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Tag: Storage

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  • February 29, 2024
  • 11 min to read

Tape vs Disk vs VTL: Which is best for backup and why?

Safeguarding your data is crucial in today’s digital landscape, but with so many backup options available, how do you choose the right one? Our latest article dives into data backup, comparing tape, disk, and virtual tape library (VTL) technologies.

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  • October 31, 2018
  • 19 min to read

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.

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  • September 7, 2018
  • 11 min to read

How VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering works, how to set it up, & why you need it

 

A couple of days ago, I decided to re-distribute VM resource shares. I, basically, wanted several VMs to get some more resource without compromising their latency. For that purpose, I played around with Storage I/O Control parameters a bit. And, you know, I decided to look at things more globally. Actually, here’s how I decided to take a deeper dive into I/O filtering. In today’s article, I’m going to tell you about the VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework providing the direct access to the to the VM I/O stream. I shed light on how to enable those filters, how they work, and why you need them.

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  • March 8, 2018
  • 9 min to read

Simplify storage management with Microsoft Systems Center VMM (SCVMM) and SMI-S

SMI-S or ‘Storage Management Initiative – Specification’ is a standard of a storage management (surprise!) which gives you a chance to administrate the storage layer using ‘Common Information Model’ and Web-Based Enterprise Management technologies and logic. The main point of SMI-S is to provide a single standard to manage various storage systems from different vendors pretty much in the same way. In this article (?) we will show you how to manage your storage using SCVMM 2016 (Server Center Virtual Machine Manager) through SMI-S, and how this whole thing works in general. We’ll use VSAN from StarWind as a reference distributed storage platform, but the primary scope of this document is to cover the subject in general, so any SMI-S compatible storage will work.

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  • February 27, 2018
  • 8 min to read

Storage Tiering – the best of both worlds

Before the time when SSDs took their irreplaceable place in the modern datacenter, there was a time of slow, unreliable, fragile, and vacuum filled spinning rust drives. A moment of change divided the community into two groups – the first with dreams of implementing SSDs in their environment, and the second, with SSDs already being part of their infrastructure.
The idea of having your data stored on the associated tier has never been so intriguing. The possibility of granting your mission-critical VM the performance it deserves in the moment of need has never been more appropriate.

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  • February 22, 2018
  • 7 min to read

How Can I Replace a Failed Physical Disk on Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016?

So, we all know about Microsoft’s Storage Spaces Direct (S2D to put it simple) by now. It’s the feature introduced in Microsoft Server 2016 (Datacenter Edition) that pools together server’s storage allowing to build…that’s right: highly available and easily scalable software-defined storage systems. In this article, I’m gonna talk about not as much about its fault-tolerance characteristics themselves, but some hands-on experience, namely: how to replace a failed disk.

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  • February 2, 2018
  • 9 min to read

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?

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  • January 26, 2018
  • 10 min to read

3 benefits your business gets with a hyper-converged infrastructure

We’ve all heard the expression “time is money” and you can’t put it better when talking about IT. Most businesses’ success and efficiency depends on their IT infrastructure. For real. We all want our applications to run as fast as possible and roll them out in a matter of minutes. Moreover, the more data you have, the worse the consequences are in the event of its loss. So, companies want to get back all their data and get it back as soon as possible in case something happens. That’s called Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the shorter they are, the better it is for your company. Finally, as your business grows, you want to provision it with the right amount of storage and capacity and in case you need to open another branch office, you want to deploy an IT infrastructure shortly without spending months for building it.

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  • July 14, 2017
  • 7 min to read

Windows Server 2016 Core configuration. Part 1: step-by-step installation

This series of articles will guide you through the basic deployment of Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Core version, covering all the steps from an initial installation to the deployment of Hyper-V role and Failover Cluster configuration. The first and the main thing you need to double-check before installing the Windows Server 2016 Core is whether your hardware meets the system requirements of WS 2016. This also is very important in the process of planning your environment, in order to be sure that you have enough amount of compute resources for running your production workload.

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  • June 19, 2017
  • 5 min to read

Azure Introduces Storage Service Encryption for Managed Disks with No Additional Cost

As we referenced several times, security is one of the main topics for cloud providers looking to guarantee privacy for their customers’ data and information. Microsoft just announced the public availability for Storage Service Encryption (SSE) for Azure Managed Disks, with no additional cost.