Economic Storage Solutions for Higher Ed.

Colleges and Universities are facing tremendous hurdles trying to balance the need for storage and affordability. This webinar focuses on implementing large to massive storage solutions and optimizing your existing infrastructure without breaking the bank.

When: Friday, June 26, 2009

Where: At your Desk (dial-in information will be sent upon registration)

Time: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST

Intended Audience:
College and University system administrators running day-to-day operations as well as systems architects and IT managers. This tutorial is technical in nature, but it does not address command-line syntax or the operation of specific products or technologies. Rather, the focus is on general architectures and various approaches to scaling in both performance and capacity. Discussion will focus on the relative cost of different technologies and of strategies for managing cost and achieving results on a limited budget.

Content Overview:  

There has been tremendous innovation in the data storage industry over the past few years. Proprietary, monolithic SAN and NAS solutions are beginning to give way to open-system solutions and distributed architectures. Traditional storage interfaces such as parallel SCSI and Fibre Channel are being challenged by iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP), SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial attached SCSI), and even Infiniband. New filesystem designs and alternatives to NFS and CIFS are enabling high-performance filesharing measured in gigabytes (yes, "bytes," not "bits") per second. New spindle management techniques are enabling higher-performance and lower-cost disk storage.

Since storage networking technologies tend to be costly, there will be focus on the relative cost of different technologies and of strategies for managing cost and achieving results on a limited budget.

Meanwhile, a whole new set of efficiency technologies are allowing storage protocols to flow over the WAN with unprecedented performance. This tutorial is a survey of the latest storage networking technologies, with commentary on where and when these technologies are most suitably deployed.

About the Presenter:

Involving everything from homing pigeons, deduplication, replication, and WAN optimization, Sam Eckhouse strives to incorporate creativity and innovation to design storage and data protection solutions that surpass business requirements and come in under budget. A graduate of University of California at Santa Cruz, Sam has been with Cambridge Computer for four years.