Storage and Storage Management

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Jump straight to an abstract:

• Understanding High Availability in the SAN
• Writing Storage RFPs in 2010 - This is Not Your Father's Storage Array
• Storage Management Best Practices and Tips
• SAS & SATA Combine to Change the Storage Market
• Open Source & Standards: A Marriage Made in IT Heaven
• Server and Storage Consolidation with iSCSI

The Abstracts

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.

Writing Storage RFPs in 2010 - This is Not Your Father's Storage Array
John Webster and Larry Freeman
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The data storage industry has changed dramatically over the past few years.  With the rise of virtual machines, virtual desktops, and private clouds, organizations must take a holistic view of the storage environment and its relationship to the server and application environments.   In addition, areas such as energy conservation, capacity optimization and storage resource management (SRM) tools should be given careful consideration during the vendor selection process.

A broad range of products from storage, networking, and systems vendors, each with many different options, confronts the potential buyer. Therefore, using the Request for Information (RFI) and Request for Proposal (RFP) processes to differentiate the vendors and their offerings is highly recommended.
Performance, scalability, and resiliency are given; but new challenges are arising around power consumption, space requirements, and overall cost containment.  In addition, accommodations for SRM tools and the various standards at play including SMI-S must be designed into the RFI/RFP. 

Given the changing roles of storage systems and the storage administrators who use them, this tutorial discusses the “must-have” criteria that should be included in any data storage RFI/RFP in the current era.  Attendees of this session will receive a sample RFP designed specifically to leverage modern storage systems and SRM capabilities.

Note: The session presenters will be Larry Freeman, Senior Technologist at NetApp and author of “Evolution of the Storage Brain”, and John Webster, Senior Partner at The Evaluator Group and author of “Inescapable Data – Harnessing the Power of Convergence”.

Storage Management Best Practices and Tips
Dave Anjan
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The non-stop growth in the amount of information that is generated and stored necessitates a review of storage networking best practices in medium to large sized storage environments. This turorial provides some practical tips for planning, purchasing, and deployment of storage in areas of Network Attached Storage systems for unstructured data, deploying block storage for business critical applications, and managing Storage Area Networks.

Learning Objectives

• Learn how to plan the purchase and deployment of NAS storage in a large enterprise environement from storage capacity, performance and backups perspective 
• What methodologies to adopt for deploying block-storage for business critical applications for structured data 
• What are some of the influencing factors in optimally managing the networked storage infrastructure for unstructured and structured data 

SAS & SATA Combine to Change the Storage Market
Harry Mason and Marty Czekalski
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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, the new SAS connectivity roadmap, and Solid State Disks.

Learning Objectives

• Attendees will learn about new and emerging capabilities of SAS and how these capabilities can benefit their storage systems. 
• Attendees will learn why SAS Advanced Connectivity is important for extending into cloud computing, large data centers and enterprise storage opportunities.

Open Source & Standards: A Marriage Made in IT 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 & vendor hype.  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 CDMI, OCCI and SMI-S.  The presentation also will examine the risks and benefits companies face when developing and deploying products, and why open source and standards are a marriage made in IT heaven.

Learning Objectives

• Identifying the need for open source: What are the issues/problems open source and standards can solve for IT.   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
• Evaluating open source optons. 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. Look at test case using open source and standards
• Integrating standards-based open source solutions.  Review end user benefits for standards-based solution;  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 environment

Server and Storage Consolidation with iSCSI
David Dale
Pending

This session will appeal to IT managers, administrators and architects interested in best practices and deployment considerations of storage consolidation solutions available with iSCSI-based systems today.      This presentation, an update to a very popular SNIA Tutorial, outlines the benefits of networked storage, contrasting deployment models.  After a summary of iSCSI-based SAN benefits, the presentation provides a detailed description of iSCSI SAN configurations, capabilities, options and best practices.  As iSCSI has a natural affinity to virtualization, it also covers virtual server environments. Finally, the presentation describes typical deployment scenarios, and emerging developments, including 40/100Gb Ethernet and FCoE.

Learning Objectives

Where iSCSI solutions fit in the IT infrastructure today 
Current best practices and deployment consideration for virtual server environments 
How iSCSI fits with new protocols such as FCoE, and benefits from new Ethernet developments