Calming Down Boot Storms

As server and storage virtualization find their way into even small data centers, organizations are now considering virtualizing desktops, known as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). VDI offers tangible advantages. Because operating systems and applications are centrally-located master images rather than local instances on every user’s computer, managing these resources becomes vastly easier. The computers are thin or zero clients and therefore can be relatively inexpensive devices like iPads. Moreover, VDI keeps all data within the corporate security perimeter to safeguard against data loss or theft, especially with the proliferation of mobile devices.

VDI, however, also centralizes data storage, which puts tremendous pressure on storage systems to handle read and write demands. When users boot up in the morning and log in, or log out at the end of the day, they can overwhelm the I/O capacities of storage devices, resulting in very slow response times. Because of these “boot storms,” administrators must ensure their VDI storage meets performance needs as well as capacity needs. This is why RAID arrays, which provide fast reads thanks to their multiple disks, are a strong solution. Additionally, some RAID vendors offer solid-state drives (SSDs), which are nearly as fast as DRAM, for read and write caches. Reading master images from SSD can greatly mitigate boot storms, and data can be speedily written to SSD and transferred later to spinning disks. Moreover, RAID arrays that offer block-level data deduplication can reduce the amount of data written to disk, and solutions that support VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) quicken disk operations by offloading storage tasks from the physical servers running VMware virtualization to the storage array. The bottom line is a successful VDI implementation requires fast storage, which often means function-rich RAID.

Cloud Storage – Using it for your Company’s benefit

The buzz word today is cloud storage. Anywhere you go; you can hear almost everyone mentioning it, whether to backup storage is for computer data or mobile phone information. This online storage allows you to store your data for free for life.

The need to backup your data is imperative; you just don’t want to wake up one day empty-handed and lost. Computer hard drives or your computer storage can only last for a couple of years before it shuts down. The moment your hard drive start to malfunction; all your hard work, precious photos, videos, files, etc. will vanish.

Luckily, these days, with the advent of modern technology, you can now enjoy virtualized storage, and that can be either through shared storage, or you can subscribe or avail of free cloud storage. Undoubtedly, of you have your own backup system, all your data are secured and well protected, no matter what happen to your computer’s hard drive.

Cloud storage simply means internet storage, where you can store your files online. It is for free. There are a lot of service providers that are offering this serve for free, wherever you may be. Once advantage when your files are stored in this platform is that you can access it practically everywhere. You might be asking about the security feature of this virtualized storage.

How safe is cloud storage? All service providers, whether paid or not are placing file security at the top-most priority. Aside from the firewall, it has 24-bit SSL encryption.  Likewise, service providers also have human security intervention, wherein their administration conducts frequent server monitoring, just to safeguard everything that is stored to their servers. When you factor in everything, you can expect a full security feature when you backup your files through cloud storage.