Hierarchical storage management (HSM) is a data storage technique that automatically moves data between high-cost and low-cost storage media. HSM systems exist because high-speed storage devices, such as solid state drive arrays, are more expensive than slower devices, such as hard disk drives, optical discs and magnetic tape drives. While it would be ideal to have all data available on high-speed devices all the time, this is prohibitively expensive for many organizations. Instead, HSM systems store the bulk of the enterprise's data on slower devices, and then copy data to faster disk drives when needed. In effect, HSM turns the fast disk drives into caches for the slower mass storage devices. The HSM system monitors the way data is used and makes best guesses as to which data can safely be moved to slower devices and which data should stay on the fast devices.
The Storage Resource Management (SRM) technology was initiated by the Scientific Data Management Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and developed in response to growing needs of managing large datasets on a variety of storage systems.
In computing, thin provisioning involves using virtualization technology to give the appearance of having more physical resources than are actually available. If a system always has enough resource to simultaneously support all of the virtualized resources, then it is not thin provisioned. The term thin provisioning is applied to disk layer in this article, but could refer to an allocation scheme for any resource. For example, real memory in a computer is typically thin-provisioned to running tasks with some form of address translation technology doing the virtualization. Each task acts as if it has real memory allocated. The sum of the allocated virtual memory assigned to tasks typically exceeds the total of real memory.
Capacity management's primary goal is to ensure that information technology resources are right-sized to meet current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner. One common interpretation of capacity management is described in the ITIL framework. ITIL version 3 views capacity management as comprising three sub-processes: business capacity management, service capacity management, and component capacity management.
In computer science, storage virtualization is "the process of presenting a logical view of the physical storage resources to" a host computer system, "treating all storage media in the enterprise as a single pool of storage."
A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system. Clustered file systems can provide features like location-independent addressing and redundancy which improve reliability or reduce the complexity of the other parts of the cluster. Parallel file systems are a type of clustered file system that spread data across multiple storage nodes, usually for redundancy or performance.
Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools. The physical storage spans multiple servers, and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment protected and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.
In computing, file virtualization is a field of storage virtualization operating on computer file level. It involves uniting multiple storage devices into a single logical pool of file. It is a vital part of both file area network (FAN) and network file management (NFM) concepts.
In computing, data deduplication is a technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data. A related and somewhat synonymous term is single-instance (data) storage. This technique is used to improve storage utilization and can also be applied to network data transfers to reduce the number of bytes that must be sent. In the deduplication process, unique chunks of data, or byte patterns, are identified and stored during a process of analysis. As the analysis continues, other chunks are compared to the stored copy and whenever a match occurs, the redundant chunk is replaced with a small reference that points to the stored chunk. Given that the same byte pattern may occur dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times, the amount of data that must be stored or transferred can be greatly reduced.
Cloud computing makes computer system resources, especially storage and computing power, available on demand without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an Edge server.
In computer science, memory virtualization decouples volatile random access memory (RAM) resources from individual systems in the data center, and then aggregates those resources into a virtualized memory pool available to any computer in the cluster. The memory pool is accessed by the operating system or applications running on top of the operating system. The distributed memory pool can then be utilized as a high-speed cache, a messaging layer, or a large, shared memory resource for a CPU or a GPU application.
IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) is a Storage Resource Management (SRM) software offering that provides a centralized point of control for managing large-scale, complex heterogeneous storage environments. IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center V5.2.x (5608-PC1) was renamed in V5.2.8 to IBM Spectrum Control Standard Edition V5.2.x (5608-PC1).
Converged infrastructure operates by grouping multiple information technology (IT) components into a single, optimized computing package. Components of a converged infrastructure may include servers, data storage devices, networking equipment and software for IT infrastructure management, automation and orchestration.
OpenNebula is a cloud computing platform for managing heterogeneous distributed data center infrastructures. The OpenNebula platform manages a data center's virtual infrastructure to build private, public and hybrid implementations of infrastructure as a service. The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization solutions and cloud infrastructure solutions. The platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate a cloud on top of existing infrastructure management solutions. OpenNebula is free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the Apache License version 2.
Converged storage is a storage architecture that combines storage and computing resources into a single entity. This can result in the development of platforms for server centric, storage centric or hybrid workloads where applications and data come together to improve application performance and delivery. The combination of storage and compute differs to the traditional IT model in which computation and storage take place in separate or siloed computer equipment. The traditional model requires discrete provisioning changes, such as upgrades and planned migrations, in the face of server load changes, which are increasingly dynamic with virtualization, where converged storage increases the supply of resources along with new VM demands in parallel.
Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages it. The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup.
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined IT infrastructure that virtualizes all of the elements of conventional "hardware-defined" systems. HCI includes, at a minimum, virtualized computing, a virtualised SAN and virtualized networking. HCI typically runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. The term was first used in this context by analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group in 2012.
Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center This includes Business service management and planning for the future.
