From: "Adam Flinton" 

Another example:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2132644,00.html

"
Virtual storage is the way ahead for really efficient systems, says IBM IBM
demonstrated the result of more than three years' development this week
when it unveiled its TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) at its
Hursley Park, UK laboratories.

Previously known as Lodestone, the product is "mostly software",
according to lead architect Steve Legg, but is being sold with specially
configured x-Series IBM servers to ensure reliability. The SVC uses four 2
Gb/s FibreChannel interfaces, a 4GB cache and dual 2.4GHz Pentium 4 to
manage heterogeneous hard disk storage independently of application servers
-- storage virtualisation, in other words, one of the hot topics in current
SME systems design.

Storage virtualisation is disk management where the physical details of the
hard disks are hidden by a controller from servers on a network. The
controller can organise caching, reaction to faults, storage attachment and
removal, as well as security, backup and other management issues, by
bringing disparate devices together into components of one unit of storage,
a single virtual disk drive which in the SVC can be up to 2 petabytes
(roughly a million gigabytes) in size.

This leads, says IBM, to better resource utilisation, easier management and
more efficient use of system administrators' time.

The SVC is an in-band virtualiser, which means it handles all the file data
itself. Out-of-band virtualisation tells servers where to read and write
data, but then lets them do it directly. This is a religious schism in the
virtualisation community: "In-band does increase latency, but it gives
us complete control over the storage network," said Legg, "which
is necessary for high availability and guaranteed performance. Quality of
Service [QoS] is much easier to deliver."

He said that the SVC ran Little Blue, an IBM embedded variant of SuSE
Linux, but with no OS calls in the data path: it managed 1Gbps consistent
throughput."



Adam

"Chris Robinson"  wrote
in message news:pan.2003.03.31.18.34.10.639002{at}NOSPAM.totalise.co.uk...
> On Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:13:34 +0100, Adam Flinton wrote:
>
> > Nope but this is an excellant example of why Linux will win in the end.
> > Anyone can take something that works (e.g. knoppix) & can
then "roll
their
> > own" to suit their exact tastes.
> >
> > Imagine if someone shoved a cut down knoppix onto a USB(2) memory stick
for
> > a machine which allowed booting from a memstick....
> >
> > Point is that you can.
> >
> > Adam
> >
> >
> >
> > "Chris Robinson"
 wrote in message
> > news:3E8801E6.399B925D{at}NOSPAMtotalise.co.uk...
> >> It's pretty cool, have you also checked out Damn Small Linux?
> >> (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) - it's a business card Linux Distro
(like
> >> LNX-BBC) but it runs with a GUI and it's based on a stripped down
Knoppix
> > :o).
> >>
> Yup - it's hella cool stuff ;)
>
> Chris.

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