Cloud is “hot”, everyone is talking about it, everyone uses it, everyone keeps data in the “Cloud”. However, do we know what it really means? Let’s look at a cloud without a marketing shell – at the myths and facts. Confusion in the Clouds Where does the Cloud begin, and where does it end? You may say: “Yes, I have access to my data from various locations. I can choose the capacity of services. I [...]

What to do with old hard disks? What to do if your company is going to upgrade its equipment? How to get rid of any useless hardware? However we approach these problems, everything will always concern one important issue – the protection of confidential data. Data security policy Briefly and generally – data security policy is a set of precise rules and procedures created to organize the resources of a company including the issues of [...]

Here we present two ways of thinking about the issue of boot media in cooperation with Open-E DSS V6. Take a look below – there are following options to consider: The first is to use a Small Boot Volume that resides on the Hardware RAID controller. This is a very reliable and stabile boot media and there is no need to buy an extra boot media. The small 2GB logical volume on the RAID Array [...]

So you need Asynchronous volume replication badly and you only find the Synchronous volume replication is on our feature list. Not all is lost as we can still provide a good solution for this requirement for your customers. An equivalent solution that can convert a volume image into files will help here. Let’s consider a Windows 2008R2 server or VMware ESXi server hosting many virtual machines. In both cases the customer will need to have [...]

We are sure some of you have thought about DRBD – about its use and operation. Here is some information about it – a few benefits, some drawbacks, tips and solutions. The built-in volume replication mechanism is based on the open source DRBD which was being developed by the Austrian company LINBIT. It is a popular and widely used software for High Availability (HA) Clusters. Volume replication is used to create a mirror copy of [...]

While you are using WAN network you may face the problem of slow connections. It may cause various difficulties – i.e. during replication process. Open-E Data Storage Software – as a professional and versatile product – has been designed with solving this problem in mind.   Synchronous or asynchronous? This is the question. There are two different cases. The first one is connected with block based volume replication. It is based on synchronous volume replication [...]

Very often, storage product users do not know what kind of performance numbers to expect in real operations. Why do storage vendors claim such great performance when measured by an industry accepted reference tool like IOmeter, but in production database applications are often very slow? The biggest difference comes from how the data is being read from the disk. Is it in sequential blocks or is it scattered in random blocks all over the drive? [...]

How to provide access to shared data using Linux based servers and cluster file system? In this post we are going to present quick and painless way to configure the whole environment that will consist of a few servers using Linux Debian Squeeze and another one with DSS V6 as a storage provider. To be more interesting we are going to present also an alternative way to manage DSS V6.

There are plenty of benchmarking tools available but storage professionals mostly use IOmeter. Unfortunately IOmeter is a little tricky to use. You really need to read the user manual first. I have frequently seen users trying to run IOmeter tests without success. Being human, most of us hate to read the manual and with IOmeter this can lead to problems. I hope this short post will help you to get the wanted results. First off, [...]

I am not kidding. We were getting queries about the performance of our latest DSS V6 build 4786. So I needed to quickly set up a performance benchmark. It took me about 5 minutes to set one up with a Fibre Channel volume connected to a VMware ESXi 4.1.0 host. My test server has a 4Gb dual-port FC HBA, so in order to get maximum performance I configured a round-robin Multipath. Then I ran IOmeter [...]