Next Generation Storage Networking: Beyond Conventional SAN and NAS - UMD October 22, 2008

Next Generation Storage Networking:
Beyond Conventional SAN and NAS

Duration: 3 hours, not including 30-minute break

Intended Audience: System administrators running day-to-day operations as well as enterprise architects and IT managers/supervisors. This tutorial is technical in nature, but it does not address command-line syntax or the operation of specific products or technologies. Rather, the focus is on general architectures and various approaches to scaling in both performance and capacity. Since storage networking technologies tend to be costly, there is some discussion of the relative cost of different technologies and of strategies for managing cost and achieving results on a limited budget.

Overview: There has been tremendous innovation in the data storage industry over the past few years. Proprietary, monolithic SAN and NAS solutions are beginning to give way to open-system solutions and distributed architectures. Traditional storage interfaces such as parallel SCSI and Fibre Channel are being challenged by iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP), SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial attached SCSI), and even Infiniband. New filesystem designs and alternatives to NFS and CIFS are enabling high-performance filesharing measured in gigabytes (yes, "bytes," not "bits") per second. New spindle management techniques are enabling higher-performance and lower-cost disk storage. Meanwhile, a whole new set of efficiency technologies are allowing storage protocols to flow over the WAN with unprecedented performance. This tutorial is a survey of the latest storage networking technologies, with commentary on where and when these technologies are most suitably deployed.

Topics include:

* Fundamentals of storage virtualization: the storage I/O path
* Shortcomings of conventional SAN and NAS architectures
* In-band and out-of-band virtualization architectures
* The latest storage interfaces: SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial attached SCSI), 4Gb Fibre Channel, Infiniband, iSCSI
* Content-Addressable Storage (CAS)
* Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)
* The convergence of SAN and NAS
* High-performance file sharing
* Parallel file systems
* SAN-enabled file systems
* Wide-area file systems (WAFS)

About the Presenter: Jacob Farmer is an industry-recognized expert on storage networking and data protection technologies. He has authored numerous papers and is a regular speaker at major industry events such as Storage Networking World, VMWorld, Interop, and the Usenix conferences. Jacob’s no-nonsense, fast paced presentation style has won him many accolades. Jacob is a regular lecturer at many of the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Inside the data storage industry, Jacob is best known for having authored best practices for designing and optimizing enterprise backup systems and for his expertise in the marketplace for emerging storage networking technologies. He has served on the advisory boards of many of the most successful storage technology startups, and is well respected in the analyst community.

Official Website: http://usenixontheroadumd.eventbrite.com