Category: Data Storage

Data storage is a recording medium is a physical material that holds information.

Ceph vs vSAN 1

Data Center / Data Storage

Ceph Use Cases in vSphere: Best Practices, Challenges, and Comparison with vSAN

VMware vSphere is one of the main virtualization platforms used today. Despite the close integration of VMware’s proprietary Virtual SAN (vSAN) into the vSphere ecosystem, a growing number of enterprises are choosing open-source storage technologies such as Ceph. The choice to incorporate Ceph into a vSphere system requires knowledge of the architecture’s drawbacks as well as its advantages, use cases, and best practices.

MicroCeph Architecture 0

Cloud Native Architecture / Data Storage / Reviews / Software Defined Data Center

MicroCeph: Big Data, Tiny Setup. Where Simplicity Scales Your Storage to the Stars

The open-source software defined storage (SDS) colossus, Ceph, has long been praised for its versatility, scalability, and strong feature set. But creating and maintaining a Ceph cluster, especially for small-scale deployments, may be a difficult undertaking best left to storage experts and experienced system administrators. Introducing MicroCeph, an opinionated and streamlined implementation of Ceph that seeks to enable everyone to use this potent storage solution.

Imagine being able to effortlessly manage a fully functional Ceph cluster with only a few finger snaps. That is MicroCeph’s magic. It uses Snaps, a safe and independent Linux packaging standard, to provide a pre-setup, pre-optimized Ceph experience. Forget about laborious orchestration, complicated daemons, and manual configuration; MicroCeph handles everything, from deployment to continuing management.

Storage Spaces Direct 2

Data Center / Data Storage / Software Defined Data Center

Storage Spaces Direct is a scalable and cost-effective storage solution for VMware vSphere environments

A cluster of Windows Server nodes can use the software-defined storage (SDS) solution Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) to pool their local storage drives into a single, highly available storage pool. The creation and management of virtual discs (VDisks) with different sizes and performance characteristics may then be done using this storage pool. The Datacenter and Standard editions of Windows Server 2022, 2019 and 2016 come with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).

VM ID Improved Storage Usage and Performance 0

Reviews / Data Storage / Virtualization

Virtual Machine Identification (VM-ID) in Fibre Channel: A Comprehensive Overview

Virtual Machine Identification (VMID or VM-ID) is a technology for tracking virtual machine I/O between virtual machine and SAN target. VM-ID can be used by hypervisor and FC switch to trace generated I/O by specific VM. As result, we can optimize whole SAN area for VI workload and non-VI workloads would be achieved.

FC Port Aggregation (Trunking) 0

Server Hardware / Data Center / Data Storage

Fibre Channel Trunking (Aggregation): Better Performance, Higher Bandwidth (>1 Tb/s)

We are all knowing LACP on ethernet network but Fibre Channel and SAN network providing multipathing I/O by using logical and physical paths as single device on operating system and also using path selecting policies for using I/O paths optimized. But if server using 16Gb/s FC HBA, so there is no bandwidth aggregation. Server can generate bandwidth for each port up to maximum speed of port and also path selecting has performance impact of server when large paths are presented to server. Months before, I was thinking about FC port aggregation and did many searches but I didn’t find anything until now.

io block size 3mb 1

Data Center / Data Storage / Operating System / Reviews

I/O Block Size (> 3 MB) Best Practice on EMC AFA/HFA and Linux (Physical and Virtual)

We have a problem on our Oracle Database servers which are hosting by Oracle Linux servers, when Oracle Databases putting to Maximum Availability protection mode, some workloads impacts performance whole database ecosystem. The workloads are related to some tasks which performed from by application servers and the tasks needs huge read/write I/O on storage arrays. We are using DELL EMC Unity/Unity XT (All Flash/Hybrid Flash) family in most of projects. I did lots of searches and found nothing at first step. I had only one clue, I/O block size was very large during performing tasks by database servers.

Dell EMC Unity XT 0

Data Storage / News

Major Update For DELL EMC Unity/Unity XT OE (5.2.0.0.5.173)

EMC has released new OE (5.2.0.0.5.173) for Unity/Unity XT storage array family with new major changes. The new release also contains lots of resolved issues for different components. The biggest changes are “Data Reduction and Advanced Deduplication” can now be enabled for hybrid storage pools and also dynamic pools will be expanded faster than before.

pnfs architecture 1

Data Storage / Data Center / Reviews

Parallel NFS (pNFS) – Part 1 (Introduction)

Parallel NFS (pNFS) is a part of the NFS v4.1 standard that allows compute clients to access storage devices directly and in parallel. The pNFS architecture eliminates the scalability and performance issues associated with NFS servers deployed today. This is achieved by the separation of data and metadata, and moving the metadata server out of the data path.

Ceph Alternatives 1

Reviews / Data Center / Data Storage

Ceph Storage Platform: Best Alternatives in 2022

Ceph is most popular software-defined storage platform and offers Objec-Storage, Block Device and File System (CephFS) for storing data in modern data centers or public and private clouds. Best and popular solutions needs alternatives as well. So at this post, we’ll review some alternatives for Ceph.

emc unity host group 1

Data Storage

EMC Unity Host Group, Finally Came!

EMC Unity array was released in 2016 to replace VNX and VNXe family with another mid-range array solution. EMC Unity came with lots of new features and enhancements compare to older families but there was an absent feature that VNX offering. Host access method was changed and each LUN should have been present to each host separately. More than 4 years from GA release, we were waiting for changing host access method because presenting LUN to each host was horrible in large scale environment with many hosts and LUNs. Biggest Change In EMC Unity OE 5.1.0.0.5.394 Previous versions have “Consistency Group” with some limits to present a LUN or more than one LUN to group of hosts. EMC Unity OE 5.1.0.0.5.394 including new feature that the new feature is like VNX Storage Group. The new feature called “Host Group“. You could assign or present multiple LUN to multiple hosts in OE version 5.0 and later but Host Group is the feature that we want. In Dell EMC Unity OE version 5.1 users can logically group hosts and block resources within a host group. Host groups can be created and managed from the Host Groups tab and help to streamline host/resource...

Unity XT Metro Node Differentiators 1

Data Center / Data Storage / Virtualization

Unity XT Metro Node (1st/2nd Generation): Protect Your Data and Applications from Disaster

Unity XT storage arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency and built to work in multi-cloud environment. Actually Unity XT storage array is mid-range storage array family but this family is capable for enterprise workloads. Enterprise businesses needs protection and needs business continuity solutions. Typically, mid-range storage array has no native business continuity solution but Unity XT offers Unity XT Metro Node as business continuity solution.