Storage Infrastructure and Protocols

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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

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.