Windows Server 2012 introduces support for deployment of virtual machines on file servers and NAS devices that support SMB 3.0. Virtual Machine Manager automates the provisioning of new file shares, share ACL management, and management of virtual machines on file shares, using SMI-S to manage NAS devices. Microsoft is working with industry partners to implement updates to SMI-S 1.6 profiles specifically for ACL management.

Learning Objectives

All-Flash Arrays have to overcome two key obstacles when trying to gain acceptance as storage systems which can be utilized across a wide number of use cases in the data center. First, they must be durable and secondly, they must be cost effective. The challenge is that one of the most common methods for increasing durability, overprovisioning, actually increases the cost of the All-Flash Array.

The Cloud, mobile technology, IOT, Social Media has completely changed the storage needs as these applications are generating massive amount of data.
At the same time the IT organization is moving from siloed infrastructure to Software defined storage, Hybrid Storage. It’s a challenge for Data center administrator to understand the storage IO access patterns and tune the storage system to optimize for performance keeping the cost optimum.

The implementation of SMI-S providers for managing Storage Arrays or Controllers often involves selection of type of providers (proxy or embedded). This presentation compares the advantages and dis-advantages of Proxy and embedded providers, design considerations for selecting any one of them along with various methods of implementing embedded and proxy providers. Issues in managing large number of objects, association traversal related issues and typical capabilities required in the providers to overcome this issue are also discussed.

Service providers and enterprises deploy private cloud infrastructure offering powerful capabilities that reduce costs, streamline management, and deliver new value.

With SMI-S, Windows Server and System Center manages SAN, NAS, and Fibre Channel Fabrics for virtualized environments.

Learning Objectives

Use SMI-S and SMAPI to invoke CIM directly for advanced management scenarios
Determine differentiating value-add using SMI-S
Design cloud tiering models that take into account storage capabilities
Rapid VM provisioning using snapshot/clone technology

SAS is the backbone of nearly every enterprise storage deployment, rapidly evolving, adding new features, enhanced capabilities and offering “no compromise” system performance. SAS not only excels as a device level interface, its versatility, reliability and scalability have made it the connectivity standard of choice for creating new Enterprise storage architectures. This presentation covers the advantages of using SAS as a device interface, and how its capabilities as a connectivity solution, are changing the way data centers are being deployed.

In the face of rapidly increasing requirements for storage, IT initiatives driving virtualization across all aspects of the infrastructure, and cloud-enabling the environment, Data Center Managers face a fundamental task in figuring out how to integrate SAN environments over multi-vender and multi-protocol infrastructures. Learn about solutions that streamline the integration and cost effective expansion of heterogeneous SAN environments by enabling transparent connections to existing core infrastructures.

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) focused approach to create solutions that would satisfy the needs of the customers based on the target workloads. SLOs will be used in the selection of components to use, features to develop, parameters to tune and the overall QA strategy. Solutions will cover performance in the optimal, transitional and degraded states that are critical to the end customer.

This presentation, a major update to a popular SNIA Tutorial, outlines the benefits of networked storage, contrasting the different options. It then goes into detail on iSCSI-based SAN configurations, capabilities and options. It goes on to examines how the technology is deployed as a consolidation solution alone, and in conjunction with server consolidation and virtual server environments - examining typical configurations and best practices. It then illustrates via customer case studies how these capabilities deliver benefits to IT organizations.

Recent advances in Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies blur the line between storage and memory, creating a disruptive change to the way software is written. The new SNIA NVM Programming Model describes behavior provided by operating systems enabling applications, file systems, and other software to take advantage of new NVM capabilities. This tutorial describes how the programming model addresses NVM extensions for existing devices (such as SSDs) and persistent memory (such as NVDIMMs).