High end storage systems

For most of us, our principal exposure to computer storage systems involves the sorts of things we find on our personal computers:

• Winchester-technology hard drives


• USB-attached flash memory systems


• writable optical (DVD/CD) media

But at the high end, where price is (mostly) no object, the state of the art in computer storage systems is advancing rapidly.

If you haven't been pay much attention to this area of computer technology, you owe it to yourself to have a look through this three part series from Chuck Hollis at EMC:

• Virtualization of Storage


• Storage Tiering


• System Impacts

A little sample to whet your appetite:

In this picture, we've got a pool of VMs, a pool of servers, a pool of paths, and a pool of different storage media types.

This sort of picture wants to be managed very differently than traditional server/fabric/storage approaches. It wants to you set policy, stand back -- and simply add more resources if and when they're needed.
...
In just a few short years, virtualization concepts have changed forever how we think about server environments: how we build them, and how we run them.

Earlier this fall I was talking with my friend Gil about a major e-commerce roll-out he's managing for a high-end retail enterprise, and he confirmed this impact that virtualization technologies are having on enterprise computing. There is lots to learn, and lots of new opportunities become available.