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Storage & Clustering Community Blog

Showing posts tagged with Best Practice
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Top Technotes & Screencasts: What Other Tech Info Would Be Useful to You?
Kimberley | 01 May 2009 | 0 comments

In conjunction with Symantec Tech Support, we've started publishing a list of the monthly Tech Support 'Top Technotes' in the Storage Forums area. This is a compilation of the technotes that were most accessed by customers during the prior month. The list covers Storage Foundation Unix/Linux (including Volume Manager and File System), Storage Foundation Windows, and Storage Foundation Manager. Here's the Top Storage Technote April 2009 list. Visit the Technical Support site for full technotes, documentation and product downloads.

New Screencast Series
If you're looking for other ways to get updated product info, check out the available screencasts in the Connect Storage Videos section - these are hands-on product and feature demos created by Symantec's...

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DCIG Thin Provisioning Blog
nicole_kim | 05 Mar 2010 | 0 comments

Check out Going from ‘Fat’ to ‘Thin’ Isn’t an Automatic in the Virtual World Either, the latest blog on thin provisioning by DCIG lead analyst Jerome Wendt. He breaks down the various scenarios for when the benefits of thin provisioning are easily realized and when it is not so readily recognized, as there can be issues with deployment and utilization in certain circumstances. He discusses how Veritas Storage Foundation’s SmartMove feature can help larger enterprises maximize their thin provisioning investment.

Jerome Wendt is the President and Lead Analyst of DCIG Inc., an independent storage analyst and consulting firm. Since founding the company in 2006, Mr. Wendt has published extensively in data storage publications and journals covering all facets of storage.

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Understanding Veritas Cluster Server Limits and Prerequisites
Eric.Hennessey | 05 Mar 2010 | 0 comments

A very useful - yet often overlooked - feature of Veritas Cluster Server is Limits and Prerequisites. This feature is often used in conjunction with Service Group Workload Management (SGWM), but can also be implemented on its own. In this post, I'll describe what this feature does and how you can put it to use.

Limits and Prerequisites are attributes in VCS. Limits are system attributes applied to the cluster member nodes, while Prerequisites are attributes applied to service groups. Both are key/value type attributes defined by the user. To better understand how these two attributes work together, it's best to use a common scenario as an example.

Let's say I have a VCS cluster consisting of four nodes and four Oracle database service groups. Let's assume that (1) each node is provisioned identically with the same processor and memory power and (2) each service group places about the same amount of load on each system. Implementing SGWM will automatically keep...

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Storage Management: Data Deduplication - Don’t Store It in the First Place (Part 3 of 4)
phil samg | 05 Mar 2010 | 0 comments

Data deduplication is another technology that has gained wide acceptance as a tool to streamline the backup process. Deduplication eliminates duplicate data even when such data is unrelated, greatly reducing the data multiplier effect on data.

For example, if a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation is stored on different file servers multiple times, deduplication ensures that only one copy is stored no matter how many full or incremental backups occur. Organizations may consider specialized appliances to provide backup-to-disk and deduplication functions. However, these appliances add complexity to the data center with more devices to manage and actually add capacity to the environment rather than using what already exists more efficiently.

To be continued...

Read Part 1: A State of Neglect
...

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Storage Management: Turning Things Around (Part 2 of 4)
phil samg | 05 Mar 2010 | 0 comments

To make better use of storage resources, organizations can leverage storage management technologies. Storage resource management (SRM), for example, enables IT to navigate the storage environment and identify old or non-critical data that can be moved to less expensive storage. These tools can also be used to predict future capacity requirements.

Managing storage without an SRM tool is like going on a journey without a map. Having a clear plan and objective before taking action is the best assurance of rapid progress and success. Storage managers should ask some questions before cost-cutting:

  • What is the average utilization rate?
  • What is the utilization rate by application?
  • Which applications are growing fastest? Slowest?

SRM technology can help companies make an assessment and provide an enterprise-wide view of the storage environment, which helps identify problem areas, consolidation opportunities, and to create a priority...

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How can you stop buying storage?
phil samg | 05 Mar 2010 | 1 comment

 Even as IT organizations face significant budget pressure, business carries on and continues to drive storage growth. So, how can IT organizations meet organizational needs without buying more storage? Let’s do a little math.

First, two baseline numbers are important. Industry analysts peg average storage utilization at 35% and the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for storage at 50%. We can now apply these two numbers whatever assumption we wish. To make the calculation easy, assume that we have a total capacity of 100 TB with a 35% utilization (35 TB). With a 50% CAGR, we would utilize 52.5 TB (52.5%) and the end of 12 months and 78.75 TB (78.75%) after 24 months. Thus, the “average” organization can survive up to two years without buying another byte of storage, if only they can find a way to utilize what they have. If you know your utilization and CAGR, you can easily apply this calculation yourself to see how long you can survive without...
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