http://sun.systemnews.com Storage http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/127/1/storage/20524 FileBench has kindled the enthusiasm of Ben Rockwood, who writes on how to "Explore Your Storage with FileBench," which he calls one of the most powerful and flexible benchmarking tools around. Unlike such micro-benchmarking tools as Bonnie++ or IOzone, he writes, FileBench [19937] is an application simulator or workload generator that results in benchmarking results that more nearly approximate the results in an actual production setting. For all of that, FileBench, which is still in development, is somewhat non-intuitive, Rockwood maintains. His aim is to make using the solution easier through example. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/127/1/storage/20525 Sun blogger Anatol Studler makes that case in a recent blog that you should avoid placing SSDs in traditional arrays. A traditional array has a controller with a certain fixed amount of compute power and I/O capability. Placing fast SSDs into an array designed for traditional disks is, "is quite surprising to me, as it is comparable to place a 8-cylinder bi-turbo engine with 450HP into an entry level car." Anatol continues, "Traditional midrange arrays are developed to handle hundreds of traditional (15k RPM) harddisk drives. A traditional harddisk is capable of running about 250 IO/s. Now if we compare this with the actual enterprise class Solid State Disks available on the market, a single solid state disk can do about 50k IO/s read or 12k IO/s write. So in fact it is about 100x faster than a 15k RPM harddisk." A fast array controller capable of delivering 500k I/Os would hard pressed to keep up with just 10 SSDs. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/4/storage/20504 ZFS is commonly used for local I/O in a Solaris-based platform. The architecture can support very large amounts of storage and is considered easy to administrate. while focusing on data integrity, every block is check-summed to prevent silent data corruption. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/4/storage/20466 The StorageTek Virtual Tape Library Prime (VTL Prime) System is an addition to the VTL product portfolio, and the first data de-duplication solution from Sun. VTL Prime provides a way to synchronize and consolidate the backup process for remote-office and large enterprise environments. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/2/storage/20389 TrueCopy asynchronous software enables replication with full data integrity beyond the distance limitations of synchronous copy to ensure data at a secondary site is safely beyond a wide-area disaster's impact zone. Moving data to a secondary site for switchover of primary processing can eliminate scheduled downtime and is critical when an unexpected event compromises your primary site. Unlike traditional data recovery processes that are labor-intensive and can span several days, recovery based on TrueCopy software can help businesses resume operations rapidly, almost from the point where they broke off. TrueCopy Asynchronous is complemented by TrueCopy Synchronous. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/2/storage/20421 Drew Robb, writing for enterprisestorageforum.com, declares "NFS Enters a Parallel Universe," claiming that Version 4.1 of NFS (network file system), having undergone a profound overhaul, promises higher than ever levels of performance and security, particularly in enterprise data centers. For corroboration, Robb refers readers to Henry Newman's article, "The Future of NFS Arrives". http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/5/storage/20314 "A D2D2T infrastructure allows the archival and non-critical data to flow out to a lower cost and lower energy medium (tape), while delivering backup and recovery performance to meet enterprise SLAs for the VTL. A D2D2T environment also enables the data center to retain older back-ups for a longer period without a significant impact on the TCO," writes David Reine, an analyst for The Clipper Group, in a white paper about making Use of Virtual Tape in a D2D2T Environment. David concludes that, "a VTL alone cannot satisfy all of the demands of a modern data center, mall or large. A D2D2T solution, however, can provide your data center with all of the latest standards in data protection as it delivers high performance, high capacity, and reliability, while controlling the TCO of the IT infrastructure." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/5/storage/20319 Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi, Ltd., have tested and evaluated guidelines and backup and recovery best practices for using Automatic Storage Management (ASM), a new feature introduced in Oracle Database 10g, to simplify Oracle database file administration on the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform family of products while optimizing performance. Results are reported in the 42-page Hitachi-Oracle application brief "Oracle Database 10g Automatic Storage Management Best Practices...." "Oracle Database 10g ASM provides storage cluster volume management and file system functionality at no additional cost. ASM increases storage utilization, performance, and availability while eliminating the need for third-party volume management and file systems for Oracle database files. As a result, ASM provides significant cost savings for the data center." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/5/storage/20326 Are your licensing and maintenance fees for NAS costing you too much? Not happy with being locked in to a vendor's proprietary OS and protocols? Tired of paying for such standards-based tools as NFS, CIFS or NDMP? Then have a look at Anatol Studler's blog on how to bring those costs down. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/4/storage/20262 Sun’s COMSTAR team is constantly looking for ways of improving storage using the COMSTAR software which is the framework that uses a Solaris host as a SCSI Target platform. They use multiprotocol SCSI target mode framework to increase the list of things that can be done with their builds, rapidly, every day.