Brocade's installed base of Fibre Channel SANs is both an asset and an albatross.

Compellent today announced the next generation of its storage area network, which adds support for non-disruptive movement of data volumes between arrays as well as a new controller that offers Fibre Channel over Ethernet and iSCSI transport protocols.

Cisco rolled out this week a bevy of data center products ranging from servers to switches to SANs, all designed to further broaden the company's reach beyond networking and into IT infrastructure.

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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I’ve been asked by a few customers about the location of the VMware ESX\ESXi LUN masking feature and how the LUN masking is done at the VMware ESX\ESXi level in version 4.
In VMware ESX 3.0/3.5 the settings for LUN masking were available in the UI via the Advance Software settings under Disk -> Disk.MaskLUNs as shown in screenshot below.

VMware ESX\ESXi 3.x Disk.MaxLUNs Settings

  I found this very clever feature in the StarWind vSAN product that allows you to allocate a chunk of physical memory on a host (i.e real RAM) and present it out as an iSCSI target – imagine the possibilities for running virtual machines from that? watch this space \ Posted in Starwind

By Eric Gray

Most enterprise virtualization deployments make use of a robust shared storage infrastructure.  A high-performance SAN allows multiple hypervisors to access virtual machine disks and is the foundation for amazing virtualization benefits such as VMware vMotion and HA.  There are other benefits, too.

By Scott Lowe

Two technologies that seem to have come to the fore recently are NPIV (N_Port ID Virtualization) and NPV (N_Port Virtualization). Judging just by the names, you might think that these two technologies are the same thing. While they are related in some aspects and can be used in a complementary way, they are quite different. What I’d like to do in this post is help explain these two technologies, how they are different, and how they can be used.

By Greg Ferro

The iSCSI protocol carries block data from storage array to server. Typically, that is inside a data centre where loss is not a problem. So why use TCP and have all that overhead ? [..]

Jeff Miller created a quick and dirty tutorial on how to create a MetaLUN on an EMC SAN.  Here are the steps involved in creating a MetaLUN on an EMC Clariion CX4. The steps below show creating 4 LUNs of size 6,400 MB which are then expanded... [[More information after the jump - Visit http://www.VMwareInfo.com for the full post, links and details.]]