Data Domain is talking
about their ability to boot VMs from the DR replica system. As most of
you know Data Domain stores and replicates deduplicated data, so
backups can be retained onsite and efficiently moved to a DR location.
Using a utility or script that protects the virtual machine by copying
it in its native form, you can move the VMDK and configuration files to
the data domain system via NFS. Then in the DR site the VMDK files can
be mounted and VMs booted from an NFS data store configured on the
replica Data Domain system. This is an ideal way to bring servers back
online for file recovery from within the guest OS, DR testing or in the
first minutes of a disaster recovery plan. If the time at the DR site
is going to be extended then the virtual image can be moved to a more
traditional storage using storage VMotion.
Final briefing of the
day is 3PAR.
They are delivering storage solutions for serious VMware environments.
Most of the ease of use storage solutions that are at the show are
focused on using NFS or iSCSI, both viable but also viable is if you
could make fibre channel easy. 3PAR does this with an autonomic storage
platform that goes beyond the thin provisioning that we discuss in our
latest white
paper but adds self optimization, self tuning, is a scalable
array that grows as opposed to an array without adding separate boxes
that increase management complexity.
Combine this with the
standard capabilities of fibre channel SANs like NPIV and the basic QoS
functions as we discuss in our article "Using
NPIV to Optimize Server Virtualization's Storage" and fibre
channel especially in the enterprise is still something to consider.
CORAID - SMB Storage for
VMware, one more time, now with an ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) twist. AoE
is a block based protocol layered directly on top of ethernet. ATA disk
commands (ie. read disk sector x, write disk sector y) are put directly
into standard ethernet frames using the AoE protocol. Also is a
non-routed protocol, therefore does not require IP or TCP protocol
layers. This eliminates unnecessary processing and makes network
connection to disks simple. For ESX CORAID has developed a specialized
NIC card that identifies itself as a SCSI card, otherwise ESX would
assume control of it like it does with any other network card. The card
comes in two flavors, dual 1GB port and dual 10GB port. The ports are
automatically trunked together providing either 2GB or 10GB of
bandwidth and with no IP overhead performance should be sustainable.
StorMagic - SMBs should
be feeling the love. StorMagic is also vying for the SMB market.
StorMagic wants to make the storage internal to your servers sharable.
With the StorMagic solution each server can see the other server's
storage as if it were on iSCSI network. The software also has the
ability to synchronously replicate the data to one of the other
servers, so functionality like Vmotion will work. The use case would be
a dual or three physical server environment, where each server would
replicate one of the others providing full redundancy and full use of
VMware's advanced features. SMBs have some series cost saving, storage
simplifying choices available to them, no excuse not to deploy VMware
in the small business now.
