear picture of the different virtualization approaches. Links to the SNIA Shared Storage Model and the usage of the new SNIA Storage Virtualization Taxonomy will help to achieve this goal.    This tutorial is intended for IT Managers, Storage and System Administrators who have responsibilities for IT infrastructures and storage management tasks.

Learning Objectives:

1. Become familiar with the definition of storage virtualization and its taxonomy
2. Understand the three basic methods of storage virtualization
3. Understand what problems storage virtualization helps to solve

 

Storage Virtualization II - Effective Use of Virtualization

Rob Peglar Download

The second part of this tutorial builds on the first one, so the audience should have visited part I: What, Why, Where and How? or already should have a basic understanding of this subject.  Storage Virtualization part II covers practical issues of block virtualization in order to make most effective use of it. Among other topics it describes the implementation step by step and aspects of availability, performance and capacity improvements. The material discusses the role of storage virtualization within policy-based management and describes its integration in the SNIA Storage Management Initiative Specification(SMI-S). 

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand a detailed example of the implementation of storage virtualization
2. Understand the management techniques necessary to effectively control virtualized storage
3. Increase awareness of the impact of virtualized storage on other aspects of computation (especially virtual servers) and networking

 

Server and Storage Virtualization With IP Storage

David Dale Download

This presentation examines server virtualization--a trend that many consider to be the next big wave in IT infrastructures. The presentation covers the benefits, options and technologies in server virtualization today.  It then goes into detail on complementary networked storage solutions, with particular emphasis iSCSI- based SAN configurations, options and best practices, including contemporary iSCSI storage virtualization features. The presentation describes how virtualized storage dramatically improves application and server provisioning,  data protection and recovery, and ease of management.  The presentation explains via customer case studies how these capabilities deliver distinct benefits to IT organizations  This session will appeal to IT managers, administrators and architects interested in the state of the practice for virtualized server environments and complementary storage virtualization capabilities available with contemporary iSCSI Storage solutions.

Storage Management:  SMI-S to Management Frameworkds

Mark Carlson Download

The broad implementation of SMI-S in nearly every storage product in the industry has laid a solid foundation for further work in reducing the cost and complexity of managing distributed storage resources. In addition to continued improvements in the SMI-S standard, SNIA is now standardizing the common components that make up a management client. These interface to these components are standardized in this new management standard. 

Learning Objectives: 

1. Learn where SMI-S is now standardizing management interfaces to storage resources
2. Learn the value of standard framework interfaces
3. Understand where SNIA is headed in standardizing storage management

 

SMI-S: Building the Case for a Standard

Paul von Behren and Mike Walker Download

This tutorial describes how the SMI-S standard benefits the three primary players in storage management solutions end users, vendors of storage products, and application (such as SRM) vendors. Standards-based solutions help end-users avoid vendor lock-in, provide choices in storage management applications, and eliminating the cost of vendor-specific agent infrastructures.  Vendors of storage products benefit by gaining application support with little or no vendor-specific development costs.  Application vendors benefit by gaining storage support with little or no vendor-specific development costs.  This tutorial also looks at innovative solutions that can exploit a standards-based infrastructure such as SMI-S – for example, Management Frameworks.   This tutorial also talks about the past and future evolution of SMI-S; how the standard started by providing basic storage networking management tasks, adding more functionality and increasing the scope to meet the requirements of end-users and storage vendors, and plans for the future. 

Learning Objectives:

1. How end users, storage vendors, and application vendors benefit from use of a standard such as SMI-S and
2. How the SMI-S standard has evolved to meet requirements and objectives of its stakeholders

 

eXtensible Access Method (XAM) - A New Fixed Content API

Mark Carlson Download

XAM Provides: * Interoperability: Applications can work with any XAM conformant storage system; information can be migrated and shared, * Compliance: Integrated record retention and disposition metadata, * ILM Practices: Framework for classification, policy, and implementation * Migration: Ability to automate migration process to maintain long-term readability* Discovery: Application-independent structured discovery avoids application obsolescence. 

Learning Objectives:

1. For Storage Vendors:  what is needed to implement a XAM interface (VIM) to their products
2. For Application Vendors: what it means to have a standard interface for supporting any fixed content storage device
3. For End Users: the value of vendor choice in fixed content applications and storage devices

 

Best Practices in Managing Virtualized Environments

Mike Matchett Download

Today the data center environments are getting increasingly complex with virtualization at all layers of IT stack, including network, server, SAN and storage.  IT professionals are often challenged in diagnosing application performance issues, optimizing infrastructure resource utilization, and planning for future changes.  The best practices for managing complex data center environments include cross domain management orientation, watch the infrastructure response time for cross-domain performance, look for application contention and contention-based latency in the storage layer, best fit analysis of workloads to storage resources, and work toward infrastructure performance SLAs.  The key requirements for the new-breed management software include agent-less discovery and SMI-S support. 

Learning Objectives:

1. Best practices for managing virtualized data center environments
2. Agent-less discovery vs. agent-based discovery
3. Benefit of SMI-S support.