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How to go Virtual Part 1: Storage Selection

One of the core components of a virtualized infrastructure is a new perspective on storage.  A SAN or Storage Area Network is the most common and most flexible way to provide disk space to your virtual infrastructure.  There are plenty of vendors out there doing SANs from the biggies like HP, EMC, Hitachi, but for the SMB there are even better smaller scale more affordably options like Dell, Equallogic, Promise, and DataCore,   Compellent.  DataCore is a software only solution that can take any storage that a Windows OS can see and turn it into virtualized storage for any of your virtual machines.  The SAN software solutions have the ability to aggregate disparate storage devices and make them presentable to the virtual machines, which is very handy for small shops that are growing organically. 

The key factors in selecting storage for your virtual infrastructure are:

• Total Amount of storage needed.  (keep in mind you can over subscribe your vm's and add disks to the SAN later)
• Redundancy (if all the servers are running off the SAN, you sure don't want the hardware to have a single point of failure)
• Feature Set (surprisingly there are some significant differences including replication ability, snapshotting, scalability)
• Scalability  (keep in mind that storage is a core component of your virtual infrastructure so being able to scale it up easily should be a key factor in your choice. 

Stay tuned for Part 2: Hypervisor selection

 

Technorati Tags: SAN,virtual iron,vmware,virtual,infrastructure,smb,emerging,IT,NAS,storage

Emerging IT for the SMB market....

So many people ask me "what's the latest and greatest out there?" which is ironic because fewer than 25% that ask that question actually want to deploy it.  Nevertheless, its a fun question to be asked and for the 25% that are willing to risk a little to be very current with technology in their business, its exciting to see how the emerging technology improves their business.

So what is it you ask?  Well, it's virtualization!  Virtualization has been around for a while now, and certainly has great traction in the larger enterprises, but it's applicability for the SMB space has finally hit.

The technology of virtualization isn't the reason for it's emergence in SMB server rooms, rather it's the benefits.  Simple disaster recovery, more comprehensive backups, redundancy, server consolidation, scalability. 

Over the next couple posts I will go into the parts an pieces that are typically involved in virtualized infrastructure, their costs, and the options.

 

Technorati Tags: vmware,virtual iron,virtualizations,SAN,NAS,LAN,SMB,emerging,IT,technology,backups,business

Location based services are going to explode

I can't wait to see how the new iPhone app store from Apple is going to revolutionize location based services. I write this after having just updated my Twitter profile with my current latitude and longitude with a tap in the twitterific iphone app. Stay tuned this is going to get interesting.