HP’s D2D product line, which has recently been rebranded “StoreOnce”, is effectively an expensive software platform.
via HP D2D/StoreOnce Backdoor.
Open up your favourite SSH client, key in the IP of an HP D2D unit. Enter in yourself the username HPSupport, and the password which has a SHA1 of 78a7ecf065324604540ad3c41c3bb8fe1d084c50. Say hello to an administrative account you didn’t know existed.
The three main protocols for IP SANs are Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP), and Internet SCSI (iSCSI). As shown in Figure 1, the iSCSI, iFCP, and FCIP protocols support a serial SCSI-3 interface to the standard SCSI command set expected by the operating system and upper-layer applications. This allows conventional storage I/O to be performed over a high-performance gigabit transport. Serial SCSI-3 transactions are carried over TCP/IP, although only iFCP and iSCSI leverage native TCP/IP for each storage end device. Each IP storage protocol has unique requirements for discovery.
iSCSI is also supported as the ideal alternative to SAN solution for business. Affordable and cost-effective iSCSI allows large scale business to consolidate storage into data center storage arrays while providing hosts with the illusion of locally-attached disks. With the iSCSI support, DS1812+ provides a seamless storage solution for virtualization servers, such as VMware, Citrix, and Hyper-V.
StarWind is an iSCSI SAN software that turns any industry-standard server into a highly reliable and highly available enterprise-class SAN or centralized iSCSI storage.
via iSCSI SAN Software and Storage Virtualization Solutions.
Computerworld – Fibre Channel, the high-speed data transport protocol for storage area networks (SAN), is under increasing pressure as data centers move toward Ethernet for all data network traffic and SAS for hardware interconnects.
By no means is Fibre Channel down and out. In fact, recent figures indicate it’s still showing low single-digit, year-over-year growth. The protocol is currently used in $50 billion worth of equipment around the world, according to research firm Gartner.
via Protocol wars: Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet’s assault? – Computerworld.
Storage encryption has historically proven unpopular because of the issues of managing the keys used in various encryption methods, and the system performance burden that encryption/decryption placed on systems hardware. These issues have been iteratively surmounted in a number of advances. Faster CPUs, disk controllers and host bus adapters (HBAs) and tough-to-break encryption now reduce the burden once placed on subsystem, disk, and device encryption.
via Enterprise Storage Encryption: An Administrator’s … – Input Output.
This is a pretty good article. Here’s one more blurb.
Subsystems are encrypted at the hardware level or at the device group level. Subsystems can also be encrypted by the use of third-party software packages designed specifically for this purpose. Subsystem encryption usually means that a single encryption key is used for the group, and that the private encryption key is stored in hardware or in system firmware. This type of protection means that a drive “stolen” or otherwise removed from the group of storage media can’t be decrypted, even by examining the disk using an identical system, as the identical system would be missing the key that unlocks the data by decrypting it.
This seems like a rather high level of security.
Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) is a transport protocol (similar to TCP used in IP networks) which predominantly transports SCSI commands over Fibre Channel networks.[1][2]
via Fibre Channel – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Despite its name, Fibre Channel signaling can run on both twisted paircopperwire and fiber-opticcables.[1][2]
I still need to know how this is done over fibre.
I wanted to test an Openfiler as a solution forHA and vMotion with ESX Server and vCenter. Using Openfiler is a great way to save some money on expensive SANs and for home lab testing and learning, this choice is just great. I did not have 3 physical boxes (2 for ESX hosts and one for Openfiler) so I opted for a hybrid solution, where I’m actually running one ESX server inside of VMware workstation.
via How to configure OpenFiler iSCSI Storage for use with VMware ESX. | ESX Virtualization.
The Openfiler distribution is available as an installable ISO CD image to be deployed on bare-metal or a pre-installed disk image for use in one of the several supported virtual machines monitors.
Installable images are available for both x86 and x86-64 architectures. Supported virtual machines monitors include Xen, VMware, QEMU, Virtual Iron and Parallels.
via Openfiler — Download.