The leading storage network technology for mission critical applications today is Fibre Channel (FC). Fibre Channel is a highly reliable and high performing network technology for block storage applications. But, for organizations that can’t afford single purpose networks or the added complexity of managing more than one network technology, FC may not be ideal. With the introduction of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), the ability to deploy your FC storage resources over a shared Ethernet network is now possible. But, FCoE isn’t the only available option for block storage over Ethernet.

Initially used primarily by small and medium sized businesses or for … Read the rest

Last week a friend and I were talking about our children and the conversation turned to affordable options for college. It turns out my friend’s daughter is doing very well in school and eager to study agriculture, but is applying to only a couple state universities. I suggested that she should keep her options open and also apply to top agriculture schools like Cornell, but at $50,000/year cost is a major issue and sadly the reality is that colleges are becoming less and less affordable each year.

So it wasn’t enough for my friend’s daughter to have options, she needed … Read the rest

I continue to believe that IP based storage protocols will be preferred for future data center deployments. The future of IT is pointing to cloud based architectures, whether internal or external. At the core of the cloud is virtualization. And I believe that Ethernet and IP storage protocols offer the greatest overall value to unlock the potential of virtualization and clouds. Will other storage network technologies work? Of course. But, I’m not talking about whether a network “works”. I’m suggesting that a converged network environment with Ethernet and IP storage offers the best combined value for virtual environments and cloud … Read the rest

by Gary Gumanow

Following up from the previous blogpost on iSCSI over DCB, this blogpost highlights just some of the benefits that DCB can deliver. Welcome back.

DCB extends Ethernet by providing a network infrastructure that virtually eliminates packet loss, enabling improved data networking and management within the DCB network environment with features for priority flow control (P802.1Qbb), enhanced transmission selection (P802.1Qaz), congestion notification (P802.1Qau), and discovery. The result is a more deterministic network behavior. DCB is enabled through enhanced switches, server network adapters, and storage targets.

DCB delivers a “lossless” network, and makes the network performance extremely predictable. While … Read the rest

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by: Gary Gumanow

EXTENDING NETWORK STANDARDS

10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), standardized by the IEEE in 2004, delivers ten times the bandwidth of previously available networking technologies, and its availability has prompted the development of new standards for the data center, delivering on the promise of a single networking fabric or technology to connect storage, the LAN, and Inter-Processing Communication, or IPC.

These new IEEE standards go by several names: “Converged Enhanced Ethernet,” “Data Center Ethernet,” and the industry-standard term “Data Center Bridging,” or DCB. In this series of blogpostings we provide an overview of the reasons DCB is being developed … Read the rest

IT as a Service (ITaaS), or cloud services (clouds), was one of the “buzz” topics at SNW this Spring. And industry groups, such as SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative, are beginning to address the standards, policies, and marketing messages that help define what is ITaaS or clouds.

Whatever the definition, “cloud” technologies appear ahead of attempts to describe them. In fact, many customers are deploying cloud solutions today. A few obvious examples include online email and CRM solutions that have been available for several years. Enabling these cloud offerings are technologies that are very complimentary, namely virtualization in its various … Read the rest

The podcast about FCoE and iSCSI that I mentioned in my last blog is now posted on Storage Monkeys.

Check it out. Clearly, we were having way too much fun!

Tags: iSCSI, FCoE, Ethernet, convergence

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Well we’re already into Day 1 of Spring SNW, and the SNIA tutorials educational program is well under way.

I presented to a packed room at 9:20am on the subject of Server and Storage Consolidation with iSCSI Arrays - a great audience for the first session of the day.

Tuesday afternoon’s agenda includes pNFS, Parallel Storage for Grid, Virtualization and Database Computing by Pranoop Erasani (NetApp), and Thursday’s agenda includes two tutorials by Gary Gumanow (Dell) & Jason Blosil (NetApp) — iSCSI SANs: Ideal Applications, Large and Small, and iSCSI: A Lossless Ethernet Fabric with DCB. If you’re … Read the rest

I spent the past few days wondering what my first post for SNIA on Ethernet Storage should be about, and finally arrived at this - despite the fact that it’s old news…

A couple of months ago Ben Hacker posted a great blog on The Server Room section of Intel’s communities site, talking about Intel and Microsoft’s performance benchmarking work on iSCSI over 10Gb Ethernet. The post is entitled “1,000,000 IOPS with iSCSI - That’s Not a Typo…” - check it out, it’s very enlightening.

Ben’s blog in turn pointed to a joint Microsoft/Intel webcast going into detail about … Read the rest