Since I started this article series, I’ve had the awesome opportunity to have my ideas (well, some of the early articles at least) reviewed by person(s) who deal with the actual infrastructure of storage systems day in, day out. The benefit of such peer review is that you get to learn at the symbolic “feet” of the masters and discover flaws, omissions, and understated features that need to be understood and incorporated. This post is dedicated to some of those discussions and, where applicable, my understanding of how the FSS either incorporates or misses the boat.
Future Storage Systems: A pause in workflow
October 17, 2008
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AMD, FSS, Hypertransport, Intel, PCI Express, PCIe, Performancing, environment, perspective, storage | Tagged: AMD, Business, Components, Desktops, EMC Corporation, EMC Symmetrix, Hardware, Hypertransport, Intel, Intel Dunnington, Multi-core, Opteron, Processors, Solid-state drive, storage, Symmetrix, Torrenza | 
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Configuring nVidia SATA controllers for use with VMware ESX
October 16, 2008Part of the beauty of ESX 3.x from a hardware support standpoint was the addition of SATA as a viable install media for the hypervisor and service console. However, opening up support for SATA also included a few hiccups along the way, most related to the SATA controllers officially supported by VMware. For folks like myself who spent a lot of time with AMD-based platforms, the only real choices for SATA controllers (onboard the motherboard, not discrete) were offerings from Broadcom and nVidia. This post will highlight how to configure your ESX 3.x host to use nVidia SATA controllers.
Note: This information is available within the VMware user community as well. I am indebted to the person(s) in that community who provided this information, albeit in a slightly less “visual” way.
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SATA, Tyan, VMWare, perspective, storage | Tagged: Command line interface, Serial ATA, Service Console, storage, Virtual machine, VMWare, VMware ESX Server, Xen | 
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Posted by flickerdown
Search Term Reviews: October 15th Edition
October 15, 2008It’s been awhile since I last did a review of what people are searching for (July 30th was the last time…wow) so, let’s see what’s new.
Search Term #1: EMC NX4
Not really suprised here. Honestly, take the Celerra NS-20, cut the price signficantly, allow blended SAS/SATA drive trays, Read the rest of this entry »
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AX4-5, EMC, Fibre, NAS, NX4, SAS, SATA, SMB, clariion, perspective, storage | Tagged: Buses, Business, EMC Celerra, EMC Corporation, Fibre Channel, google, Hardware, iSCSI, NetApp, Network-attached storage, storage, Storage area network, Subsystems, YouTube | 
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Is FCoE a viable option for SMB/Commercial?
October 14, 2008
Image via Wikipedia
Since I work in the SMB/Commercial space as a TC, I routintely am exposed to mixed fabric environments. With the advent of iSCSI, we’ve seen a proportional shift towards iSCSI as a reduced-cost block storage fabric. Legacy (2Gb/s) fibre still has presence in specific markets but the uptake of 4Gb/s fibre has been slowing down. With FCoE being announced as the next logical evolution of converged fabrics and 8Gb/s FC and 10G iSCSI working their way to availability, does FCoE make sense for SMB/Commercial markets?
1 Comment | EMC, Fibre, NAS, Performancing, marketing, perspective, storage | Tagged: Cisco, Emulex, Ethernet, FCoE, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Hardware, Host adapter, iSCSI, NetApp, Nexus, Qlogic, Storage area network | Permalink
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Future Storage Systems: Part 4: Operating System - Conceptual Overview
October 13, 2008In the previous Future Storage System articles, we’ve covered the basic hardware foundation for what I envision to be a powerful future-oriented storage solution for the commercial midrange. However, as you’re probably aware, hardware is meaningless without software to provide the operational capabilities that are needed to mange information. In this article, I will focus on a general design for an extensible software layer (an OS) that will provide future-oriented capability expansion as well as robust analytics, capabilities, and integration with business continuity principles. As always, please reference the diagram below.
Future Storage System - Operating System - Conceptual
No Comments » | AMD, EMC, FSS, Fibre, Hypertransport, Infiniband, Intel, PCI Express, PCIe, Performancing, Qlogic, SATA, VMWare, clariion, environment, perspective, storage | Tagged: Business, Business continuity, Command line interface, Computers, Emulator, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Graphical user interface, Hardware, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, IBM, iSCSI, Kernel, Mac OS, Management, Microsoft, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Windows, NetApp, Operating system, Programming, RAID, server, storage, system-tray, Torrenza, Virtual machine, VMWare, Windows, Xen | Permalink
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Future Storage Systems: Part 3b - I/O Expansion Node
October 10, 2008In Part 3a, we discussed the possibility of a purpose-driven Compute Node based on the Torrenza initiative for the Future Storage system. This expansion node made use of Hypertransport as a “glue” between the base storage compute node and the expansion node (of computation or I/O flavours) that could be added. The advantages of that topology were simple: hot add support for additional processing power, additional I/O bandwidth within the system, and additional computing power for the array OS (which we’ll cover in a later article). In this overview, we’ll take a look at another variation on an expansion node: an I/O expansion node that will add additional front-end ports and/or functionality to the base system. We will be referencing the diagram below. (Apologies in advance for the image shearing off in the lower right hand corner).
Hypertransport I/O Expansion Topology
No Comments » | AMD, EMC, FSS, Fibre, Hypertransport, Infiniband, Intel, PCI Express, PCIe, Performancing, Qlogic, clariion, perspective, storage | Tagged: Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, Application-specific integrated circuit, clariion, Computing, Emulex, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, FSS, Hypertransport, iSCSI, Multi-core, Node, Operating system, PCI Express, Processors, Qlogic, SNWSpotlight, Storage area network, Torrenza, Ultraflex, XFP | Permalink
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Future Storage Systems: Part 3a - Node Expansion Overview
October 9, 2008In the previous two articles on the Future Storage System (FSS), I took a general look at a basic storage system architecture (Part 1) and then went a bit deeper into some of the more interesting bits of that system from a platform standpoint (Part 2). In this article, I want to dive a bit deeper into how I envision nodes to be building blocks for additional capabilities and processing directives. I will be referencing the image below as part of this article.
Hypertransport Node Expansion (detailed)
1 Comment | AMD, EMC, FSS, Fibre, Hypertransport, Infiniband, Intel, PCI Express, PCIe, Performancing, Qlogic, clariion, perspective | Tagged: Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, Central processing unit, Components, Hardware, HTX, Hypertransport, Intel, NetApp, Opteron, PCI Express, Permabit, Processors, Socket F, Torrenza, x86, XIV | Permalink
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Future Storage Systems: Part 2 - Detailed Node View
October 8, 2008So, in my article yesterday, I gave a global view of a very simple storage system for the future. Since I LOVE this type of conjecture and theoretics (is that a word?), I decided to take this a step further and flesh out some of the other intricacies of the design. Check out the image below and then click through to read the rest.
Fleshing out the Hypertransport Storage System
1 Comment | AMD, EMC, FSS, Fibre, Hypertransport, Infiniband, Intel, PCI Express, PCIe, Performancing, Qlogic, Sun, clariion, perspective, storage | Tagged: 3Par, AMD, Broacde, Cisco, clariion, CX4, EMC, EMC Clariion, Equallogic, FCoE, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Hardware, HDS, HP, Infiniband, Intel, iSCSI, Lefthand, Multi-core, NetApp, Opteron, Pillar, Processors, Sun | Permalink
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Why wouldn’t the following work? (Future Storage System: Part 1)
October 7, 2008So, I’ve been toying around with this in my mind for some time. Essentially, I’ve tried to understand the basic “Storage Processor” limitation of current storage systems and propose an admittedly simplistic design to get around some of the difficulties. The biggest hurdle, in my mind, is to have cache coherency, low latency memory access to other nodes in a “cluster,” and have a communications “bus” between nodes that is extensible (or at least will grow bandwidth with more devices on the signal chain). Staring at that problem, then, look at the image below.
A case for Hypertransport connected nodes...
1 Comment | AMD, FSS, Fibre, Hypertransport, Infiniband, Iomega, Performancing, environment, perspective, storage | Tagged: Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, Brocade, Buses, Business, CHiPs, Cisco, Components, Emulex, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Hardware, Hypertransport, Infiniband, Mellanox, PCI Express, Processors, Qlogic | Permalink
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Quick VMWare Links
October 7, 2008
Image via CrunchBase
I get asked a lot of questions regarding VMWare setup, etc. and I thought I’d take the time to push this out to the front page on the blog.
This is for Virtual Infrastructure 3: 3.5 Update 2/3:
Main Documentation Page:
http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pages/vi_pubs_35u2.html
Quick Start Guide:
Installation Guide:
Basic Systems Admin Guide:
Virtual Center Installation Guide:
Virtual Center 2.5 Installation Guide
Virtual Machine Backup Guide:
Server Config Guide:
iSCSI and Fibre Config Guides:
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1 Comment | Cloud, VMWare | Tagged: Data center, Emulators, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Intel x86 Architecture, iSCSI, Microsoft, Virtual reality, VMWare, VMware Infrastructure, Windows | Permalink
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