Skip to main content

Storage management: efficiently using and saving energy



Storage vendor 3Par maintains that in one instance, it found a large customer's existing OLTP systems to be only 8% utilized--the other 92% was just adding entropy to the universe. While this is an extreme example, it illustrates the point. Good storage management can save a lot of money, space, and power.

For OLTP that means thin provisioning, a technique that allocates disk blocks to a given application only when the blocks are actually written rather than at initial provisioning. By employing thin provisioning along with good storage management software, the onus for guessing exactly how much storage will be needed is taken off the database administrator and instead can be tracked by the storage management system itself. A year ago, only a few vendors were offering thin provisioning on OLTP systems; now it's much more pervasive and should be strongly considered to right-size OLTP storage.

For general-purpose file storage, the problem is much different. Thin provisioning is useful here, too, but more commonly the problem comes down to creating a global view of all data stored across disparate systems. After all, just how many copies of the latest Paris Hilton video does an enterprise need (or copies of the annual report, or the video of the CEO's address to shareholders, and so on)? Global storage resource management (SRM) systems are the best bet for understanding and managing the complex storage needs of an enterprise.

Read on...

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

Virtualization: GlassHouse hopes to cash in with its IPO!

GlassHouse Technologies Inc. on Tuesday registered to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering that, despite the company's financial losses, could prove a hit with investors drawn to its focus on "virtualization" technology. The Framingham, Mass., company offers consulting services for companies that use virtualization software to improve the performance of corporate servers and cut costs in their data centers. GlassHouse also provides Internet-based data storage. "Software-as-a-service," or SaaS, companies and vendors of virtualization products have proved popular among investors in recent years as corporate customers seek alternatives to conventional packaged software. GlassHouse, with roots in both sectors, will test the strength of that interest, said Peter Falvey, managing director with Boston investment bank Revolution Partners. "It will be a bit of a bell weather," he says. "It's not as though it's the 15th SaaS m...
Post a Comment
Read more