Chances are that your IT shop (and most others) faces accusations every day. IT has its own set of goals and concerns that must come first. When these facts come into conflict with your user’s needs or wants, then something has got to give. Read More »

In this edition: Symantec to Rely on Partners After Restructuring; Touchdown! NetApp & The Super Bowl Partner; Autodesk and NASA Developing New Technology; Red Hat Uses ManageIQ Acquisition to Further Cloud Offerings Read More »

Technically News scans thousands of industry articles to present you with a weekly source of IT news, information, and ideas that impact the public sector. In this edition: Using GIS Technology to Develop Government Apps; 20 State and Local Government Technology Infographics; Big Data: What to Consider Before Releasing Information to the Public; Virtualization Will Drive the Storage Market; Cloud Computing Adoption Grows, Bandwidth Isn't Read More »

What do you do when you have a client that is not communicating with your master server? First, you should check the firewall rules and open port configurations to verify that everything looks right. You should then check the host file where you are likely to see line after line of names. If you’re anything like me, you probably find this very frustrating. Everyone wants to use a short name, bypass protocol, or short cuts via host files, but do they realize this can create confusion and issues? Read More »

Datacenter growth is one of the larger challenges encountered by datacenter managers today. The key solutions to combat these challenges are consolidation and virtualization. There are many virtualization solutions available, such as Oracle VM, and all of them are effective for server consolidation. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance can integrate and interoperate with any of these solutions but does best with Oracle VM and VMware. Read More »

In the past, we’ve discussed server consolidation using virtualization technologies like RHEV. And we know that there are tangible reductions in physical footprint by moving to an enterprise virtualization solution as increased utilization of fewer, more powerful servers with advanced memory capabilities is standard fare for today's data center architectures. Read More »

When it comes to disaster recovery, there has historically been a limitation on disk storage. While tapes can easily be sent offsite to be used for restores after a site outage, disks do not offer the same flexibility. Some OpenStorage technologies, support out-of-band replication in which the contents of the disk storage are replicated between devices. In these instances, NetBackup has no knowledge of the data, which complicates recovery in a NetBackup protected environment because the replicated data can only be accessed after recreating the NetBackup catalog. Replication is done by importing the entire contents of the disk storage at the remote site using the bpimport command. The nbcatsync utility, introduced in NetBackup 6.5.6 and 7.0.1, can address this challenge as well, but it relies on being able to restore the catalog from a catalog backup and then post-processing it to reconcile the disk device mappings, resulting in a very time consuming process. Read More »

Way back in 2003, an eternity in tech years, Network Appliance purchased Spinnaker Networks an appliance maker that utilized SpinFS. Since the acquisition NetApp , as it is now called, has developed two different operating system offerings a.k.a. their “special sauce.” The original ONTAP “flavor” (ONTAP 8 7-mode) and the ONTAP 8 Cluster-mode, a reincarnate of technology acquired from Spinnaker and previously known as ONTAP GX. Read More »

Symantec plans to release a full refresh of its Storage Foundation and Veritas Operations Manager software, which will include features allowing end-to-end management of private cloud infrastructures. Veritas Operations Manager (VOM) 4.0 is due out in May 2012. Storage Foundation 6.0 is planned for release in the second half of the year. One upcoming feature Symantec is planning is called Enterprise Object Store, which will use a global name space to offer a heterogeneous, enterprise-wide abstraction of all file data. According to Don Angspatt, vice president of product management for Symantec's storage and availability management group, the file system will be able to scale to petabytes in size and will be accessible through HTTP. "So this creates one common global repository. You can access data the same way you would [from a workstation] through your cell phone," he said. Read More »

This is my advice for customers who want to get started with storage efficiency: • Consider SATA drives instead of Fiber Channel • Enable Dedupe • (Use Flash Cache as insurance against bad performance) NetApp has other efficiency features too (thin provisioning, cloning, compression, and so on), but I’ve found that customers often start with SATA and dedupe. SATA because it saves so much money, and dedupe because it’s so easy to turn on and comes free with ONTAP. When I talk with customers who are using SATA and dedupe, they are usually happy with NetApp, and pleased with their storage costs. When customers are haggling over price but haven’t at least considered these features, I wonder what they are thinking. SATA with Flash Cache doesn’t always match the performance of Fiber Channel, but when it does, it can cut your costs in half. It’s definitely worth considering! We have many happy customers using it for production data. Home directories are a good place to start. Email, especially with the most recent versions of Exchange. Some customers use it for database, depending on the workload. Read More »