The February 27, 2010 issue of The Economist contains a special feature on the data deluge assembled by its Tokyo correspondent Kenneth Cukier, who observes, “Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits but also big headaches.” Statistics show the average American is bombarded with 34 gigabytes of information per person per day. The biggest data hogs were video games and television while, in terms of bytes, written words are insignificant, amounting to less than 0.1% of the total. Data, The Economist reports, is accumulating at a rate that exceeds the capability to store it.
Another Sign of Industry Consolidation, New Opportunities for Solution Providers
Oracle-Sun and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) will end the long-term reseller agreement HDS originally had with Sun on March 31. Announced by HDS via an email to its solution provider partners on March 2, the company wrote “With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Hitachi Data Systems and Oracle agree that the time is right to evolve this relationship into one reflecting the priorities of the new company.”
Step-by-step instructions have been published for using the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System (release 2008.Q4) as a repository for the PostgreSQL database for the ADempiere open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) application. Penned by Praneet Tiwani, the technical article provides all the configuration details as well as installation of ADempiere and test procedures.
Creating and Preparing Volumes for Use with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
The quick-start guide “Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007″ by Ulrich Conrad provides an introduction to the steps for creating and preparing volumes on a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System (release 2009.Q3) to be published and used by a server running Microsoft Windows for use with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a common “share.”
Some First Steps for Budding Storage Service Vendors
“Proof of Concept for a Simple Storage Service,” an article by Carol Zhang and Case Cao on the Sun Developer Network, briefly introduces the components that make up a storage service, describes in detail how to use Apache web server to set up a proof of concept (PoC) for a simple storage service, and touches on issues affecting storage service in the real world.
Publishing Group Reaps Benefits from Sun’s Open Storage
Global publishing group Elanders provides “infomedia” content in print and online as well as archives documents and images on systems at its main office and two remote sites. With its technology reaching its end of life in 2008, Elander began researching the market and decided to deploy a 66TB Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System. The group reports it has cut administration time by 50%, power consumption by up to 50%, reduced customer costs by 40%, and its infrastructure is 10 times as scalable.
The Logical Choice for Enterprise Archival Storage
The need to develop data archiving capabilities is a challenge that every enterprise faces these days for any or all of several needs: whether to accommodate explosive data growth; to respond to the pressure to meet promised service levels and backup windows for users; to provide archive data retention and retrieval requirements; and to better manage rising energy costs. Dean Halbeisen’s Sun BluePrints Online paper “Sun Systems for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software” details the openly architected, intelligent and massively scalable general purpose archive solutions Sun is developing to assist enterprise users in meeting these challenges.
Configuring Highly Available Paths from Sun LDoms Guest Domains to Storage
The Sun BluePrints article “LDoms I/O Best Practices - Storage Availability with Logical Domains” by Peter A. Wilson discusses the approaches and trade-offs for configuring highly available paths from Sun Logical Domains (LDoms) guest domains to storage. Topics include I/O availability, multipath I/O with Solaris OS MPxIO, multipath I/O with virtual I/O failover, virtual I/O failover and network file storage, and multipath I/O to network file storage with virtual I/O failover.
With the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array and IBM DB2
If accelerating on-line transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehouse performance holds any interest, then take a look at Sun Technical Staffer Cherry Shu’s article on using the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array with IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. A Sun Blueprints article authored by Shu explains how the combination of flash and disk technology can be applied to overcome disk latency bottlenecks that impede performance for applications such as the DB2 database.
Veritas Storage Foundation by Symantec is a comprehensive solution for centralized heterogeneous online storage management from one screen. The latest version is 5.1 that offers several new features including zero reboot install and zero reboot upgrade, fully automated Solid State Drive (SSD) optimization, continued focus on enabling a full Thin Provisioning ecosystem, and support for Oracle 11g R2 RAC.
