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Technology
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 Flashed-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming a big issue for enterprise storage users; a number of customers I work with are planning for this new "tier 0" data storage for a number of reasons. It could be as simple as IOPS per watt, IOPS per dollar, or for some applications, bandwidth per GB/sec of storage.
SSDs have a number of disadvantages compared to traditional disk storage, the biggest by far being cost. There are those who claim that spinning hard drives will soon be a thing of the past because of flash SSDs, but I can't see that happening anytime soon, and if it does, the devices that replace spinning hard drives will not be based on flash and won't appear much before the end of this decade (see I/O Bottlenecks: Biggest Threat to Data Storage). Vendors have been claiming tape is dead for the last 20 years, but it continues to play a big role in data protection schemes. There will always be tiers of storage, it seems.
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Technology
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NMC 'foreach' primitive is yet another enhancement to quickly create high-power custom scripts, or simply execute any number of NMC commands in a loop.
The outline of NMC 'foreach' loop follows below:
nmc$ foreach var (value1, value, ...)
(f)nmc$ some-command
(f)nmc$ other-command
...
...
(f)nmc$ endfor |
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Technology
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Citrix StorageLink™ technology allows virtual server infrastructures to leverage resources and functionality of existing storage systems via an easy to use interface that connects both Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen Server virtualization technologies to underlying storage management.
NexentaStor StorageLink Adapter is a separate module that uses the NexentaStor Storage Appliance public API (SA-API) to allow StorageLink to control NexentaStor instances and to thereby take full advantage of NexentaStor capabilities, including unlimited incremental backups or 'snapshots', snapshot mirroring (replication), block level mirroring, inherent virtualization, thin provisioning, high availability, replication services, advanced iSCSI, CIFS and NFS services, and more. NexentaStor StorageLink Adapter is throughly tested and certified.
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Technology
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Introduction: ClamAV antivirus
NexentaStor is generally considered a risk-free platform, when it comes to the general threats posed by malware (short for "malicious software"). The latter includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, most rootkits, spyware, and so on. Still, to ensure that the appliance is ready when (and if) such malicious software is attempted to be used against the appliance, we have recently added a built-in antivirus capability. The corresponding NexentaStor extension module (plugin) is based on a well-known cross-platform antivirus software: ClamAV.
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Technology
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VM DataCenter 2.0 simplifies the management of the storage for virtualized environments, and specifically VMware's ESX and Citrix's Xen server.
This optional module integrates seamlessly into the NexentaStor web GUI, and provides a single point of control to manage all storage related aspects of virtualized servers.
Capabilities include:
- establish storage policies, including scheduled backups and replication, for each VM data set from one user interface
- perform common VM management tasks such as starting and stopping VMs
- use templates to clone VMs at a fraction of the time of cloning within virtualized environments.
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Technology
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Auto-sync is one of the NexentaStor provided data replication mechanisms. It is a schedulable, fault-managed, fully configurable (tunable) NexentaStor Data Replication service that can be used in a variety of backup, archiving, and DR scenarios.
- For general and background information, please see Data Replication.
- For NexentaStor Automatic Continuous Data Protection (CDP) extension, please see AutoCDP.
During the last several release iterations, auto-sync replication has been significantly improved, and a number of new features added. That includes:
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Technology
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NexentaStor is often used to provide database storage for Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL and other database servers. Based on a popular request, we have added NexentaStor plugins that extend the appliance's capability to take consistent database snapshots. The latter must include an extra step of "quiescing a database": that is, flushing all in-progress transactions, so that the resulting ZFS snapshot is internally consistent and can be used to backup the database, rollback the database, etc.
There are two fundamental ways to implement consistent database snapshotting:
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Technology
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 Read the performance whitepaper Data centers and cloud computing environments around the world are facing intense pressure to reduce capital and operating costs while maintaining the highest levels of system performance.
TheAdaptec MaxIQ™ SSD Cache Performance Solution addresses the needs of I/O intensive data centers by creating high-performance hybrid arrays – storage arrays that use both solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) – to deliver up to five times the I/O performance of HDD-only arrays, and up to 50% savings in costs.
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