Recently in Storage/SAN Category
Question from LinkedIn User:
I am looking to purchase a new NAS device for my home network. I would
prefer to have a RAID system that isn't dependent on one vendor for the
harddrives but if you feel strongly about a particular solution please
don't let that stop you from saying so. I expect the solution to have a
gigabit network card and would prefer RAID 1. 500 MB is fine but 1 TB
would be better.
My Answer:
I've set up the D-Link two-drive enclosure for a friend, but his main
need was to share music between a laptop, home desktop system, and one
for his kids. The D-Link product is $170-$200 with no drives, so you
could buy two 1TB SATA drives on your own. It's also sold with two
500GB drives for around $400. It's a far cry from the BlueArc NAS heads
I teach about for Hitachi Data Systems, but hey, it's a home unit!
The Data Robotics product is a bit more up-scale. Think of it as a
4-drive shelf where you can mix-and-match drives. You can start with a
single drive and scale up to all four as you go.
The big question would be, do you need a four-drive shelf? That's
4TB with no fault tolerance, or 2TB of RAID1, either way, that's a lot
of space for most home applications. Base investment in the Drobo
solution is $400 for the shelf, then $200 for the software, then $200
or so for each drive. No argument that Droboshare is much more robust
than other solutions, but the price tag is higher.
What do you have to say about external NAS appliances for your home network?
I am looking to purchase a new NAS device for my home network. I would
prefer to have a RAID system that isn't dependent on one vendor for the
harddrives but if you feel strongly about a particular solution please
don't let that stop you from saying so. I expect the solution to have a
gigabit network card and would prefer RAID 1. 500 MB is fine but 1 TB
would be better.
My Answer:
I've set up the D-Link two-drive enclosure for a friend, but his main
need was to share music between a laptop, home desktop system, and one
for his kids. The D-Link product is $170-$200 with no drives, so you
could buy two 1TB SATA drives on your own. It's also sold with two
500GB drives for around $400. It's a far cry from the BlueArc NAS heads
I teach about for Hitachi Data Systems, but hey, it's a home unit!
The Data Robotics product is a bit more up-scale. Think of it as a
4-drive shelf where you can mix-and-match drives. You can start with a
single drive and scale up to all four as you go.
The big question would be, do you need a four-drive shelf? That's
4TB with no fault tolerance, or 2TB of RAID1, either way, that's a lot
of space for most home applications. Base investment in the Drobo
solution is $400 for the shelf, then $200 for the software, then $200
or so for each drive. No argument that Droboshare is much more robust
than other solutions, but the price tag is higher.
(cross-posted from my Seashell-Software.com blog)
I wrote an article for this blog back in 2006 explaining the sort of thing I teach for EMC, specifically Business Continuity on large-scale storage systems. Since I'm teaching a lot for Hitachi Data Systems now, I thought it would be a good idea to elaborate a bit on their classes.
First, some background. In 2000-2001, I was doing a lot of teaching for a company in the Boston area that was a training partner for Compaq. They were partners with Digital Equipment Corporation prior to Compaq's acquisiton of Digital, and we continued to deliver classes on Tru64 UNIX, TruClusters, and StorageWorks disk systems. Boston is one of those areas where compter professionals move around regularly, so one of our Digital/Compaq contacts landed at EMC. We were engaged to develop a course on how to hook up non-EMC storage to their then-relatively-new product, EMC Control Center. We went out and acquired some Compaq StorageWorks frames, a couple of NetApp filers, and a HDS Thunder frame.
It was then that I began digging into the sublime mysteries of HORCM. We designed a number of lab exercises involving in-system replication on the Thunder, and showed the EMC folks what could and could not be controlled through ECC. Overall, the class was fun to teach, in spite of some complications involving accessing the hardware for the labs (which was located in Southborough, MA). While ramping this course up, I also was auditing several other EMC classes, dealing with the Symmetrix product line. That's how I came to be up to speed on that product line so I can teach TimeFinder/SRDF and ECC now.
Of course nothing stays the same in this business, and soon one of the EMC contacts we had landed at HDS, right at the time the company was expanding HDS Academy and implementing their new certification program. I was contracted by a company to help with development of two "foundations" classes, one each for the HDS "enterprise" and "modular" lines. These classes are now THI0515, Storage Foundations (Modular), and THI0517, Storage Foundations (Enterprise). After the developer, I was the first instructor to deliver both of these classes. I've also been over to Holland to do a TTT (Train-The-Trainer) class for THI0517.
Unfortunately, the company I was working for HDS through fell out of favor with the Academy for reasons I'm not quite sure about. (I stay out of the office politics as much as possible), so I spent most of 2006 and 2007 teaching for EMC. I made the decision to stay home for a while in the fall of 2007, to work on the streetcar nonprofit and be dad to my 8th grader who made marching band at his high school. When family was pretty much tired of me being home all the time, I e-mailed a couple of folks at HDS to see what was going on, and was immediately re-connected with the Academy.
There are a number of classes I'm qualified to teach for HDS, such as Replication Fundamentals, Hitachi Universal Replicator, External Storage (UVM), and the other topics/products we cover in the Foundations classes. THI0515 and THI0517 are currently popular enough that they're keeping me busy doing those, and I'm not complaining.
The storage arrays addressed in these classes hold a LOT of hard disk drives. The smallest array is the WMS-100, which is the size (more or less) of a half-height refrigerator. It has seven shelves that hold 15 hard drives each, for a total of 105 drives. The largest array is the USP-1100, which consists of five cabinets each the size of a refrigerator, filled with those 15-drive shelves. These storage systems are designed for companies with large data needs.
So, what do we teach in a "Storage Foundations" class? Well, the Enterprise class, which covers the TagmaStore USP/USP-V and NSC-55/USP-VM storage arrays, is a four-day class that breaks down (more or less) like this:
Day One: Introductory stuff, Product Philosophy, Overview of the product line, a detailed hardware overview, and a module on the software that is used to manage the array.
Day Two: Modules covering software products used for data replication. We cover both "in-system" and "remote" replication. In-system replication is when you copy data from one set of drives in a storage array to another set of drives in the same array. The backup set can sit there in case there is a problem with the production data, or it can be mounted and used for another purpose. Remote replication is when data on a set of drives in one storage array is transmitted to a different storage frame in another location. That way, if something happens to your main data center (power blackout, fire, other disaster), you can start up the copy in a different location.
Day Three: Overviews of many of the software products used on these arrays, such as how to implement the HDS Tiered Storage concept. We also cover the various management products which can be purchased as add-ons to the basic frame, such as HiCommand Device Manager, Hitachi Storage Services Manager (a product similar to EMC Control Center in scope), and HiCommand Tuning Manager.
Day Four: Class wraps up with discussions of HCAP (Hitachi Content Archive Program), NAS (Network Attached Storage) options, as well as the data protection and virtual tape capabilities of the arrays.
Whew!
It's fun, I love it. The only thing that's more fun than these foundations classes are the more-advanced, single-product classes, because those involve helping the students work with lab exercises. Those classes are also easier on my voice, since they're half-lecture, half-lab work, and the Foundations classes are all-lecture.
So that's what I'm doing when I'm not home. If there's a downside to teaching at this level, it's that I don't get to teach folks who work in less-technical fields. This storage training is really only useful to IT professionals, and a specific segment of those folks at that. Talking to folks about scanners this morning on Twitter reminded me that it's a lot of fun to teach less-technical stuff, such as ACT!, business card scanning, and e-mail. Still, those classes don't get me trips to Holland, Tokyo, and Singapore. :-)
I wrote an article for this blog back in 2006 explaining the sort of thing I teach for EMC, specifically Business Continuity on large-scale storage systems. Since I'm teaching a lot for Hitachi Data Systems now, I thought it would be a good idea to elaborate a bit on their classes.
First, some background. In 2000-2001, I was doing a lot of teaching for a company in the Boston area that was a training partner for Compaq. They were partners with Digital Equipment Corporation prior to Compaq's acquisiton of Digital, and we continued to deliver classes on Tru64 UNIX, TruClusters, and StorageWorks disk systems. Boston is one of those areas where compter professionals move around regularly, so one of our Digital/Compaq contacts landed at EMC. We were engaged to develop a course on how to hook up non-EMC storage to their then-relatively-new product, EMC Control Center. We went out and acquired some Compaq StorageWorks frames, a couple of NetApp filers, and a HDS Thunder frame.
It was then that I began digging into the sublime mysteries of HORCM. We designed a number of lab exercises involving in-system replication on the Thunder, and showed the EMC folks what could and could not be controlled through ECC. Overall, the class was fun to teach, in spite of some complications involving accessing the hardware for the labs (which was located in Southborough, MA). While ramping this course up, I also was auditing several other EMC classes, dealing with the Symmetrix product line. That's how I came to be up to speed on that product line so I can teach TimeFinder/SRDF and ECC now.
Of course nothing stays the same in this business, and soon one of the EMC contacts we had landed at HDS, right at the time the company was expanding HDS Academy and implementing their new certification program. I was contracted by a company to help with development of two "foundations" classes, one each for the HDS "enterprise" and "modular" lines. These classes are now THI0515, Storage Foundations (Modular), and THI0517, Storage Foundations (Enterprise). After the developer, I was the first instructor to deliver both of these classes. I've also been over to Holland to do a TTT (Train-The-Trainer) class for THI0517.
Unfortunately, the company I was working for HDS through fell out of favor with the Academy for reasons I'm not quite sure about. (I stay out of the office politics as much as possible), so I spent most of 2006 and 2007 teaching for EMC. I made the decision to stay home for a while in the fall of 2007, to work on the streetcar nonprofit and be dad to my 8th grader who made marching band at his high school. When family was pretty much tired of me being home all the time, I e-mailed a couple of folks at HDS to see what was going on, and was immediately re-connected with the Academy.
There are a number of classes I'm qualified to teach for HDS, such as Replication Fundamentals, Hitachi Universal Replicator, External Storage (UVM), and the other topics/products we cover in the Foundations classes. THI0515 and THI0517 are currently popular enough that they're keeping me busy doing those, and I'm not complaining.
The storage arrays addressed in these classes hold a LOT of hard disk drives. The smallest array is the WMS-100, which is the size (more or less) of a half-height refrigerator. It has seven shelves that hold 15 hard drives each, for a total of 105 drives. The largest array is the USP-1100, which consists of five cabinets each the size of a refrigerator, filled with those 15-drive shelves. These storage systems are designed for companies with large data needs.
So, what do we teach in a "Storage Foundations" class? Well, the Enterprise class, which covers the TagmaStore USP/USP-V and NSC-55/USP-VM storage arrays, is a four-day class that breaks down (more or less) like this:
Day One: Introductory stuff, Product Philosophy, Overview of the product line, a detailed hardware overview, and a module on the software that is used to manage the array.
Day Two: Modules covering software products used for data replication. We cover both "in-system" and "remote" replication. In-system replication is when you copy data from one set of drives in a storage array to another set of drives in the same array. The backup set can sit there in case there is a problem with the production data, or it can be mounted and used for another purpose. Remote replication is when data on a set of drives in one storage array is transmitted to a different storage frame in another location. That way, if something happens to your main data center (power blackout, fire, other disaster), you can start up the copy in a different location.
Day Three: Overviews of many of the software products used on these arrays, such as how to implement the HDS Tiered Storage concept. We also cover the various management products which can be purchased as add-ons to the basic frame, such as HiCommand Device Manager, Hitachi Storage Services Manager (a product similar to EMC Control Center in scope), and HiCommand Tuning Manager.
Day Four: Class wraps up with discussions of HCAP (Hitachi Content Archive Program), NAS (Network Attached Storage) options, as well as the data protection and virtual tape capabilities of the arrays.
Whew!
It's fun, I love it. The only thing that's more fun than these foundations classes are the more-advanced, single-product classes, because those involve helping the students work with lab exercises. Those classes are also easier on my voice, since they're half-lecture, half-lab work, and the Foundations classes are all-lecture.
So that's what I'm doing when I'm not home. If there's a downside to teaching at this level, it's that I don't get to teach folks who work in less-technical fields. This storage training is really only useful to IT professionals, and a specific segment of those folks at that. Talking to folks about scanners this morning on Twitter reminded me that it's a lot of fun to teach less-technical stuff, such as ACT!, business card scanning, and e-mail. Still, those classes don't get me trips to Holland, Tokyo, and Singapore. :-)
