The bedrock of storage is the disk drive, but an operating system cannot access disk drives without mediation via logical addressing that translates the physical characteristics of the disk — platters ...

The logical unit number (LUN) has been a bedrock concept in storage for decades. It’s the fundamental “soft” way in which physical media is partitioned in block access storage. But recent times have ...

So I have begun drilling into how our SAN has been utilized at this point and I am pretty stunned how much wasted space we have. In total we have 12TB, and at least 4-5TB is wasted in inefficently ...

I'm in a bind! I've inherited a bunch of UCS chassis/blades that connect to an EMC VNX5600 SAN. The blades are running ESXi 5.5 and none of them have local storage; they all boot from LUNs on the SAN.

I’m always surprised that so many people still want to build their private and public cloud on logical units, served out by Fibre Channel SANs. From my point of view, we should have ditched the LUN ...

VMware ESX uses datastores, or virtual machine file system volumes, to hold disk images and snapshots associated with a virtual machine in your business. These datastores are contained on logical unit ...

What can the experience of managing IBM mainframes teach us about designing storage for public or private cloud computing? Plenty, it turns out… In my previous post, Designing Cloud Storage? Ditch the ...

With SANs and NAS becoming the norm for both the enterprise and personal computing (welcome to the cloud), there's very little that IT staffs can expect users to manage all on their own. As an ...

You will need to use additional storage-area network control software to mediate the file system access, or you will have to configure the servers to use separate volumes on the RAID array. The two ...

No single storage technology stole the spotlight in 2005, but the year was nonetheless an exciting one that featured new products in areas such as data protection and virtualization as well as ...