By Simon Gallagher

Now that VMware are moving away from ESX classic (with service console) to the ESXi model I have experienced a couple of issues recently that got me wondering if NFS will be a more appropriate model for VM storage going forward. in recent versions of ESX (3.5 and 4) NFS has moved away from just being recommended for .ISO/template storage and has some big names behind it for production VM storage.

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Cloud storage platforms like Amazon S3 are handy unless your primary business is providing active file servers. That tidbit was divulged by Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain as the company released a local cloud networked attached storage (NAS) offering aimed at small to mid-sized businesses.

Is the average household ready for a network-attached storage device? Iomega, an EMC company, sees an opportunity when it comes to mainstream consumers and a storage device that allows all of the PCs in a home to connect to the same storage drive. This week, the company launched a next-generation quad-drive desktop NAS appliance built on [...]

By Chad Sakac

Scott Lowe recently wrote a good post on FCoE, and his thoughts here.   The comments of his readers are comments I’ve heard from others as well, so I posted a response in the comments, but I think Scott and I don’t have the same readership (and perhaps those that do may not read the comments)

This is an important dialog, IMHO, [...]

We were quite a bit surprised to see how popular our “Multivendor iSCSI” post was. The feedback was overwhelming and very supportive of industry leaders partnering to ensure customer’s success with VMware. While writing that post, we (Vaughn Stewart from NetApp and Chad Sakac from EMC) discussed following up the iSCSI post with one focused on deploying VMware over NFS. The most difficult part around creating this post is that we couldn’t do it with our iSCSI-focused colleagues.

A Fibre Channel storage area network isn't the only way to get the networked storage you need for a virtualized environment.

Reasons For Using NFS With VMware Virtual Infrastructure | VM /ETC: “” “A lot of companies are using NFS as the preferred protocol to shared storage for VMware Virtual Infrastructure. In my personal experience, The administrative options and convenience of NFS is unmatched, and the virtual machine (VM) performance is surprising.” AND “For those that are considering NFS, [...]

Microsoft is pragmatic about open source: It works with open-source projects when a business need is being met. File sharing between Windows and non-Microsoft operating systems for high-performance computing scenarios meets that criterion. The company is sponsoring work at the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration to create an open-source Network File System (NFSv4.1) client that runs on Windows.

A number of storage bloggers have been questioning the relevance of FCoE and why would you bother with it. Given the size of marketing budgets pushing FCoE and the reality distortion this generates, lets look at the case AGAINST FCoE.

In my previous post on the subject of storage (Is SAN really NAS spelled backwards), I introduced a fundamentals whitepaper. Behind XenServer Storage, builds on this and shows how XenServer leverages the different kinds of storage. Feedback welcome! View Online | Add Comment