GlassHouse Technologies Blog

In a service provider model, we typically find a multi layered supply chain delivering services under ITIL OLAs to support a final deliverable to the end consumer under an ITIL SLA. The end consumer (or customer) is invariably the Business Unit but there are many internal consumers who also participate in the order and consumption [...]

Continued from Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) part 1

New standards are being developed, which will achieve line-rate bandwidth with zero packet loss. This is being referred to a ‘lossless’ network which supports standards like:

• Priority Flow Control (IEEE 802.1Qbb)
• Congestion notification (IEEE 802.1Qau)
• Shortest path bridging (802.1aq)
• Link layer routing protocol (IETF – TRILL)
• [...]

There has been a lot of discussion about Fibre Channel over Ethernet lately, and in this post I will try to provide an overview of the technology. FCoE is becoming a standard protocol adopted by storage vendors and operating systems to allow Fibre Channel to run over Ethernet. With the adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet [...]

As a Storage and Data Protection consultant, I often have to look at my customer’s tape library capacity and assess current state and future state sizing needs. Sometimes I find that the backup environment has been reconfigured to meet increasing capacity demands with existing equipment capacity. For example, an admin can no longer keep 2 [...]

There’s been a fair amount written recently about the end or “death” of RAID as a viable storage protection technology. However, as is often the case, ascertaining the life or death of a technology category can depend highly on assumptions and semantics.
Those arguing that RAID is at the end of the road point out, [...]

A common theme running through IT organizations across virtually every industry these days is finding ways to do more with less. This puts many storage groups between a rock and a hard place: facing increasing pressure to reign in storage spending while fighting back the continuing floodwaters of seemingly uncontrollable data growth.
For many, [...]

Online storage has been available for quite a while. Aren’t picture album sharing websites a data type specific archive? Organizing online pictures into albums, couldn’t that be a form of tagging data for discovery? The answer… Ah no, but you could make the case that it’s an example of archive copy. You could also say [...]

I was recently involved with a customer who had outsourced their IT operations. This outsourcing provider in turn moved the storage management/operations piece to a team based in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Never mind that the distance, time zone and cultural differences made it a challenge to get any work done. However what amazed me [...]

Currently the prevailing approach to backup tape management and retention is to send a secondary or even primary copy of backup offsite daily. In the not so distant past this used to be an IT operational detail hidden from all except the backup administrator. To the business this was at most an IT budget line [...]

I’m a proponent of tape elimination solutions that entirely remove tape from the data protection design or at least eliminate the tape export and transport to offsite storage. There are several solution paths you can go down like deduplication with replication or online backup service to name a few.
What if you just can’t get around [...]