Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
Access "Using NAS for virtual machines"
This article is part of the Vol. 9 Num. 10 February 2011 issue of Storage Products of the Year 2010
Common wisdom says you need block storage for virtual servers, but with most hypervisors supporting the NFS protocol, NAS may work just as well. By Eric Siebert Shared storage is a requisite for virtualized servers if you want to use any of the advanced features server virtualization offers, such as high availability or the ability to move a running virtual machine (VM) from one host to another. This typically meant you had to invest in an expensive Fibre Channel SAN (FC SAN). But all server virtualization products also support using network-attached storage (NAS) devices, which can provide a worthy, cost-effective alternative to FC SANs for shared storage. Another alternative is iSCSI storage which, like NAS, uses TCP/IP over a standard Ethernet network, but iSCSI is block storage like Fibre Channel and tends to be costlier than NAS. NAS systems generally support both NFS and CIFS file-sharing protocols, but server virtualization products prefer -- or are limited to -- NFS. Inside NFS NFS was developed in the late 1980s and has been revised several times ... Access >>>
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Finalists: 2010 data storage Products of the Year
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Storage managers plan for busy 2011
Based on our annual Storage Priorities Survey, it looks like a busy year -- storage budgets are up a bit and there are long to-do lists.
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Finalists: 2010 data storage Products of the Year
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Replication revisited
Once an expensive option, data replication is now available in many forms and is a more affordable and effective disaster recovery option than ever.
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Using NAS for virtual machines
Common wisdom says you need block storage for virtual servers; but with most hypervisors supporting the NFS protocol, NAS may work just as well.
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Replication revisited
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Columns
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What you should know about global dedupe
by Arun Taneja
Global data deduplication can yield significant capacity savings, but its most attractive feature may be the architecture it's built upon.
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Follow the leader: Mature virtualization projects reap biggest benefits
by Lauren Whitehouse
A recent survey shows the sharp contrast between the benefits associated with server virtualization projects and the age and size of the deployment environment.
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Just don't call it disaster recovery
Things might be looking up in data storage shops these days, but a lot of firms are still falling short when it comes to DR readiness.
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The end of NAS as we know it
by Tony Asaro
You've read all the predictions about how file storage will bury our data centers in a few years. How to cope? Probably not with NAS.
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What you should know about global dedupe
by Arun Taneja
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