April | 2007 | The Storage Architect

From the monthly archives: April 2007

Where are all the simulators

By Chris M Evans On April 11, 2007 · 6 Comments · In Uncategorized

I love the Netapp simulator (well, apart from the annoying issues with creating and deleting disks) and I use it all the time. It is great for testing ideas, testing scripting and generally refreshing knowledge on commands before having to touch real equipment. I use it with VMware (as I have probably mentioned before) and [...]

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Improving efficiency

By Chris M Evans On April 9, 2007 · 1 Comment · In Uncategorized

Hu posted an interesting view of storage utilisation here. His view is that virtualisation on the USP would improve on the average 30% utilisation. I have to say that I disagree with this. There are lots of reasons why storage remains unused in the enterprise:

inefficient administration by Storage Admins, SAs and [...]

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Distributed Backup

By Chris M Evans On April 7, 2007 · 3 Comments · In Uncategorized

Following on from a previous post on RAID and backup, I’ve been doing some more thinking on how to back up consumer data from a PC workstation. I reckon I’ve got about over 200GB of data on my server, which previously was on my main workstation. I dabbled with the Linksys NSLU2 however I hated [...]

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Giving RAID the thumbs up

By Chris M Evans On April 4, 2007 · 2 Comments · In Uncategorized

Just read Robin Harris’ post at his new blog location; http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=116 and his comment on another blog discussing RAID. He quotes a VAR who has tracked disk failures and thinks RAID is an expensive luxury for desktops.

It’s interesting to see the failure rates quoted, anywhere from 1-3%, which on the face [...]

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