System News for Sun Users

4 Practical Steps to Building a Data Destruction Policy for Your Business

2013-06-12T16:00:00+01:00

"Data security has become one of the highest priorities for business owners throughout the country in recent years. Reading about high profile cases of data breach, whether they were caused maliciously or accidentally, can make any business owner nervous.

Could it happen to your business? While it�'s impossible to completely remove the risk of data breach, there are steps you can take to significantly reduce that risk. Taking these steps to build a secure and reliable data destruction policy will help you avoid paying costly fines, dedicating time and resources to efforts to mitigate the damage, and suffering the embarrassment and loss of customer confidence associated with a data breach..."

When Can Worse Data Quality Be Better?

2013-06-12T16:00:00+01:00

"Continuing a theme from three previous posts, which discussed when it�'s okay to call data quality as good as it needs to get, the occasional times when perfect data quality is necessary, and the costs and profits of poor data quality, in this blog post I want to provide three examples of when the world of consumer electronics proved that sometimes worse data quality is better..."

Rethinking the Storage Controller for Unstructured Data

2013-06-11T16:00:00+01:00

"Conventional wisdom suggests that most business data is stored in database applications, however, unstructured data comprises approximately 70-80% of the total data in a typical environment and, according to some industry sources, is growing 5x as fast. File-based data is also increasing in value as this information is often mined for decision support in business analytics systems and is sometimes required for legal discovery as well. As a result, mid-sized or Tier-2 data centers have pressing needs to effectively manage and centrally control their unstructured data repositories..."

Why NSA Will Have the Capacity for All That Data It's Collecting

2013-06-10T16:00:00+01:00

"The National Security Agency's data gathering operations are generating a lot of debate among security and privacy proponents, but one this is sure: all that data will have some place to go, and NSA will have the capacity for it.

NSA is a few months away from beginning operations at a massive $1.2 billion code-breaking and data analysis data center in Utah, and it recently broke ground on another new center in Maryland. The agency's Utah Data Center at the National Guard's Camp Williams 26 miles south of Salt Lake City is a 1 million square-foot-plus complex, where high-performance computers alone will fill 100,000 square feet.."

No one ever got fired for buying enterprise storage, right?

2013-06-04T16:00:00+01:00

Martin Glassborow writes in El Reg, "The concept of enterprise storage - kit sold by large companies who charge very high margins for providing hardware and support services - is more or less done.

Sound like a rash statement to you? I'll explain what I mean. Pretty much all the functionality that you might expect to be put into a storage array has been done and the previous differentiating features are now provided by pretty much every vendor..."

Is All Thin Provisioning The Same?

2013-06-04T16:00:00+01:00

"Thin provisioning is a storage allocation process that improves the write efficiency of a storage system by enabling it to consume less capacity for storing a given amount of data. It is becoming an increasingly popular, almost commonplace, feature available on a wide variety of arrays. The tendency in the fast paced world of IT is to assume that these systems all present thin provisioning the same way. In reality these offerings are NOT the same and in fact their differences may significantly impact how storage managers are able to take advantage of this technology..."

How to Overcome Flash-Based Storage Limitations to Ensure Efficiency

2013-06-04T16:00:00+01:00

"In spite of what you may have heard, flash-based storage -- whether you're talking about memory chip-laden PCI Express cards aimed at servers, 2.5-inch disk form-factor solid-state drives for insertion into server or storage system drive bays, or all-flash storage arrays and appliances -- isn't a panacea. It's a useful technology with a number of specific applications, but, as some of my friends in the South are fond of saying, 'It don't fix stupid.'"

Tiering Storage: Best Practices to Promote Efficiency

2013-06-04T16:00:00+01:00

"A recent article in Forbes extensively quotes a study by Forester Research to identify four widely used techniques -- tiering storage, data retirement, compression and storage virtualization -- for "storage capacity growth containment."

Technically, tiered storage has nothing whatsoever to do with capacity growth containment. It's a strategy for data movement intended to primarily free space on more expensive and higher-performing storage by moving less frequently accessed data to less expensive and lower-performing storage over time..."

Overcoming the Challenges With SSD Reliability

2013-06-03T16:00:00+01:00

"Articles posted on the Storage Switzerland web site that focus on SSD Reliability are consistently among the top read articles on our site. Clearly there is concern about using the technology in the enterprise and IT planners want to know more about what the problems are related to. The payoff for understanding and effectively working around these issues is increased performance; something that every data center, regardless of size, ultimately needs.

SSD reliability is a bit of a misnomer. The focus instead, should be on SSD durability. Reliability implies that an SSD will fail shortly after being installed in a storage system. While SSDs can certainly fail out of the box, the chances of that are no greater than hard disk drives failing out of the box. Durability means that somewhere down the road, say 2 to 3 years, the SSD will fail..."

Parsing Through the Software-Defined Storage Hype

2013-06-03T16:00:00+01:00

"With all the hype around software defined storage (SDS), it can be hard to tell which of the many technology vendors claiming the term clearly fall into this category. But experts agree that true SDS technologies share a central goal -- the emergence of a non-proprietary system that is software-driven and enables automated, flexible provisioning of storage resources.

Essentially, SDS is emerging as an ecosystem of products that decouples software from underlying storage networking hardware..."

The Critical Need for Data Disposal

2013-06-03T16:00:00+01:00

"With so much stored data having no business value, enterprises need to tackle the challenge of reducing the data mountain.

Did you know that 69% of all data stored by enterprises has no value? That is, it is data that serves no useful purpose--none, zilch--yet continues to cost IT a bundle in storage resources. This has important implications to IT and enterprises that we need to explore..."

High Performance Storage for Hyperscale Data Centers

2013-05-28T16:00:00+01:00

"Hyperscale architectures typically include dozens to hundreds of generic servers running either a clustered application or a hypervisor. Leveraging the cluster, these servers provide a massively scalable infrastructure ideal for all types of service providers. Hyperscale architectures are even beginning to be implemented in corporate data centers because of their cost effective, high performance nature. But these advanced architectures are restrained from their full potential by the limitations of the storage infrastructure..."

Hey, You, Dev. What Do You Mean, Storage is BORING?

2013-05-27T16:00:00+01:00

"Many years ago, as an entry-level systems programmer, I decided there were two teams that I was never going to join: the test team and the storage team - because they were boring.

A fellow blogger has a habit of referring to storage as snorage and I suspect that is the attitude of many. So why do I keep doing storage?

Well, first, I have little choice but to stick to infrastructure. I'm a pretty lousy programmer and it seems that I can do less damage in infrastructure. If you have ever received more chequebooks in the post from a certain retail bank, I can only apologise.

But storage is cool. First of all, it's BIG and EXPENSIVE - who doesn't like raising orders for millions? It is also so much more than that just the place where you store your stuff: for starters, you have to get it back..."

Why Your Unstructured Data is a Blessing, Not a Curse

2013-05-20T16:00:00+01:00

"If you've opened up a business magazine within the last year, you've likely read articles from big data evangelists, proclaiming that unstructured data is a problem that can sink your company's time, focus and money.

You know the oft-repeated, dire facts. Rich media data types have exploded in number and in kind. The majority of the data received or produced by your company is messy, unstructured and terribly difficult to manage. The tools that allow anyone to create video, audio and other rich file formats have outpaced the tools we use to capture, store, search and analyze that data. Your employees spend much of their day swimming in a pool of unstructured data..."

How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do?

2013-05-20T16:00:00+01:00

"A common question I run across is how many IOPS (IO Operations Per Second) can a storage device or system do or give.

The answer is or should be it depends.

This is the first of a two-part series looking at storage performance, and in context specifically around drive or device (e.g. mediums) characteristics across HDD, HHDD and SSD that can be found in cloud, virtual, and legacy environments. In this first part the focus is around putting some context around drive or device performance with the second part looking at some workload characteristics (e.g. benchmarks)..."

Will flash or disk drives own the future of data storage?

2013-05-20T16:00:00+01:00

"'Flash or disk?' That question �' whether the future of data storage would be defined by flash memory or hard drives �' has been a looming battle in the storage industry for the last several years.

Hard drives, of course, remain the heart of the storage industry. Manufacturers shipped 524 million disk drives in 2012, according to iSuppli, more than ten times the 39 million flash drives that were shipped in the same period. Worldwide manufacturing capacity for drives at the end of 2012 came to around 125,000 petabytes per quarter, compared to around 10,000 petabytes per quarter for flash. By volume, hard drives are tough to beat.

But look at the growth rates, say flash advocates. Shipments will grow from 39 million units in 2012 to 83 million units in 2013. By 2016, 239 million flash drives will be shipping annually, propelled by sales of tablets, smartphones, and notebooks..."

The Unknown Risk of SSD Mapping Tables

2013-05-16T16:00:00+01:00

"Solid State Disks (SSD) and Flash Appliances use mapping tables to track where data is stored on the flash device. These tables play a similar role to iNode or File Allocation Tables (FAT) and if they get corrupted or lost, they need to be rebuilt. While faster than hard disk systems, the rebuild process on large flash appliances can take hours which makes it especially problematic for the performance sensitive environments that solid state solutions are typically deployed into..."

Storage optimization: Flash finds some government niches

2013-05-16T16:00:00+01:00

"Storage performance can spell the difference between a successful technology venture and one that brings systems to a standstill. Storage optimization tools, including software-based accelerators, aim to reduce or eliminate that bottleneck.

Another approach that promises better storage performance is flash technology, which is familiar to anyone who has ever used a USB thumb drive. In the enterprise context, flash technology takes the form of cards that plug into servers or solid-state drives housed in storage arrays..."

What is the Fate of Object Storage?

2013-05-14T16:00:00+01:00

"Object storage and the systems that leverage its unique data storage approach have been the subject of much hype over the past few years. If you took past analyst predictions at face value, by now all unstructured data would be residing on an object based storage platform. For some reason, however, reality has not caught up with all the current hype. What then is the fate of object storage? Will it carve out a well defined niche or is it destined to be one of those technologies that barely makes it beyond a PowerPoint presentation?..."

The Proper Care and Feeding of SSD Storage

2013-05-13T16:00:00+01:00

"Your solid-state drive sits there in silence. It's sleek. Elegant. More than a little mysterious. The hard drive it replaced was easy to understand: A soft hum assured you that its platters were spinning. A quiet mechanical click informed you of its read/write operations. You'd groom it with the occasional defrag. Times were good.

Now? Everything seems peaceful. But you keep hearing stories: An SSD's performance deteriorates over time. They have disturbingly short life spans. If it fails, your precious data will be consigned to oblivion. Facts? Or fever-brained fiction?..."

Demystifying RAID

2013-05-13T16:00:00+01:00

"Ever since RAID was invented over three decades ago it has been counted on by IT professionals around the world to keep data available for users and applications when something goes wrong with their storage systems. That thing going "wrong" most likely was a drive failure. Using RAID has since become the standard operating procedure for almost any business of any size, but with that familiarity have come some dangerous assumptions as well, which in some cases can lead to lost data. The purpose of this article is to clear up those assumptions so that IT gets exactly what it expects from RAID and doesn't lose data..."

Five Reasons Why HDD Is Dead and SSD Is Taking Over

2013-05-06T16:00:00+01:00

"Until recently, Flash-optimized Fibre channel storage has been extremely expensive to implement and many organizations were priced out of the procurement cycle. According to Gartner, however, the solid-state drive (SSD) market is expected to grow from some $390 million in 2012 to more than $4 billion in 2016. Emulex, a provider of hardware and software solutions for network connectivity, monitoring and management, offers five reasons why..."

Big Data
Cost and Availability
Faster Resonse Times
Durability
Power and Cooling

Read on for details.

Data Governance: 10 Steps to Establishing Effective Policies

2013-05-06T16:00:00+01:00

"Data governance, an important IT best practice that nonetheless is underutilized in enterprises, continues to confuse and frustrate IT managers while running up significant costs with little return. Those involved typically stumble across a few similar challenges such as lack of clarity on where to start, insufficient cross-functional involvement, and a rapidly growing population of experts and vendors offering high price-point applications and services. Individuals and teams exploring and implementing data governance systems are often under pressure to deliver measurable progress..."

Recognizing Data Governance-Related Critical Business Issues
Determine What Is Causing or Continuing These Issues
Explore the Impact of a DG Program
Establish a Vision for Effective Enterprise Data Utilization
Identify Cross-Functional Stakeholders, Decision Makers
Determine and Document DG Impact and Benefits
Define How a Successful DG Deployment Will Be Measured
Develop an Enterprise Information Map
Determine What Existing IT Can Be Repurposed for DG
Share Quick Wins of Data Governance Throughout the Enterprise

Read on for details.

Data Hoarding: How to Stop

2013-05-06T16:00:00+01:00

"Hoarding information, or storing enterprise data in the wrong places, can open your company to legal liability. But culture change won't be easy.

Data management is a never-ending struggle for enterprises, particularly when employees store work data in personal accounts on cloud storage services. This so-called data leakage, combined with the problem of data hoarding inside the enterprise firewall, can spell trouble for organizations, especially in legal matters..."

Is SSD Enough To Stop Active Data Onslaught?

2013-04-30T16:00:00+01:00

"While hard drives can provide quick access to data they cannot instantly process all of the required information. In other words, access is merely how fast the starting point can be reached. From that initial starting point, data still needs to be read so it can be processed. The time it takes to load a map image, 100 restaurant reviews, historical traffic patterns and current traffic conditions, disrupts the real-time value of the request. Finding out that traffic is at a stand-still when you are already stuck in traffic is ironic but not amusing. Clearly, something more robust than spinning hard drives are needed to serve active data..."

SSDs to Complement, Not Replace HDDs in Data Centers - Gartner

2013-04-30T16:00:00+01:00

"Valdis Filks, Joseph Unsworth, John Monroe, Stanley Zaffos, analysts from Gartner, Inc., wrote the following paper, dated April 15, 2013:, 'Solid-State Drives Will Complement, Not Replace, Hard-Disk Drives in Data Centers'

Given the enormity of future capacity needs, it will be impossible for CIOs and IT managers to completely replace HDDs with SSDs during the next five to 10 years in data centers. Although SSDs will increase hardware performance, application workloads will still require software optimization..."

Automated Caching for the Virtualized Data Center

2013-04-29T16:00:00+01:00

"Many industry observers estimate that the server infrastructure in a typical data center environment is approximately 50% virtualized. As virtual machine (VM) density increases, conventional storage platforms are wilting under the pressure of managing highly randomized storage IO patterns. Indeed, the 'storage blender' effect, of unpredictable, high volume read and write IO activity emanating from VMs, threatens application quality of service (QOS) levels. As a result, server administrators are increasingly turning to server side caching or SSD solutions to meet performance objectives.

Solid state disk (SSD) and flash memory based storage technologies, offer business application owners a safety valve for responding to the storage IO pressure experienced in highly dense VM environments..."

What Is Dispersed Storage?

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

"Keeping unstructured data available, as data sets continue to grow, is a key challenge for today's data center. The access requirements of unstructured data often preclude relying 100% on capacity centric tape so higher capacity disk solutions, for many organizations, become the only option. But making sure data is protected and available on very large disk systems using multiple-TB disk drives has become increasingly challenging and expensive..."

What Is Storage Caching?

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

"A cache in a manufacturing environment is an intermediate store of components or partially assembled products, often referred to as 'in-process inventory', that serves to make the overall production process more efficient. In a computer system, caches, also called 'buffers', similarly decouple various components in the data path from each other maximizing the throughput of the system as a whole. Like a factory's in-process inventory, buffers hold data and smooth the transition between components (steps in the 'data production line') that run at different speeds..."

Improving SSD Performance through Better Flash Management

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

"Solid State Drive (SSD) storage has become a viable performance option thanks to the advent of NAND flash devices which are making memory-based storage affordable. The performance of an SSD is not solely dictated by the NAND but by the performance of the combined components that make up the SSD. The performance of the flash controller, its firmware and how it interacts with the NAND determine the combined performance of the device.

There are many actions that impact flash SSD performance, most notably the management of the flash itself. Flash can only be written to a finite number of times so steps have to be taken to make sure that write I/O is spread evenly across the SSD, a process called 'wear leveling'..."