Virtualization/Standards

Jump straight to an abstract:

• Storage Virtualization I - What, Why, Where and How?
• Storage Virtualization II - Effective Use of Virtualization
• Best Practice in Managing Virtualized Environments
• SNIA XAM:  Technology and Application Usage
• Solving Business-oriented Goals with SMI-S

The Abstracts

Storage Virtualization I - What, Why, Where and How?
Rob Peglar
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Storage Virtualization is one of the buzzwords in the industry, especially with the near-ubiquitous deployment 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

• Understand the definition of storage virtualization and its taxonomy
• Learn about the three categories/methods of storage virtualization and their architectures
• Understand which storage virtualization techniques apply to various new and existing infrastructures and potential benefits to storage management

Storage Virtualization II - Effective Use of Virtualization
Rob Peglar
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The second part of this tutorial builds on the first one, so the audience should have visited part I 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
• Understand the role of virtualization in improving storage availability, performance and capacity management
• Learn about potential policy-based management using virtual techniques
• Understand how storage virtualization fits into the SNIA SMI-S and Web Services (SOA) architectures

Best Practice in Managing Virtualized Environments
Peter Lauterbach
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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 performance and capacity management, 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

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

SNIA XAM:  Technology and Application Usage
Mark Carlson
Mark Sassure
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The SNIA XAM standard is making its way out into the installed base and is being implemented by storage vendors and ISVs. In addition, there is significant interest from the Digital Preservation and Retention community. This talk will cover the basics of the XAM technology and then will discuss an actual use case, soon to be implemented, of XAM in a preservation context.

Learning Objectives

• A basic introduction to the technology and use case of the XAM standard
• A good understanding of how XAM can be used in each attendee's situation
• A deep understanding of its use in the Preservation context

Solving Business-oriented Goals with SMI-S
Paul von Behren
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This tutorial discusses how the SMI-S standard relates to business goals for storage management. SMI-S is a standard for storage management; the standard itself is targeted to developers and does not directly talk a lot about its relationship to businesses. This tutorial looks at the capabilities offered by SMI-S and presents them with a focus on how they apply in an IT environment. The tutorial looks at the functionality is SMI-S 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 (available in many shipping products), additional functionality added in the recently completed 1.3 version, and functionality planned for future releases. In addition to looking at the functionality in the standard itself, this tutorial also looks at end-user oriented aspects of the SMI ecosystem, including conformance.