Category Archives: Storage

Dell Storage Forum Europe 2012

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If you’re into storage and a happy DELL customer / user like me you might very well want to check out the DELL Storage Forum2012 in London (January 9-12). Don’t wait too long however as time is running out. Compellent has some impressive features and conditions (licensing, modularity, easy of use, PowerShell support, Live Motion & federation, Hyper-V support, Snapshots) that I’m very interested in. It’s those abilities that make a SAN worth it’s money in 2012 and beyond, that combined with a way to get out of the forklift upgrade cycle of storage.

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Storage vendors have a lot of competition going on and are under a lot of pressure from customers to provide better value for money due to operational costs, complex licensing and fork lift upgrades, expensive upgrades and sometime lack luster support. Those vendors that can address these concerns best will be in a good spot when they face competition, not only from the storage vendors but also from software SAN producers and Microsoft with Windows 8 Server. I think Compellent is a viable candidate in this space and I’ll be checking them out extensively. Data growth is a huge issue and affordable storage needs are a big concern for most companies. Vendors know that and I hope they compete on offering better & more affordable solutions rather than banking on the fact customers need them that much they won’t need to change their business too much.

Video Interview on CSV & Storage Design by Carsten Rachfahl

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I already mentioned that during the Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference I met a lot of great people and I presented on High Performance & High Availability networking for Hyper-V clusters (10Gbps goodness). Some of the people I met I already knew from the on line community and others were unknown to me until that event. Among the attendees we found some of the usual virtualization suspects in our community like Aidan Finn, Jeff Wouters, Carsten Rachfahl, Ronnie Isherwood.

Now Carsten Rachfahl is a MVP in Virtual Machine expertise but he’s also a dynamic entrepreneur who shows a lot of initiative. Using social media he is really making in effort to get people & customers to notice important snippets of information by providing easy and fast access to them. He’s very active as a speaker, on Twitter and on his blogs. On top of that he does podcasts and video interviews. For Hyper-V information go to http://www.hyper-v-server.de/  which you can also use  as an entry point for his other sites focusing on several aspects of IT in the Microsoft sphere in Germany. Like cloud computing & Licensing. There you’ll also find the videos of interviews on these subjects. It’s quite an impressive endeavor.

Carsten took the opportunity to make some videos with all the above suspects on various subject and he recently released our interview. 2011-12-01-didier-interview

In this video we continued the discussion that Aidan started on CSV and we briefly touched on a subject you could make hour long documentaries about: storage options in Windows Hyper-V now and in the years to come. Enjoy!

Data Protection & Disaster Recovery in Windows 8 Server Hyper-V 3.0

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The news coming in from the Build Windows conference is awesome. The speculation of the last months is being validated by what is being told and on top of that more goodness is thrown at us Hyper-V techies.

On the data protection and disaster recovery front some great new weapons are at our disposal. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Live Migration & Storage Live Migration.

Among the goodies are the improvements in Live Migration and the introduction of Storage Live Migration.  Hyper-V 3.0 supports multiple concurrent Live Migrations now, which combined with adequate bandwidth will provide for fast evacuation of problematic hosts. Storage Live Migration means you can move a VM (configuration, VHD & snapshots) to different storage while the guest remains on line so the users are not hindered by this. I’m trying to find out if they will support multiple networks / NICs  with this.

Now to make this shine even more MSFT has another ace up it’s sleeve. You can do Live Migration and Storage Live Migration without the requirement of shared storage on the backend. This combination is a big one. This is means “shared nothing” high availability. Even now when prices for entry level shard storage has plummeted we see SMB being weary of SAN technology. It’s foreign to them and the fact they haven’t yet gained any confidence with the technology makes them hesitant. Also the real or perceived complexity might hold ‘m back. For that segment of the market it is now possible to have high availability anyway with the combo Live Migration / Storage Migration.  Add to this that Hyper-V now supports running virtual machines on a file share and you can see the possibilities of NAS appliances in this space of the market for achieving some very nice solutions.

Replication to complete the picture

To top this of you have replication built in, meaning we have the possibility to provide reasonably fast disaster recovery. It might not be real time data center fail over but a lot of clients don’t need that. However, they do need easy recoverability and here it is. To give you even more options, especially  if you only have one location, you can replicate to the cloud.

So now I start dreaming Smile We have shared nothing Live & Storage Live  Migration, we have replication. What could achieve with this? Do synchronous replication locally over a 10Gbps for example and use that to build something like continuous availability. There we go, we already have requirements for “Windows 8 Server R2”!

NIC Teaming in the OS

No more worries about third party NIC teaming woes. It has arrived in the OS (finally!) and it will support load balancing & failover. I welcome this, again it makes this a lot more feasible for the SMB shops.

IP Virtualization / Address Mobility

Another thing that will aid with any kind of of site  disaster recovery / high availability is IP address Mobility. You have an IP for the hosting of the VM and one for internal use by VM. That means you can migrate to other environments (cloud, remote site) with other addresses as the VM can change the hosted IP address, while the internal IP address remains the same.  Just imagine the flexibility this gives us during maintenance, recovery, trouble shooting network infrastructure issues and all this without impacting the users who depend on the VM to get their job done.

Conclusion

Everything we described is out of the box with Windows 8 Server Hyper-V. To a lot of business this can  mean a  huge improvement in their current  availability and disaster recovery situation. More than ever there is now no more reason for any company to go down or even out of business due to catastrophic data loss as all this technology is available on site, in hybrid scenarios and in the cloud with the providers.

BriForum 2011 Europe Here I Come

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As you might have read a previous blog and noticed in the sidebar, I’m off to London (UK) to attend  BriForum 2011 Europe. It’s time to get away from the wide screens overlooking my ICT empire toys and broaden my horizons  For those who think the cloud is going to take away your job … think again, I’m getting busier than ever. The reality is that we just can’t push a button and have everything up and running in the cloud. Greenfield projects and startups might beat existing infrastructure & application architecture over the head with cloud and make those businesses run harder for their money but they will run and compete. That race will produce a huge workload.

So I’m of to dive into some sessions on Cloud, Server & Application Virtualization, VDI … should make for some interesting days. I hope to be able to talk to lots of people with a variety of experiences to help find out new or alternate ways to address some issues (or challenges) we need to tackle in the years ahead. Subjects like Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, application-aware storage in a virtualized environment, Geo Clustering, Site Recovery, … should give us ample to discuss. Give us a shout if you’re there. It’s also a nice opportunity to meet up with some fellow bloggers and twitter. acquaintances.

A colleague of mine is heading to the USA, Atlanta to attend TechEd 2011 USA. So he’s crossing the big pond to get some brand new info on the latest and the greatest in Microsoft technologies on the IT Pro side of the business.

So of to London, I go, onwards & always going forward in IT as there is no turning back I’ll keep you posted when I find the time to do so.