Storage Management
Running a large-scale data centre is a Herculean task these days. Increasingly complex systems, the storage of a daily growing amount of data, day-to-day management and the need to scale or build out new facilities have planners and managers in a constant state of flux. Once thought of as just a room or building for computer systems, the data centre is becoming an increasingly vital part of the company's success or failure. Ensure maximum application availability and data recoverability is paramount to a successful business. In today's enterprise, downtime costs money, and a simple outage can result in hours of work and business lost. Data and system reliability and availability are key concerns for IT decision makers.
SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell can play a key role in improving data storage and reducing downtime.
More Robust, More Scalable and More Available Storage
The new storage foundation in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is all about delivering more in an enterprise server as well. It's about being a more robust and manageable foundation that can support small file systems or millions of files in terabytes of storage. It's about having a more flexible foundation that can support a wide range of applications from Web applications to databases. It's about having more high availability (HA) with improved clustering capabilities. It's about being a more scalable foundation with the ability to scale out with its parallel cluster file system.
High Availability Storage Foundation, an important technology featured in the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Platform, integrates open source components like Heartbeat v2, Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2) and Enterprise Volume Management System 2 (EVMS2) as well as iSCSI and Xen virtualization technology. The result is an enterprise-class, highly available foundation that protects your data while lowering costs, simplifying storage management, and most important, keeping your enterprise running.
In 1999, the SNIA and Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) introduced open standards for managing storage devices. These standards use a common protocol called the Common Information Model (CIM) to enable interoperability. The Web-based version of CIM (WBEM) uses XML to define CIM objects and process transactions within sessions. This standard proposes a CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) to manage CIM objects and interactions. CIM is used to define objects and their interactions. Management applications then use the CIM object model and XML over HTTP to provide for the management of storage devices. This enables central management through the use of open standards.
Built in to applications like Business Continuity Clustering, SLES and Xen and ZENworks Orchestrator are CIM based management tools to control the ACLs and visibility of LUNs in a SAN, integration with Fibre switches and Zoning and the accessibility of data by nodes and services based upon policies applied.
