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Storage Infrastructure and Protocols

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Storage Infrastructure and Protocols

In immortal words of Howard Marks, "Storage is different". In this section you'll figure out why storage administrators have to have a totally different view of the world, how traditional storage was implement, what software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructure are, and what protocols you might have to support to connect physical or virtual servers with the storage arrays or scale-out storage infrastructure.

2:39:09 All You Need to Know about Storage

Howard Marks, a renowned storage guru, started his presentation with a brief introduction of traditional storage technology including:

  • performance metrics,
  • storage systems,
  • RAID data redundancy,
  • storage protocols.

The core of his presentation focused on modern storage concepts including object storage, software-defined storage, scale-out architectures, erasure coding, the impact of flash storage, and hyperconverged infrastructure.

He concluded with a plethora of interesting topics we rarely hear about in enough details including snapshots, storage QoS, per-VM storage services and VMware vVols, and various storage replication mechanisms.

Software Defined Storage 3.3M 2016-09-26
Storage 101 66:54 2016-09-28
Software-Defined Storage 47:31 2016-09-28
Storage Services 44:44 2016-09-28

51:19 Storage Protocols

After mastering the storage basics, it's time to discuss the storage protocols. This section describes:

  • Typical storage access methods
  • LUN-based and file-based storage solutions
  • Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
  • iSCSI and NFS
  • Lossless Ethernet transport and Data Center Bridging (DCB)
Read this first 963 2022-12-12
Storage Protocols 101 11:12 2011-04-06
Fibre Channel over Ethernet 14:10 2011-04-06
iSCSI 6:26 2011-04-06
Long-Distance Storage 3:06 2011-04-06
Storage Myths 4:27 2011-04-06
Storage Q&A 11:58 2011-04-06

49:41 Designing Compute and Storage

By now you should have a pretty good understanding of compute and storage infrastructure. Let's see how we can use that to do the compute and storage parts of a data center design.

Rightsize the Servers 9:38 2019-09-07
Server Connectivity 16:15 2019-09-07
Select the Storage Solution 11:38 2019-09-07
Distributed File Systems 12:10 2019-09-07

Additional Information

VMware VSAN Can Stretch – Should It?
VSAN: As Always, Latency Is the Real Killer
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Deep Dive 4:18:00

This webinar will dive deep into the future and realities of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.

18:08 Compute and Storage Infrastructure Discussion - 2017

The discussion part of "compute & storage" module focused on hyperconverged infrastructure.

Hyperconverged QA 18:08 2017-04-12

Design Assignment: Design a Storage Solution

As the last step in this module you'll design a simple storage solution. If you're not familiar with the basics of data center fabrics you might want to skip this exercise and do it after going through the data center fabrics part of the course.

Design a Storage Solution 154K 2018-08-13
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Optional Self-Study Material

Related Blog Posts

These blog posts published on blog.ipSpace.net provider more details on topics discussed in this module.

Storage networking is different
Does dedicated iSCSI infrastructure make sense?
Ethernet Checksums Are Not Good Enough for Storage
Q&A: What Is a Hyperconverged Infrastructure?
PFC/ETS and storage traffic: the real story

Distributed Storage

Let’s Pretend We Run Distributed Storage over a Thick Yellow Cable
VMware VSAN Can Stretch – Should It?
VSAN: As Always, Latency Is the Real Killer

FC/FCoE Topics

Is Fibre Channel Switching Bridging or Routing?
iSCSI or FCoE – Flogging the Obsolete Dead Horse?
Why would FC/FCoE scale better than iSCSI?
Dynamic FCoE – Sparse-Mode FCoE Strikes Again
FCoE between data centers? Forget it!

iSCSI Topics

iSCSI and SAN: Two Decades of Rigid Mindsets
iSCSI: Moore’s Law Won
Why does Microsoft prefer iSCSI over FCoE?

These ipSpace.net webinars describe topics related to this module. Some of them have been included in the recommended or optional self-study materials; you might want to watch all of them.

Designing a Private Cloud Infrastructure 5:40:00
Data Center Infrastructure for Networking Engineers 10:40:00
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