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Tag: SAN

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Oleg Pankevych

SAN vs VSAN. What is the Difference?

Gain insights into storage efficiency and reliability with a comparison of Virtual SAN (VSAN) and SAN. VSAN’s simplicity or SAN’s mission-critical prowess – what’s your pick?

Diana Abo Harmouch

What is iSCSI?

Data transfer is at the core of tech evolution, and choosing the right storage system is paramount. Learn how the iSCSI protocol revolutionizes data storage and boosts efficiency.

Alex Khorolets

What is Network Attached Storage (NAS)?

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is about centralizing and streamlining your storage needs. Whether you’re a business or a home user, NAS offers great benefits: centralized storage, easy access, data protection, and cost-efficiency. Curious about NAS vs. SAN vs. DAS?

Alex Khorolets

What is virtualization? A Deep Dive Guide

It truly seems that you couldn’t possibly find a person today who hasn’t heard of virtualization technology yet. Considering its more efficient use of a physical machine’s resources, there’s no surprise whatsoever as to why it has become an industry standard for enterprise IT architecture. However, are you sure you know all there is to know?

Diana Abo Harmouch

What Is a Storage Area Network (SAN) and How Does It Work? (SAN vs NAS – what to choose?)

For quite some time, SAN (Storage Area Network) has been the go-to choice for provisioning storage for many organizations. However, NAS (Network-Attached Storage) is gaining more and more popularity.

Dmitriy Dolgiy

Where to keep your backups? Storage types explained

Managing an IT environment is impossible without a reliable backup and recovery plan that must include a robust storage option.

Dmitriy Dolgiy

SAN? NAS? Public cloud? Let’s pick the secondary storage

 

Some time ago, I wrote an article about backup storage media. Today, I’d like to talk about secondary storage.

Before I move on, I want to clarify what I mean by “secondary storage” here, just to make sure that we are on the same page. Secondary storage is the storage where the actively used data resides. It can be both some local storage like SAN or NAS, or some public cloud hot tier. Well, it’s absolutely true that you can use disk arrays too, but let’s think of them today just as NAS-like servers packed with many disks, ok? That’s entirely up to you “which side you are on”, and there’s no “one-size-fits-all” solution. NAS, SAN, and public cloud storage… Whatever secondary storage you choose, it has own pros and cons. I discuss them in this article.

Kevin Soltow

A few advices that will make your VDI sizing easier

Server virtualization helped businesses increase productivity and efficiency of their IT infrastructures by abstracting physical servers’ workloads from the underlying hardware with little to no loss of functionality, VDI applied quite the same logic. Desktops and applications run inside virtual machines that are hosted centrally, either on a server or in the cloud. The purpose of VDI is to deliver fully-featured user desktops to a variety of devices including conventional PCs, thin clients, and even zero-client endpoints. But how something that was seen as a bright alternative to the traditional server-based computing model used by Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services a decade ago ended up being a niched deployment?

Jon Toigo

Back to Enterprise Storage

An under-reported trend in storage these days is the mounting dissatisfaction with server-centric storage infrastructure as conceived by proprietary server hypervisor vendors and implemented as exclusive software-defined storage stacks.  A few years ago, the hypervisor vendors seized on consumer anger around overpriced “value-add” storage arrays to insert a “new” modality of storage, so-called software-defined storage, into the IT lexicon.  Touted as a solution for everything that ailed storage – and as a way to improve virtual machine performance in the process – SDS and hyper-converged infrastructure did rather well in the market.  However, the downside of creating silo’ed storage behind server hosts was that storage efficiency declined by 10 percent or more on an enterprise-wide basis; companies were realizing less bang for the buck with software-defined storage than with the enterprise storage platforms they were replacing.

Andrea Mauro

The dark side of converged storage networks

The fabric of SAN (means Storage Area Network) with Fibre Channel solutions have always been a dedicated network, with dedicated components (like FC switches). But, starting with iSCSI and FCoE protocols, the storage fabric could now be shared with the traditional network infrastructure, because at least level 1 and 2 have a common Ethernet layer (for iSCSI also layer 3 and 4 are the same of TCP/IP networks). Hosts (the initiators) in a converged network use typically Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) that provide both Ethernet and storage functions (usually FCoE and iSCSI).