Fast Lane Instructor to speak at NetApp Insight Conference

The NetApp Insight conference will be held next week in Las Vegas. The conference is dedicated to NetApp employees and partners and features over 100 breakout training sessions focusing on NetApp storage and related technologies. I am honored to be a guest speaker at Insight and will be leading a discussion on Secure Multi-Tenancy (SMT). Cisco, NetApp and VMware have partnered to create a Multi-Tenant solution that has been validated as secure.

Secure Multi-Tenancy is the enablement of a shared infrastructure including storage, network and compute resources using outlined implementation standards. These standards include maintaining secure separation and high availability of tenant assigned resources while maintaining service level agreements. Another key component of Secure Multi-Tenancy is the simplification of administration which allows for rapid provisioning of resources and greater control of those resources for the tenant administrator.

If you are interested in Secure Multi-Tenancy, Fast Lane has developed the first multi-vendor SMT course based on the Cisco Validated Design document. The course features Cisco UCS, NetApp MultiStore and VMware ESX. You can learn more about the Implementing Secure Multi-Tenancy course by visiting this link: http://www.fastlaneus.com/course/fl-ismt?hl=smt.

Quite often students ask for references to whitepapers, technical reports related to NetApp technologies. More often than not, I end up referring them to the NetApp Technical Library which is a hidden gem for anyone researching NetApp technologies.

The NetApp technical library can be an excellent resource for gathering information on staple NetApp technologies such as SnapMirror, but it is also a great place to find additional information on hot and emerging technologies like Secure Multi-Tenancy.

The library is divided into technical reports, customer stories, white papers, analyst reports and research papers making it easy for researchers to find information on how the various NetApp products integrate with other technologies such as VMware.

The library can be an invaluable tool for storage administrators and IT Managers interested in implementing new technologies. Access to the NetApp Technical library is free; no login required and is available on the NetApp website.

Before the days of electronic check processing, people would sometimes float checks. The trick to floating a check was ensuring that you had enough money in the bank to cover the check by the time it cleared the bank. Thin provisioning works the same way. You are essentially floating a storage check and need to have the storage physically in place by the time it’s actually needed. This means you can allocate as much space as you want in the volume, but only add disks when the volume or aggregate is almost full. This is why thin provisioning is sometimes referred to as “storage on demand” or “just-in-time storage”.  Read the rest of this entry »