Welcome to Wikibon's Storage Networks (SN) Portal.
The SN Portal is a resource for IT professionals interested in building resilient, cost effective and flexible enterprise storage infrastructure to support mission and business critical applications. Key technology themes in this portal include storage area networks (SAN), network attached storage (NAS), iSCSI, SAS, storage consolidation and related innovations. We welcome you to join Wikibon, browse the portal and participate. You can write a Wikitip, Ask a Question or attend a Peer Incite Research Meeting.
The Wikibon Storage Network Portal contains storage network industry research, articles, expert opinion, case studies, and storage network company profiles.
Check out these Peer Incite Podcasts related to storage networking:
1. Six noted industry experts rap about EMC's recent analysts meeting. (23:18)
2. Grant, a Sr. Storage Admin at a large bank discusses how heterogeneous storage virtualization can help reduce the budget for 2009. (20 Mins)
3. Wikibon's summary of IBM's 'stealthy' XIV announcement. (9:07)
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WikitipMake blade servers as homogeneous as possibleBlade computing works best when organizations apply a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy, meaning all the blades in the chassis are as similar as possible and ideally, identical. This means same cpu, same speed, same memory, same everything, including the same vendor. By standardizing on blade servers, operating procedures can assume that every component in the chassis is identical and IT operations doesn’t have to worry about the sensitivity of a particular server component to an application’s unique characteristics. This makes blades more swappable, easier to manage, simpler to back up and cheaper to acquire and inventory. Greater diversity within the chassis defeats many of the benefits of blade computing. If for whatever reason, you don’t want to enforce this degree of commonality, it is advisable that customers take an N and N-1 approach to blade server technology, meaning standardize on a couple of blade server types, one current technology and one current minus one generation, replacing existing server technologies every few years to keep the infrastructure simple. The business benefits of commonality, as seen in the case examples will outweigh any incremental hardware costs borne by this approach. |
Featured Case StudyFinancial Firm Implements Tiered StorageCS2 is a financial organization and significant merger and acquisition activity has led to a mixture of storage and storage management tools behind nine SANs, with poor storage utilization. The charge back system does not reflect all the storage costs and has led to Symmetrix being used extensively for tier 2 storage. |
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Featured How-to Note |
Implementing Tiered StorageTraditional methods of managing storage use either a “one size fits all” strategy, or a "Mix, Match and Manage" approach introducing many different storage pools. The challenge of the first technique is high equipment cost, whereas the latter often brings higher labor costs to manage the multiple storage pools all with different software, services and procedures. Creating storage tiers with more granularity with a single management approach begins to address the problems that one size does not fit all and storage pools are hard to manage. |