Storage and Storage Management

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The Abstracts

What's Old is New Again - Storage Tiering
Kevin Dudak
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Summary: The SNIA defines tiered storage as “storage that is physically partitioned into multiple distinct classes based on price, performance or other attributes.” Physical tiering of storage has been a common practice for decades. The increased availability of techniques to automatically promote “hot” data to high performance storage tiers – and demote “stale” data to lower cost tiers, combined with new storage technologies, have generated new interest in the practice Topics will include: • Fundamentals of Storage Tiering • Levels of granularity in tiering • Achieving optimal placement of data. • Recent innovations in logical and virtual tiering techniques • Using the cloud as a tier

Learning Objectives

Tiering fundamentals and benefits
Trends in automated tiering
Tiering resources

Simplified Integration and Management in Multi-Vendor SAN Environments
Chauncey Schwartz
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In the face of rapidly increasing requirements for storage, IT initiatives driving virtualization across all aspects of the infrastructure, and cloud-enabling the environment, Data Center Managers face a fundamental task in figuring out how to integrate SAN environments over multi-vender and multi-protocol infrastructures. Learn about solutions that streamline the integration and cost effective expansion of heterogeneous SAN environments by enabling transparent connections to existing core infrastructures. Reduce management complexity and cost while increasing multi-vender interoperability.

Learning Objectives

Become familiar with the terminology relating to Transparent SAN technologies
Understand the solution sets and challenges inherent in integrating a multi-vender SAN infrastructure
Evaluate the potential solutions for integrating multi-protocol and multi-vender SAN infrastructures

SAS: The Emerging Storage Fabric
Marty Czekalski
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SAS is the backbone of nearly every enterprise storage deployment, rapidly evolving, adding new features, enhanced capabilities and offering “no compromise” system performance. SAS not only excels as a device level interface, its versatility, reliability and scalability have made it the connectivity standard of choice for creating new Enterprise storage architectures. This presentation covers the advantages of using SAS as a device interface, and how its capabilities as a connectivity solution, are changing the way data centers are being deployed. Advantaging 12 Gb/s transfer rates, bandwidth aggregation, SAS Fabrics (including switches) active connections, and multi-function connectors (connectors that support SAS as well as PCIe Attached Storage devices) allows data center architects to create sustainable storage solutions that scale well into the future.

Learning Objectives

Understand the basic capabilities of SAS, including its compatibility with SATA, that makes SAS the best device level interface for Enterprise class storage devices.
Gain insight on how SAS continues to be the primary building block for advanced storage solutions based in large part due to it’s architectural flexibility which provides for continuous technological advancements and further storage innovations. The audience will also learn about the market adoption timelines and scenarios for 12Gb/s SAS and why it’s significance to the “Emerging Storage Fabric” story.
See examples of how SAS is a potent connectivity solution especially when coupled with a SAS switching solutions. These innovative SAS configurations become a vehicle for low cost storage expansion, providing a central point for storage management and serviceability while supporting legacy enterprise investments.