The next version of Microsoft Windows Server includes integrated data deduplication technology. Microsoft is positioning this as a boon for server virtualization and claims it has very little performance impact. But how exactly does Microsoft’s de-duplication technology work?
Virtualization of server, network, and storage services illuminates the link between physical resources and functional applications. A running virtual machine can instantly move from one server, network adapter, HBA, or LUN to another. And when it happens, traditional components have no idea how to react.
The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting their vote while the rest flounder. But the storage industry must wake up and embrace the divide.
PCIe SSDs like Micron’s new P320h offer mindbending performance and enterprise class reliability. Although expensive, these devices are in an entirely different league from any other storage option. Micron promises to bring the PCIe P320h to market at nearly $15 per gigabyte, a substantial discount over other PCIe SSD competitors.
The most interesting products and companies at Interop Las Vegas 2011 were found around the edges of the show floor. Companies like NEC, Synology, Ciphertex, and Endace may have gone unnoticed in the shadows of towering booths of the industry titans but deserve attention. One such pairing was two Wi-Fi analysis companies, MetaGeek and Ekahau. Both work together to enable spectrum analysis and site surveying on portable devices – smart phones and tablets.
I’ve got a new video podcast up and running: Raising the Floor is a series of discussions about the future of enterprise IT. I kicked the series off talking about one of my favorite topics: Cloud storage. It was a pretty broad discussion, all packed into less than half an hour, but I wanted to share a few excerpts.
Druva is not as new a company as the “launch” nomenclature indicates. The company has spent years building a data protection product, inSync, for remote enterprise PCs and already boasts hundreds of customers. The company is profitable and successful already, but decided to come to the United States and initiate a growth effort.
What happens in the telephone game is that a little bit of information gets lost at each step along the path, and at the end of the chain you’ve basically lost all the information. And this happens all the time in computers, especially in data storage. Thin reclamation is the core technical challenge to thin provisioning, and the telephone game is the reason.
Last week, after the Exec Event in Palo Alto, I joined my friend W. Curtis Preston for his first Backup Central Live! event. Curtis has spent years educating IT pros about data protection, this was the first week of a new series of self-produced events. And let me tell you, although I’ve seen him present dozens of times, Curtis was really in his element here. He held the packed room enthralled, and the vendor sponsors I talked to were very pleased about the event!
One of the biggest problems for thin provisioning is not the provisioning part: It’s fairly easy for a storage array to allocate on request: “I need a block; here’s some data I want you to write.” And the storage array just starts allocating, and allocating. But, the operating system never goes back and says “I don’t need that block anymore.”
