RDX – Removeable HD Storage
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Archive for year: 2014
Storage and Hyper-V Part 1: Fundamentals
When it comes to Hyper-V, storage is a massive topic. There are enough possible ways to configure storage that it could almost get its own book, and even then something would likely get forgotten. This post is the first of a multi-part series that will try to talk about just about everything about storage. I won’t promise that it won’t miss something, but the intent is to make it all-inclusive.
The Beginning
This series was actually inspired by MVP Alessandro Cardoso, whom you can catch up with on his blog over at CloudTidings.com. He was advising me on another project in which I was spending a lot of time and effort on the very basics of storage. Realistically, it was too in-depth for that project. His advice was simply to move it here. Who am I to argue with an MVP?
This first entry won’t deal with anything that is directly related to Hyper-V. It will introduce you to some very nuts and bolts aspects of storage. For many of you, a lot of this material is going to be pretty remedial. Later entries in this series will build upon the contents of this post as though everyone is perfectly familiar with them.
Intro
In the morass of storage options, one thing remains constant: you need drives. You might have a bunch of drives in a RAID array. You might stick a bunch of drives in a JBOD enclosure. You might rely on disks inside your host. Whatever you do, it will need drives. These are the major must-haves of any storage system, so it is with drives that we will kick off our discussion.
Networking and Hyper-V – Part I: Mapping the OSI Model
After storage, Hyper-V’s next most confusing subject is networking. There are a dizzying array of choices and possibilities. To make matters worse, many administrators don’t actually understand that much about the fundamentals because, up until now, they’ve never really had to.
Why It Matters
In the Windows NT 4.0 days, the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer exam track required passage of “Networking Essentials” and the electives included a TCP/IP exam. Neither of these exams had a corollary in the Windows 2000 track and, although I haven’t kept up much with the world of certification since the Windows 2003 series, I’m fairly certain that networking has largely disappeared from Microsoft certifications. That’s both a blessing and a curse. Basic networking isn’t overly difficult and a working knowledge can be absorbed through simple hands-on experience. More advanced, and sometimes even intermediate skills, can be involved and require a fair level of dedication.
If all you really need to do is plug a Windows Server into an existing network and get it going, then a lot of that is probably excess detail that you can leave to someone else. There are certification, expertise, and career tracks available just for networking, and the network engineers and administrators that earn them deserve to have their own world separate from system engineering and administration. Learning all of that is burdensome for systems administrators and is unlikely to pay dividends, especially with the risk of skill rot. The downside is that it’s no longer good enough to know how to set up a vendor team and slam in some basic IP information. Too many systems people have ignored the networking stacks in favor of their servers and applications and are now playing catch-up as integrated teaming, datacenter bridging, software-defined networking, and other technologies escape the confines of netops and intrude into the formerly tidy world of sysops.
The first post of this series will (re)introduce you to the fundamentals of networking that you will build the rest of your Hyper-V networking understanding upon.
Chelsio Newsletter, July 2014
New Products
The recognized leaders in 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet performance and network convergence, Chelsio’s T5-based adapters offer unprecented throughput and efficiency for cloud, storage and compute applications. In addition to a unique combination of TCP/UDP/IP sockets, iSCSI, FCoE and RDMA offload, they also address key verticals that have traditionally required specialized hardware.
In this context, Chelsio recently released netmap support into FreeBSD, offering what is deemed to be “disruptive performance” by experts in the field. Chelsio also released benchmark results for its NVGRE Offload solution for cloud virtualization, showing performance far superior to competing offerings.
Today, Chelsio’s adapters are the highest performing, most feature rich, but also most cost effective adapters, with the T520-SO-CR and T580-SO-CR leading in the 10GbE and 40GbE segments respectively. With T5, it is now possible to address all networking, clustering and storage needs using a single architecture, with one firmware image, one software suite, and a single qualification effort, resulting in tremendous cost savings.
Good News and Bad News
Good news for everyone considering deploying a high speed network infrastructure: 40GbE defies historic trends by reaching mass appeal levels shortly after its introduction, as street prices of 40GbE adapter and switch ports drop to new levels. Furthermore, with 100GbE already shipping and 400GbE on the horizon, Ethernet is now leading in performance, not simply on price curve. Driven by Big Data, the Ethernet economies of scale train is on track and switching into high gear.
New MailStore Server 9
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XenData Workstation
XenData Workstation
XenData6 Workstation software runs on a Windows 7 computer and provides high performance archiving to and restoring from LTO cartridges using Windows Explorer.
Archive and restore operations are always performed using Windows Explorer: the XenData software extends Explorer’s capabilities to transfer files to and from LTO using drag and drop or copy and paste. Files may be archived to LTO from any accessible logical drive letter or network share. Similarly, files may be restored to an available drive letter or share.
Functionality:
- Manages an unlimited number of offline LTO cartridges and allows browse and search of all offline content.
- Writes to LTO using either LTFS or TAR formats.
- All file types are supported from DPX to MXF or even Word docs.
- Maintains file and folder structures, allowing easy transfer of nested folders to and from LTO.
- Supports one or more LTO tape drives attached to a Window 7 computer.
- Restores files in tape order, which greatly improves performance when transferring many files in one operation.
- Provides reports for management of the archive, including the ability to list the contents of any tape, the ability to search for files and the generation of an archive status report.
- The XenData6 Workstation software license allows you to install the software on multiple computers and use an assigned tape drive on any of those computers.
XenData6 Workstation software is perfect for media professionals in need of a reliable and easy-to-use archive system for data wrangling applications or to create a managed offline LTO archive. It is available as software only or as a system – the X2500 – which includes an IBM LTO-6 tape drive, PCIe interface card, SAS cable and cleaning cartridge.
Nexsan Storage Speed Test
Learn the right way to test the performance of your data storage and learn how Imation’s portfolio of feature-rich storage products can help.
Published on 21 Apr 2014 – Imation’s Nexsan portfolio features solid-state optimized unified hybrid storage systems, secure automated archive solutions and high-density enterprise storage arrays. Nexsan solutions are ideal for mission-critical IT applications such as virtualization, cloud, databases, and collaboration; and energy efficient, high-density storage for backup and archiving. There are more than 11,000 customers of Nexsan solutions worldwide with more than 33,000 systems deployed since 1999. Nexsan systems are delivered through a worldwide network of cloud service providers, value-added resellers and solutions integrators
Archiware News – July 2014
Updated Archiware Solution Pages
As a manufacturer of data protection software, we are working with numerous hardware and software partners around the world and offer joint solutions to our customers.
This is something we are very proud of – so we put all of them on our solution pages.
And of course, they are all available as PDFs for download.
Thank you for a great Broadcast Asia!
Our second time exhibiting at Broadcast Asia in Singapore can only be described as a great success! We have never had so many visitors. Thank you very much for stopping by our booth and for the interesting conversations.
And a special thank you to our partners for representing us on their stands and supporting us with their amazing equipment!
See the brand-new P5 Masterclass
After the great reception that the P4 Masterclass has had with our partners and customers, we are thrilled to announce that its successor is now online!
The P5 Masterclass is a free series of videos that teach you how to install and configure all Archiware P5 Modules.
David Fox, experienced trainer at our UK Distributor JPY, has produced and published the new videos and given them a brand-new look and feel which we absolutely love!
Watch the P5 Masterclass here.
MailStore Email Archiving Solutions
MailStore Server The Standard in Email Archiving
One of the world’s leading solutions for email archiving, management and compliance for small and medium-sized businesses.
Our solutions serve a specific purpose: They archive our customers’ email in the best possible manner. We have also created highly specialized technology that is not only extremely stable, but also flexible and surprisingly intuitive. Try out the email archiving specialists!
Supported Email Sources
- Exchange Server 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 (including Windows SBS)
- Hosted Exchange
- Microsoft Office 365
- MDaemon Messaging Server
- IceWarp E-Mail-Server
- Kerio Connect (MAC Support)
- Any IMAP/POP3-compatible email server
- Email clients such as Microsoft Outlook
- Google Gmail
- PST and other email file formats
Email Archiving for Buisness
MailStore Server
Now available in version 8, MailStore Server has grown to become a global standard for email archiving in business following years of successful operation at more than 20,000 companies. Easy to install and 100-percent reliable in every situation.
- Software solution for SMEs
- Certified and legally compliant
- Suitable for most email systems
- Well priced, starting at $200
Email Archiving for Service Providers
MailStore SPE
You will be able to provide your customers with email archiving as a service thanks to the MailStore Service Provider Edition (SPE), thereby expanding your service portfolio with a new set of key components. You can run the MailStore SPE on your own infrastructure and adapt it precisely to your individual requirements using the extensive scripting and branding options.
- Software solution for service providers
- Freely scalable to any number of customers
- Simple single-server mode possible for small numbers of customers
- Also suitable for large end customers in private cloud scenarios
Free MailStor Archiving for Home Users
MailStore Home
MailStore Home lets you archive your private email from almost any email source and search through them extremely quickly. You will never lose emails again. It is also possible to start running MailStore Home as a portable version directly from a USB flash drive. This can be done without installation and on any PC.
Top-Rate Technical Support
Even though our Mailstore solutions are easy to use and prove to be very stable thanks to extensive market testing, we still demand of ourselves that our customers receive the best technical support possible.
Competitive Upgrades
We are offering a special, one-time discount of 50 percent to first-time customers of MailStore Server if they purchase and install it to replace a competitor’s product. Switch and Save!
MCAS Certification
We are delighted to inform you that we offer the opportunity to gain certification as a MailStore Certified Archiving Specialist (MCAS) as part of the international partner program.
23 Best Practices to improve Hyper-V and VM Performance
by Nirmal Sharma
Best practices are the most obvious starting point for improving your Hyper-V and Virtual Machine performance and I’ve listed 23 of them for you below. Did I miss out on any? Leave a comment and let me know! 1. Avoid overloading Hyper-V Server You must not overload Hyper-V Server. In other words, there is no…
Original post link: 23 Best Practices to improve Hyper-V and VM Performance
The post 23 Best Practices to improve Hyper-V and VM Performance appeared first onHyper-V Hub – Altaro’s Microsoft Hyper-V blog.
Read the full blog post here.
Check out our previous 5 articles:
Customizing a Generation 2 VHDX
Hyper-V and Networking – Part 3: IP Routing
Hyper-V and Networking – Part 2: VLANs
Creating a Generation 2 Disk with PowerShell
Networking and Hyper-V – Part I: Mapping the OSI Model