February 22, 2012 in video
Some of StorMagic’s friends to took the time out to ask some of the attendee’s of the New England VMUG on their branch office environments to see if they are getting the most out of them. This video is the outcome of that.
Thanks Guys, Great Video!
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/37251991 w=600&h=338]
February 15, 2012 in Webinar
With virtualization a top priority for CIOs in 2012, how do you ensure you are making the most of your investment when it comes to supporting your branch offices?
Join our Webinar to learn how virtualization solves 3 key common challenges faced in multi-site environments:
- Limited IT resources;
- The need for reduced IT complexity; and
- The demand for high availability
“How To Get the Most Out of Your Branch Office Initiatives Virtualization”
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
11:30am EST
As part of our discussion, we’ll highlight Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) and give you the tools to:
- Achieve high availability without purchasing a SAN / NAS
- Leverage your VMware vSphere
- Manage your branch offices from a centralized hub
Presented by Steven Santini at StorMagic and Matthew Satongar at D2NA
February 9, 2012 in Webinar
If the answer is yes, then you need to ask yourself how do you go about getting the most out of this effort? In your branch offices, this question couldn’t be more important. As we all know, virtualization and the delivery of server consolidation is paramount in reducing IT complexity in SMB and branch office environments. Why? Because when you have limited IT resources, virtualizing your branch offices reduces the time spent on routine administrative tasks maintained by the central office.
The benefits of virtualization are still top of mind for CIOs this year. In fact, InformationWeek.com published an article last month highlighting an IDC recent study that identifies virtualization and server consolidation as the top priority for CIOs in 2012.
So how do you make the most of your investment? Solving the issue of limited IT resources for branch office support is only one of several benefits CIOs find with virtualization. A second important benefit is, of course, the associated cost-savings. But there is even a third and more important issue here that resonates with our clients — achieving high availability.
High availability is a much needed solution in multi-site environments as it protects your virtualized IT environment against hardware and operating system failures. Users can continue accessing business critical applications and information even when one server fails.
Achieving High Availability
The costs of realizing high availability often casts a shadow over the savings generated from virtualization because the storage hardware required to achieve it can be very expensive and complicated, making it understandable why achieving high availability in multiple locations is so easily missed. But with the virtualization of your branch offices, you gain the ability to virtualize your storage. In fact Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) enable users to achieve high availability without purchasing a SAN / NAS. Instead, you are able to leverage the internal disks of branch servers to create mirrored datastores which in turn are utilized by your VMware vSphere to enable high availability.
Understanding all that an SVA provides to achieve high availability and make the most of your virtualization initiatives is exactly what we’ll be addressing in our upcoming Webinar at the end of the month. Register now for “How To Get the Most Out of Your Branch Office Virtualization Initiatives” on Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 and join our discussion.
February 2, 2012 in Webinar
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/36023218]
Date: 31 January 2012
Regardless of your industry, organizations with multiple branch offices have one thing in common. An increasing dependency for online applications and computers to serve your customers and constituents. Centralized management is the key to consistency, efficiency and affordability.
Network and application administrators who are responsible for keeping applications and servers online and up to date with the latest software releases are under pressure and they have limited budgets and staff. How do you address all these challenges? You focus on centralized management.
- Learn how to implement an affordable, high-availability branch office solution;
- Understand how the right solution reduces the demands on application and network administrators;
- Discover how to enable corporate IT to maintain control and manage branch offices from a single, centralized management hub.
Q: Can update of multiple sites be deployed hands off?
A: That is depends on the SVA solution, SvSAN instances can be installed and updated from your central office.
Q: What Raid Type is best suited to SVA’s?
A: Many vendors specify certain RAID types that they prefer or for certain environments. Typically the debate is between RAID 5 and RAID 10, RAID 5 is known to provide better read performance and Raid 10 provides better write performance. Which is best very much depends on the applications you are running and the performance of your cards, this is something you want to ideally test in house first.
Q: How Long does sync between Mirrors Take?
A: There is no definitive answer, this very much depends on the performance of your hardware, the connection between the hosts and how much data is being mirrored.
Q: What support does the product have for SRM (Site Recovery Manager) in terms of SRA (Storage Replication Adapter) module
A: At the moment SvSAN is not supported with SRM but is on the roadmap for future development
Q: Can SVA’s support linked vCenters
A: You will need to check with each provider but I can say that SvSAN does, to do this you would require SvSAN management plugin at each site.
Q: What is the Performance difference from Physical Storage
A: There are many different types of SAN solutions which can provide very high performance and even lower performance so it is difficult to give a direct answer. SvSAN has shown to provide higher performance in some scenario’s. As an example with our customer Credit Plus(Case Study: http://www.stormagic.com/case_studies.php)
For optimum performance Raw Disk Mapping is ideal as it provides approximately 25% performance increase when compared to VMDKS.
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