NAS with iSCSI for vSphere

Needed to buy a shared storage for a small vSphere 4.0 sandbox – here are my observations.

• Was looking for block storage device – so that I can use vmfs. Barring that, I was Ok with NFS
• We already have netApp et al in our concept lab. So wanted a low budget solution that will hold 2 to 4 ST31000340NS (Seagate 1TB, SATA Barracuda) disks
• iSCSI looked like the best option for block storage
• After some digging around, the choice was between NetGear ReadyNas, Synology 209 and the QNAP 210
• Lower end NetGear boxes don’t support iSCSI
• Both Synology and QNAP are based on Marvell 6281 chip and with 256MB memory (BTW, check out the plug computer which also is based on the 6281 ! Very interesting … A topic for another day …)
  • Synology has the 209j and the 209+II. The 209j is way under powered and the 209+II has better CPU and more memory, but prices a little high
• Both SY209 and the QNAP210 have iSCSI target interface but looks like the QNAP is more advanced. (Quite possible that both are based on the Linux iSCSI substrate !
• So finally I ordered 2 of the QNAP 210s
• BTW, an interesting contender is the Windows Storage Server with iSCSI ! Adding the iSCSI control plane to Win2K8R2 is a brilliant move by Microsoft !
• I will blog the agonies and ecstasies after setting these up in my vSphere 4.0 sandbox …

Is Secure Clouds An Oxymoron ?

Of late, I am working on the cloud security mechanisms from multiple vantage points:

1. Cloud Security mechanics for the provider interface between a Cloud Service Provider and a Cloud Service Consumer (including various brokers)
   • Protocols, elements et al as part of the DMTF Cloud Incubator wg. Our white paper will explain a little further on the architectures
2. Embedding Cloud Security in the network, leveraging various network capabilities – available now and in the future
3. Cloud Analytics for compliance reporting and forensics
4. And finally, a comprehensive view of Cloud Security
   • On this front, I did a guest lecture [Is Secure Clouds An oxymoron?] at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey
   • My aim was to facilitate and provoke discussions than suggest any solutions – the deep discussions will come later …
   • The room was full, excellent audience, lots of participation and some very good questions …

I will write more on this topic, especially #1. There is good amount of work happening in the Cloud Service Provider <-> Cloud Service Consumer front …

And we are starting to prototype the Cloud OS/APIs with extended semantics (including interface into our own UCS compute and policy plane) in our Cloud Concept lab (in Ruby!).

I believe that Cloud Security would be more robust if we can interface *natively* from the Cloud OS layer, with the network, compute and  storage control/management/policy planes …

Cheers

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