SDA India is an online resource for Software, Development,IT, Architecture, Open Source, Mobile, Security, Databases, Delphi, C, OS, Asp, .Net, Php, Xml, Java
Planet SDA-India
For a system administrator who works with computers in the data center all day there are at least two areas where you can help daily: data center electricity use, and paper use. The data center is becoming responsible for an ever increasing amount of electricity use, and generators are already maxed out in many locations in the country. Reducing electricity usage in the data center will not only reduce the need for electricity, it can also reduce your corporate electric bill. Paper, while being a renewable resource, is taking its toll on the trees that exist on our planet (along with the need for lumber world-wide). The biggest problem is that trees are being consumed faster than they can be regenerated - trees take many years to grow, and only minutes to take down.
Over the last couple of weeks I have been visiting customers ... first in New York as part of an event we held for the financial sector and then in New Zealand at our Executive Advisory Committee. On both trips I also got to spend time with other folks from around Sun including our East Coast sales team, executives from services, software and our server group. All the conversations, both internal and external really signaled a shift in the perception (and understanding) of storage at Sun.
Every year, a boatload of tech hopefuls gather for a throwdown marathon of product demos at DEMO. This year's DEMO points the way towards emerging technologies that are on the edge, on the brink and maybe just bubbling and ready to go mainstream. All of the video presentations are available for streaming. I've been working through them since I think this is a great way to get a 'crib notes' of what the marketplace and entrepreneurs are thinking about. Here are the notes from the first set of presentations in the archives:
Experts agree that virtualization has the potential to simplify storage administration, increase utilization and availability, and reduce the cost of managing different vendor’s storage products by masking the differentiation that vendors strive to create to capture market share. Essentially the expert’s goal is to commoditize storage so that it is just a matter of choosing the largest capacity for the lowest price. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Unfortunately the value of storage is not just about capacity. The real value of storage is in providing storage and data services to host applications. Services which are used to protect data, storing it at the right cost level, replicating data for use by other applications, making it available to authorized users, with the required level of cost performance, monitoring and reporting on the use of this data for charge back and auditing. As data volumes and transaction rates increase, the storage must scale in capacity, connectivity, and bandwidth. Storage services must be available to migrate the data to new storage when the old storage wears out, becomes technologically obsolete, becomes uneconomical, or is acquired or transferred to another owner. In a networked, shared environment, storage services must also be available to ensure that data is protected from unauthorized access, or denial of service. All this and more must be done with minimal disruption to the applications using the data. These storage and data services are provided by the storage controller.
We landed on time, and a car was nicely waiting to pick me up to bring me to my first meeting, with Data Domain … I chatted with a bunch of their smart folks theorizing about where other implementations of this technology could really affect change in the world, and found quite a few. What if you could get the performance attributes required by a high percentage of today's applications on a primary store that happened to get 40 to 1 compression rates? Imagine the economic advantages and the consolidation potential.
In a humble residential neighborhood in the south Indian city of Chennai, Hema Malini—a quiet 13-year-old girl whose hair was braided with jasmine flowers—switched on the family television and a curious new device called Nova NetTV that was connected to the TV and a keyboard. In a few seconds, the Microsoft Windows logo appeared, and suddenly her TV was transformed into a PC. With her mother looking on proudly, Hema fired up encyclopedia software, checked her e-mail and Googled for a site that offers free versions of Nintendo's Mario Bros. games. If Rajesh Jain is successful, the NetTV, which hooks up to any television, could be the first in a family of devices that connect the next billion people to the Internet. Jain, 39, is cofounder and chairman of Novatium, the Chennai-based company that makes NetTV and NetPC, a similar product that uses a normal computer monitor. Both are based on cheap cell-phone chips and come without the hard-disk drive, extensive memory and prepackaged software thatadd hundreds of dollars to the cost of regular PCs. Instead, they are little more than a keyboard, a screen and a couple of USB ports—and use a central network server to run software applications and store data. Novatium already sells the NetPC for only $100—just within reach of India's growing middle class—and Jain believes he can soon drive the price down to $70.
LeftHand Networks announced that their iSCSI SAN solution powered by SAN/iQ 6.6 has achieved VMware ESX Server 3 certification and is now listed on VMware's Storage / SAN compatibility guide. LeftHand Networks attempts to offer its customers the ability to "break free" from vendor lock-in and give their customers the freedom to build enterprise-class storage solutions on their choice of hardware. The breadth of SAN/iQ powered platforms include the HP ProLiant DL380 server, IBM System x3650, LeftHand NSM 260 and NSM 160. The first x86 server to be certified with SAN/iQ and VMware Infrastructure 3 is the HP ProLiant DL380.
