Last week I was visiting the World Hosting Day Event in Germany as usual and I’ve wanted to provide you all with some highlights. Intel was presenting the innovative Romley Server Platform. No doubt in my mind that this will be a very high performance Storage Server. We are working with Intel and Microtronica engineers on the top 3 typical configurations for the Intel Romley based Storage Servers. LSI and Adaptec were exposing SSD Cache [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Recently we’ve seen an explosion of new ideas based on the ‘cloud computing’ concept, and the chances are that many of you want to participate in this lucrative market as well. So what features do you need to provide to offer virtual servers ‘in the cloud’?  These are the fundamentals: Your cloud service must be highly available, with automatic failover. The promise of cloud computing is that is it always on, and instantly available. Automatic [...]

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? [...]

Last week I visited WHD2011 (World Hosting Day) in Rust, Germany. As usual there was plenty of interesting news and lots of ideas on how computing is going to develop in the next 10 years. But I want to mention something I saw there that is very practical and ready to deploy today. Often storage builders use external JBOD’s if they need a very high capacity system. Such solutions need a lot of rack space [...]

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 [...]

Business continuity is becoming a more and more important feature. A significant portion of the purchases of our Data Storage Software are in pairs. Customers are using pairs of 2 systems in order to build high availability clusters with our iSCSI Failover feature (our recent webinar on iSCSI Failover was our best attended webinar ever). Getting to the point: why would one want to make switchless 10Gb connections. Even though 10Gb CX4 ports are inexpensive [...]