Author Archive
Changing the Security Model for Virtualized Cloud Systems
Posted by David Floyer in Wikibon on January 21st, 2010
Physical->Logical Shockers
A key value proposition of both internal and external clouds is reduction in cost from shared resources. Virtualized processors, virtualized storage, virtualized CNAs (Converged Network Adapters) and Virtualized IO are all running virtual machines on commodity hardware.
However, security has its foundations on protecting real objects. An IP address is linked to a real piece of hardware, storage ports have been masked or separated, and processors dedicated to specific sensitive workloads. Security products are often linked to specific hardware, as in encryption of data at rest, encryption of network traffic, and encryption of tapes. If the links between these technologies is physical (e.g., no connection between server and storage) or a well understood logical separation (e.g., LUN masking) then the security gurus can be persuaded that security is auditable. When all the components of the system are shared, the security experts that I have talked to throw up their hands in horror.
Data Migration within Federated Storage
Posted by David Floyer in Wikibon on October 28th, 2009
Understand what 'Non-disruptive' Means
When vendors talk about non-disruptive migration you need to squint between the lines and ask the right questions to determine if they mean truly non-disruptive or sometimes non-disruptive.
Wikibon recently defined federated storage as a collection of autonomous storage resources governed by a common management system. The best way of thinking about federated storage is as a collection of storage resource nodes which are loosely connected. The nodes can be storage arrays or appliances controlling multiple arrays. The management system provides rules, in particular about how data is migrated throughout the network.
Two approaches to justifying and enabling Solid State
Posted by David Floyer in Wikibon on April 15th, 2009
At SNW there were two schools of thought to enabling and justifying solid state storage (SSD).
The Application Enabler School emphasizes what cool things can be achieved with SSD as a new part of the storage hierarchy. The operating system and drivers might be put on MLC solid state, log files and specific DB tables can be held in SLC SSD, and new applications can be written to overcome the constraints of physical drives. This, they argue, can only be achieved by putting the SSD on the motherboard, avoiding the overheads of the storage array and going back to Direct Attach storage. FusionIO are passionate advocates of this approach, showing how wonderful exchange will be when taken out of the oh-so-nineties SAN, and how financial wizards are writing new software on SSD equipped workstations.
VMware as Software Mainframe
Posted by David Floyer in Wikibon on March 10th, 2009
President and CEO Paul Maritz has been describing vSphere as a “software mainframe”, with 2,000 people working on it. Paul says the analogy is especially useful in describing vSphere to people over 45.
Guilty as charged. It is a good analogy. With that analogy come good things and constraints. The good things are a system that never needs to be restarted (re-IPLed for the over 45). It is fully virtualized. It is never hacked. You can move every type of workloads round a synchronous fibre fabric dynamically. It takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.
Is Fusion-I/O Flashier than EMC SSD?
Posted by David Floyer in Wikibon on March 10th, 2009
When you read the Fusion-I/O Specs, they have an access time of 50 microseconds, and 95,000 IOPS for the 160GB SLC ioDrive; that’s over 100 times faster than a traditional disk drive. Look at EMC’s assessment of the potential of flash and you see a more sober assessment of 10-30 times faster. So is Fusion-I/O a much better product and set to dominate the market?
When you look in detail at the spec of the Zeus IOPS 3.5 inch SSD from STEC which is used in the EMC storage arrays the difference between the two technology’s are minimal. Clearly the difference in performance comes from the overhead of running the SSD in a storage array. Is using a disk-drive form factor for storage a wrong decision?
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