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Past Events

Next Generation Storage Networking
Brown University

Thursday, August 23, 2007,
Providence, RI

Next Generation Storage Networking
Yale University

Wednesday, August 8, 2007,
New Haven, CT

A Technical Crash Course in Disk-to-Disk Backup and Storage Virtualization
Duke University

Thursday, May 17, 2007, Durham, NC

Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks
University of Wisconsin—Madison

Wednesday, May 9, 2007, Madison, WI


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  USENIX Education on the Road

USENIX is excited to announce a new program that will bring USENIX-quality tutorials for free to a city near you.

In 2007 USENIX will begin to partner with leading universities, research institutions, and corporations to bring some of our most popular technical tutorials to a city near you—for free! Our purpose is to give back to long-standing USENIX members, while exposing those who are not familiar with USENIX to the quality of our conferences and educational services. What better way to do that then to send out a free sample of cutting-edge tutorial programs?

This program is offered free-of-charge to qualified IT professionals, researchers, and students.

We will begin this new program by offering two of our most popular tutorial titles, "Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks" and "Next Generation Storage Networking." On occasion, we may offer a condensed version of these two tutorials that combines the topics or areas of most interest to attendees into one event. We can be flexible in terms of exact tutorial content and will prioritize based on the issues that are of most interest to your group.

Storage and backup are hot fields, rife with both innovation and confusion, so we anticipate that these topics will be relevant to a wide audience. Similarly, at past conferences these topics have appealed to people within a broad spectrum of technical experience, ranging from those who manage storage and design backup systems for a living to those who simply have curiosity.

Class Descriptions

Next Generation Storage Networking
Thursday, August 23, 2007, Providence, RI, Brown University
Wednesday, August 8, 2007, New Haven, CT, Yale University

Duration: 3 hours, not including 30 minute break

Who should attend: Sysadmins running day-to-day operations and those who set or enforce budgets. This tutorial is technical in nature, but it does not address command-line syntax or the operation of specific products or technologies. Rather, the focus is on general architectures and various approaches to scaling in both performance and capacity. Since storage networking technologies tend to be costly, there is some discussion of the relative cost of different technologies and of strategies for managing cost and achieving results on a limited budget.

Overview: There has been tremendous innovation in the data storage industry over the past few years. Proprietary, monolithic SAN and NAS solutions are beginning to give way to open-system solutions and distributed architectures. Traditional storage interfaces such as parallel SCSI and Fibre Channel are being challenged by iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP), SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial attached SCSI), and even Infiniband. New filesystem designs and alternatives to NFS and CIFS are enabling high-performance filesharing measured in gigabytes (yes, "bytes," not "bits") per second. New spindle management techniques are enabling higher-performance and lower-cost disk storage. Meanwhile, a whole new set of efficiency technologies are allowing storage protocols to flow over the WAN with unprecedented performance. This tutorial is a survey of the latest storage networking technologies, with commentary on where and when these technologies are most suitably deployed.

Topics include:

  • Fundamentals of storage virtualization: the storage I/O path
  • Shortcomings of conventional SAN and NAS architectures
  • In-band and out-of-band virtualization architectures
  • The latest storage interfaces: SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial attached SCSI), 4Gb Fibre Channel, Infiniband, iSCSI
  • Content-Addressable Storage (CAS)
  • Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)
  • The convergence of SAN and NAS
  • High-performance file sharing
  • Parallel file systems
  • SAN-enabled file systems
  • Wide-area file systems (WAFS)

A Technical Crash Course in Disk-to-Disk Backup and Storage Virtualization
Thursday, May 17, 2007, Durham, NC

Location: Duke University, Fitzpatrick Building, Schiano Auditorium (Side B). Click here for directions and parking information.

Duration: 3 hours, not including 30 minute break

Who should attend: System administrators involved in the design and management of backup systems and storage solutions, and policymakers responsible for protecting their organization's data or defining an overall storage strategy. A general familiarity with server and storage hardware is assumed. The event focuses on architectures and core technologies, and is relevant regardless of an attendee's backup hardware, software, storage strategy, or specific IT environment.

Overview: Several departments at Duke University have requested Jacob Farmer, the CTO of Cambridge Computer, to come to campus and give a talk on the topics of disk-to-disk backup and virtualization. We are opening this event up to the entire campus and hope that you can join us. This event is free to qualified IT professionals, researchers, and students.

The event will be divided into two segments in order to effectively address both topics:

  • A Technical Crash Course on Storage Virtualization
    This portion will focus on server, storage, tape, and WAN virtualization solutions.
  • Options and Economics of Disk-to-Disk Backup
    This portion will emphasize the various roles for inexpensive disks in your data protection strategy. Attention will be given to SAN-enabled backup, the current state and future of tape drives, and iSCSI.
Both segments will feature excerpts from tutorial content ("Next Generation Storage Networking" and "Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks") that Jacob will be teaching at the 2007 Annual USENIX Conference to be held in Santa Clara, CA, this June.

Topics taken from Next Generation Storage Networking include:

  • Virtualization and the storage I/O path
  • Inband vs. out-of-band virtualization
  • Spindle virtualization
  • Volume virtualization
  • File system virtualization
  • In-band network file system appliances

Topics taken from Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks include:

  • Overview of backup system bottlenecks
  • Conventional disk backup
  • Virtual tape libraries: advantages and disadvantages
  • De-duplication, commonality factoring, and single instance storage
  • Block-level incremental backups
  • Bare Metal Recovery

Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks
Wednesday, May 9, 2007, Madison, Wisconsin

Location: University of Wisconsin—Madison, UW IceCube Neutrino Observatory, Conference Room 222 West Washington Ave., 5th Floor, Madison, WI.

Parking: Overture Center Ramp, 318 W Mifflin St., Madison, WI. Entrance locations at 300 W. Dayton St. and 300 W. Mifflin St. Please bring your parking ticket to the lecture and we will provide parking validations.

Duration: 3 hours, not including 30 minute break

Who should attend: System administrators involved in the design and management of backup systems and policymakers responsible for protecting their organization's data. A general familiarity with server and storage hardware is assumed. The class focuses on architectures and core technologies and is relevant regardless of what backup hardware and software you currently use.

Overview: The data protection industry is going through a mini-renaissance. In the past few years, the cost of disk media has dropped to the point where it is practical to use disk arrays in backup systems, thus minimizing and sometimes eliminating the need for tape. In the first incarnations of disk-to-disk backup—disk staging and virtual tape libraries—disk has been used as a direct replacement for tape media. While this compensates for the mechanical shortcomings of tape drives, it fails to address other critical bottlenecks in the backup system, and thus many disk-to-disk backup projects fall short of expectations. Meanwhile, many early adopters of disk-to-disk backup are discovering that the longterm costs of disk staging and virtual tape libraries are prohibitive.

The good news is that the next generation of disk-enabled data protection solutions has reached a level of maturity where they can assist—and sometimes even replace—conventional enterprise backup systems. These new D2D solutions leverage the random access properties of disk devices to use capacity much more efficiently and to obviate many of the hidden backup-system bottlenecks that are not addressed by first-generation solutions. The challenge to the backup system architect is to cut through the industry hype, sort out all of these new technologies, and figure out how to integrate them into an existing backup system.

This tutorial identifies the major bottlenecks in conventional backup systems and explains how to address them. The emphasis is placed on the various roles for inexpensive disk in your data protection strategy; however, attention is given to SAN-enabled backup, the current state and future of tape drives, and iSCSI.

Topics include:
  • Identifying and eliminating backup system bottlenecks
  • Conventional disk staging
  • Virtual tape libraries
  • Removable disk media
  • Incremental forever and synthetic full backup strategies
  • Block- and object-level incremental backups
  • Information lifecycle management and nearline archiving
  • Data replication
  • CDP (Continuous Data Protection)
  • Snapshots
  • Current and future tape drives
  • Capacity Optimization (Single-Instance File Systems)
  • Minimizing and even eliminating tape drives
  • iSCSI

About the lecturer: Jacob Farmer is a well-known figure in the data storage industry. He has authored numerous papers and articles and is a regular speaker at trade shows and conferences. In addition to his regular expert advice column in the "Reader I/O" section of InfoStor Magazine, the leading trade magazine of the data storage industry, Jacob also serves as one of the publication's senior technical advisors. Jacob has over 20 years of experience with storage technologies and is the CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, a national integrator of data storage and data protection solutions.

 

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Last changed: 24 Aug. 2007 ch