Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Channel storage device to the WWN of the host's HBA. Fibre Channel has been the
preferred method of storage because of the available connection bandwidth between
the storage and the host.
Fibre Channel devices support 1Gb/s, 2Gb/s, and 4Gb/s connections, and they soon
will support 8Gb/s connections, but now that 10Gb/s Ethernet networks are becoming
more prevalent in many datacenters, iSCSI can be a suitable alternative. It is important
to consider that 10Gb/s network switches can be more expensive than comparable Fibre
Channel switches.
N-Port Identification Virtualization (NPIV)
is a Fibre Channel facility allowing
multiple n-port IDs to share a single physical N-Port. This allows multiple Fibre Channel
initiators to occupy a single physical port. By using a single port, this eases hardware
requirements in storage area network (SAN) design.
Network Attached Storage
The concept of a
network attached storage (NAS)
solution is that it is a low-cost device
for storing data and serving files through the use of an Ethernet LAN connection. A NAS
device accesses data at the file level via a communication protocol such as NFS, CIFS, or
even HTTP, which is different from iSCSI or FC Fibre Channel storage devices that access
the data at the block level. NAS devices are best used in file-storing applications, and they
do not require a storage expert to install and maintain the device. In most cases, the only
setup that is required is an IP address and an Ethernet connection.
Virtual Disk Service
Virtual Disk Service (VDS)
was created to ease the administrative efforts involved in man-
aging all of the various types of storage devices. Many storage hardware providers used
their own applications for installation and management, and this made administering all of
these various devices very cumbersome.
VDS is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that provides a centralized
interface for managing all of the various storage devices. The native VDS API enables the
management of disks and volumes at an OS level, and hardware vendor-supplied APIs
manage the storage devices at a RAID level. These are known as software and hardware
providers.
A
software provider
is host based, and it interacts with Plug and Play Manager
because each disk is discovered and operates on volumes, disks, and disk partitions. VDS
includes two software providers: basic and dynamic. The basic software provider manages
basic disks with no fault tolerance, whereas the dynamic software providers manage
dynamic disks with fault management. A hardware provider translates the VDS APIs into
instructions specific to the storage hardware. This is how storage management applications
are able to communicate with the storage hardware to create LUNs or Fibre Channel HBAs
to view the WWN. The following are Windows Server 2012 R2 storage management
applications that use VDS:
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