Calsoft Blog

While the 2013 ends, we bring you Top events that will set the pace for 2014 and will prove crucial to your business strategies. Listed here are the major events in 2014 1Q.   View all events here . Click here to download our all-exclusive 2014 Storage, Virtualization and Cloud Conferences calendar. Team Calsoft wishes you Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year 2014. Write to us at   smm@calsoftinc.com   Contributed by: Apeksha Bobde | Calsoft Inc.

  We hand-picked top storage technologies that are ready to take their place and have an impact on your data center in 2014. Flash Storage: Now a Mainstream. The NVMe Work Group is developing an industry-standard PCI Express host controller interface to optimize how PCIe flash devices interact in storage systems. Another interesting advancement is around 3D Flash Memory which underpins vertical stacking technology to overcome the impending physical limitations and disadvantages of reducing flash's planar die size. Hyper-converged storage: The Next Big Thing Storage complexity and management will pave way to a new breed of storage systems called hyper-converged storage systems that will be all-in-one products evolving from converged systems that include storage, networking and compute, but also pack in a hypervisor. Hyper-converged storage will ease storage provisioning via a management portal , so the need to map LUNs and volumes is eliminated. SDx: All things Softw...

By definition, Open vSwitch is open-source virtual switch software designed for virtual servers. It is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. Open vSwitch is designed to be compatible with modern switching chipsets so that it can be ported to high fan-out switches, thus providing the same flexibility of control to physical infrastructure as virtual ones. Open vSwitch differs from traditional approaches, in that it exports an interface for fine-grained control of the forwarding, which can be used to support QoS, tunneling, and filtering rules. In this short post, we will see what might somebody do with a thing like Open vSwitch? Can it be enablement of automated network infrastructure for virtualized environments? The answer is a yes. To list down, here’s a quick recap of some of the features and tools of Open vSwitch that are worth a mention: Fully functional Layer 2 switch NetFlow, sFlow, SPAN, and RSPAN support 8...

LSM Module: OS Security is a chronic and growing problem: as more systems (and more money) go on line, the motivation to attack rises. Linux is not immune to this either. Hence was introduced LSM that provides a general kernel framework to support security modules in Linux. The LSM is the Linux security framework that allows 3 rd party access control mechanisms to be linked into the GNU / Linux kernel.  Currently there are two 3 rd party services that utilize the LSM: SELinux and SMACK (Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel) that both provide mandatory access control services.   At Calsoft, we helped one of our customers with porting of Lustre file system to SELinux. This involved submission of the patch for Lustre server to enable it to run in SELinux environment. To read our success stories please click here. The basic idea behind the LSM is to : Insert security function calls (or hooks) and security data structures in the various kernel services to al...

The latest topic in enterprise networking is software-defined networks (SDNs), which increase the intelligence of the core network making it more receptive to overall IT and business demands of an enterprise.  It is essentially a new approach to providing networks with more real-time intelligence, deep application integration and high levels of automation to prepare networking technology for rigorous demands of the cloud era.  In this post we will focus on various aspects of SDN, market forecasts, the ‘OpenFlow’ connection and Calsoft’s value proposition towards SDN innovation. SDN – A Greener Pasteur? Doyle Research and GigaOM Research predict that the enterprise SDN market (as defined by this report) will reach $320 million in 2014 and grow to $2.45 billion by 2018 . North America continues to be the biggest market for SDN solutions. Plexxi, Lightspeed Venture Partners and SDNCentral recently came up with a research report on SDN market sizing that high...

A bit about VHDs Virtual hard disk or VHD is a way to provide storage medium for virtual machines, which is represented as a disk image in file format. Operating system for virtual machine is installed in VHD for it to store data within. VHDs can be of two types. 1. Fixed size 2. Dynamic size Getting to know VHDX: Windows server 2012 has introduced new Virtual hard drive file format named as VHDX for Hyper-V 3.0, which eliminates limitations posed by earlier VHD format. VHDX offers benefits like better performance, reliability and enhanced storage capacity. A VHDX file is divided in 3 sections. 1. Fixed size header 2. Non-overlapping objects 3. Free spaces Header is always at the start of VHDX image, whereas the objects and free space are intermixed randomly. All objects are 1MB aligned, named as BAT (Block allocation table), metadata, header, log, payload block and sector bitmap block. VHDX supports 3 types of disks: 1. Fixed size 2. Dynamic siz...

ZFS is a feature-rich file system that makes it valuable as a starting platform for software-defined storage. This post speaks about ZFS features that are of prime importance: Deduplication In ZFS you can set deduplication at files, blocks or bytes level . This is great flexibility which allows configuration as needed. Snapshots and Clones ZFS allows taking file level snapshot or cloning . Snapshot is read-only, whereas clone is writable. Encryption Encryption policy can be set at storage pool level. Any file system created in that pool will be having transparent encryption enabled. Compression Compression can be enabled or disabled at file system level. This feature gives flexibility to have two file systems in same pool but one compressed and another non-compressed. Send/Receive This one is a cool feature in ZFS wherein one can send or receive snapshots. The feature comes handy to replicate a given file to remote ZFS file system continuously. RAID-Z RAID-...

vVols is a completely new concept designed to be the next generation of storage. However, todays storage protocols cause significant issues in adapting VM-centric approach. They might not realize a sudden change in their existing architecture, but modifications to scale VM growth. Be it snapshots, clones or replication, today everything is LUN-centric in storage world. The storage pool on the array is carved up into LUNs or shares, and then taken up by VM application. But what if the VM admin can decide upon the storage requirements of an application and can ask storage array to create VMDK? This question is well-answered by VMware’s upcoming concept – vVols or Virtual Volumes, that talk about VM-centric approach. A VMDK stored inside the storage system, being the single source for storing entire contents of a VM, typically includes all metadata associated with it. There are three main parts that makeup the current known state of vVvols Storage Prov...