Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Free virtualization tutorial

Sure, I like free things.  That's why I appreciate the Storage Networking Industry Association's posting free tutorials on their website.

When I downloaded the Virtualizations/Applications tutorial, though, I hoped for a simple explanation,  preferably a video with one-syllable words, of the benefits of dynamic provisioning.  Instead I found three PowerPoint presentations full of sophisticated network-speak.

So I did what any writer would do.  I wrote down the phrases that appealed to me.  Here they are:
  • Heuristic shifting
  • Transparent on-the-fly reconfiguration
  • Virtual disks
  • Switch-based fabric topology is preferable to appliance-based failover mechanisms
  • A smart switch comprises a metadata controller and a data controller
  • A full block copy is better than a live volume
  • Volume updates replicate to remote servers
  • "Do not rely on only one network-based appliance or intelligent switch only"
  • You use two redundant volumes, one active and one passive, stored in a mirrored backend.  The passive one has host-based multipathing software
  • Policy-based service level management handles error-prone administrative tasks such as storage provisioning.  In fact, policy-based service must have no user interaction.  This one made me think of Vonnegut's Player Piano.
  • " Map storage to server volume(s) (online)!!" This one is obviously important because it has two exclamation marks
  • Hypervisor This is a new word to me, and I like it.
If I got them wrong, don't blame the experts at the SNIA.  Do look for these phrases on web copy and newsletters coming from my desk very soon :D

Finally, slide 21 of Trends in Application Recovery by Andreas Schwegman makes it all worthwhile.  So grab some popcorn and download those tutorials.

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