Alright everyone, stop talking to Siri for a minute and listen up. Storage Foundation just got Deduplicaton. Let me say it one more time. STORAGE FOUNDATION JUST GOT DEDUPLICATION. Just in case you missed anything of what I just said. Here you go…

Much ado is being made these days about consolidation and reducing the cost of IT, with virtualization being the drivers for storage management improvements. The truth is that storage management, as well as application management and OS management, has always been a critical component of data centers. The fact that virtualization puts more pressure on these tasks is no excuse for overlooking them to date. Virtualization and “cloud” initiatives are increasing the demand on data centers to the point that they have no choice but to seek efficiencies. Or perhaps it is budget pressure that offers no choice and the storage demands of virtualization and cloud initiatives are making it harder to realize the savings.

Veritas Storage Foundation has an optional utility called Simple Admin, that you can switch Veritas File system and Veritas Volume Manager. The Simple Admin utility simplifies storage management by providing a single interface to the administrator and by abstracting the administrator from many of the commands needed to create and manage volumes, disk groups, and file systems.

The explosive growth of Web traffic is placing tremendous pressure on enterprises and ISPs. To meet these demands, organizations have had to increase investments in bandwidth, or be crippled by slowdowns in performance. But now there’s an intelligent way to manage this explosive growth. NetApp C700 series Web caching appliances. By distributing frequently viewed content closer to end users, NetCache appliances reduce network traffic up to 60% and increase performance by a factor of 10. NetCache appliances scale the existing bandwidth, eliminate the need for additional infrastructure and deliver a fast return on investment. The NetApp C700 series is unlike any other Web caching solution because of its unique appliance architecture, which provides reliability, deploy ability and ease of administration for both ISP and enterprise networks. NetCache appliances deliver unparalleled performance by providing native caching support for Internet protocols such as HTTP, FTP and NNTP.

If you want to use Storage Foundation 5.1 to manage dual path disk you may run into the following: if you install SF first and the disk groups appear fine. Then if you try to configure MSCS and it can’t see the disk. You may need to add the MSCS Option, so you can also add “VRTS STORAGE FOUNDATION OPTION MICROSOFT CLUSTER 5.1 WIN FOR OS TIER ENTERPRISE EDITION STE LIC” license key and it in should indicate that the MSCS option is available. However, when you go back to Add/Remove programs to select this option, it does not appear as a choice in the add/remove SF options. The Proper way to manage MSCS using SFW is VERITAS Storage Foundation for Windows (SFW) management data by creating disk groups from physical disk. These disk groups are further divided into volumes, which can be mounted from the cluster nodes.

Oracle Clusterware 10g will always handle node fencing (aka eviction) by rebooting one or more nodes. Oracle didn’t have its own cluster manager software for most platforms on 9i. So, if your customer was on a platform where Oracle didn’t have a cluster manager of its own (it only had a Linux and Windows), then building the RAC cluster would have required some 3rd party software. Some of the 3rd party cluster managers used different schemes to fence nodes from the cluster. Many of them used I/O fencing which is less disruptive in that it didn’t require a node reboot, but required more proprietary interfaces to be used to access and manage storage.

There is a little hoarder in all of us.  One night I was captivated by a show called ‘Hoarders’ I saw on the cable channel.  For those not familiar, this show chronicles the lives of individuals from all walks of life, from every class, from every race, and from every culture, that are caught up in a recurring pattern of collecting and holding on to “stuff”. Do not get me wrong- there is no judgment here.  “One person’s junk, is another person treasure.”  That is unless you are a spouse who is fed up with the junk (or treasure) collecting.  Or if you are a storage administrator try

Most features in Storage Foundation are supported in a VMware environment, but let’s focus on the features that work differently in VMware environment and why certain features are not supported. Storage consumed by a virtual machine can be allocated directly over the virtual machine network interface (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI protocols), by passing the virtualization layer, and is therefore not affected by virtualization. VMware certification mark means that Version 4.1 and 5.0 of VERITAS Storage Foundation has been certified to run in a VMware Virtual Machine environment.   VMware server

I work with a number of data center managers whom increasingly need tools that will allow them to handle expanding complexity with smaller budgets.  Symantec Storage Foundation maximizes storage hardware investments, and as a staple for UNIX systems, has proven to be reliable and capable across heterogeneous storage arrays. Many features have been added in recent years, and the latest 5.1 version builds on the product's capabilities.

The new Storage Foundation 5.1 is not your daddy’s storage foundation! With the introduction of Storage Foundation 5.1, Symantec has introduced a new feature called "keyless feature enablement". The primary objective of keyless feature enablement is to improve the customer experience with Storage Foundation High Availability and make it easier to deploy, manage and use the product set.