Agent less solutions

As storage becomes more and more cheap, reliability takes an upper hand with customers. Customers want reliable s/w and one without much memory footprint.

Many storage softwares depend on agent based solution where they run processes and run the software but this has a disadvantage in the form of more memory footprints which basically proves costly for customers with large production environments.

Agentless software is the key to such things where there are no agents or processes running on each host. The agentless softwares are on-demand type of stuff which run processes when data requested get the data and terminate the process. This is usually a good way to get storage data without being dependent on processes which are running continuously and creating memory footprints that grow large over time due to many problems...

So the mantra is "demand data" start process -> get the data and stop process. No slow hosts, reliable data and more defined data rather than look at running processes for ever...which is not possible.

So agentless is more or less being used in many storage softwares like the one from HP and some other new companies.

-- Jayaram

Deduplication: Stop repeating yourself

New techniques can save disk space and speed backups.

Data deduplication, data reduction, commonality factoring, capacity optimized storage – whatever you call it — is a process designed to make network backups to disk faster and more economical.

Proponents also say it enables you to make more data available online longer in the same amount of disk.

In deduplication, as data is backed up to a disk-based virtual tape library (VTL) appliance, a catalog of the data is built. This catalog or repository indexes individual bits of data in a file or block of information, assigns a metadata reference to it that is used to rebuild the file if it needs to be recovered and stores it on disk. The catalog also is used on subsequent backups to identify which data elements are unique. Nonunique data elements are not backed up; unique ones are committed to disk.

For instance, a 20-slide PowerPoint file is initially backed up. The user then changes a single slide in the files, saves the file and e-mails it to 10 counterparts. When a traditional backup occurs, the entire PowerPoint file and its 10 e-mailed copies are backed up. In deduplication, after the PowerPoint file is modified, only the unique elements of data — the single changed slide – is backed up, requiring significantly less disk capacity.

EqualLogic rolls out tiered storage arrays

Arrays support iSCSI technology.

The PS3000 Series Storage Arrays use Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives of different speeds and capacities. The PS3800XV uses 15,000-rpm 150GB SAS drives (2.8TB) for the highest performing tier; the PS3600X uses 10,000-rpm 300GB SAS drives (4.8TB) for secondary storage. Combined with 7,200-rpm Serial Advanced Technology Attachment drives, the arrays will now allow for three tiers of storage.

The disks in the PS3000 Series Storage Arrays are fully redundant and hot swappable. Each module has dual controllers, 16 disk drive bays, plus fans and power supplies. They connect to the network with three 1GB Ethernet connections. A management system on the enclosure monitors component status, disk drive health and temperature.

Management software included with the storage array enables configuration and installation, storage-area network virtualization, provisioning and RAID 5, 10 or 50 placement. A phone-home feature is available for automated troubleshooting.

Optionally, the customer can enable multiway replication for disaster recovery, snapshots for data protection and multipathing I/O support for redundancy.

Hi

Start of a new storage blog. Coming soon...latest news and things I have learnt.
Inspired by Gokul's blog http://www.gokulonstorage.blogspot.com/