Stefan Didak – Storage

You really think my local storage is insane?

June 2, 2011 by Stefan Didak 12 Comments

A lot of external USB and eSATA harddisks

Of course it is possible to travel with a few dozen virtual machines! After looking at the stack of external USB and eSATA harddisks I use to travel with essential materials I just had to take a picture of it. Sorry about the quality that isn’t up to snuff but I used the iPhone to take the snap. Over the past year people have asked me, “when you have so much local storage, how do you decide what you travel with and how do you carry it with you”. Well, the picture here probably says more than a thousand words. Not that I couldn’t write a thousand words on it, if I really wanted to. And no, it is not a joke. I really do travel with 22 external HDD’s (over 13TB of storage). Since I travel with the Clevo D900F “laptop” (ahum, sort of, mobile luggable workstation) I also travel with enough storage and data that if I need to grab a VM and do a quick fix on a bug somewhere, I can do so without having to wait until I can return to the larger workstations.

Filed Under: Home Office Tagged With: Storage, Transport, Travel

StarWind Server: SAN Made Simple

September 11, 2009 by Stefan Didak 2 Comments

I have very little need for a SAN (Storage Area Network), because every single system is already loaded up with many terabytes of fast RAID storage. A SAN, regardless of the size, speed, and cost, would always be slower than the local storage of each system. However, if I wanted to centralize the storage for the systems in the network, whereby the systems themselves were smaller, less top-heavy computers, I would certainly be looking at something like StarWind Server or StarWind Enterprise Server (probably the latter because I like the replication features).

Filed Under: Software, Windows Software Tagged With: iSCSI, RAID, Review, SAN, Servers, Software, StarWind, Storage, Virtualization, Visualization, Windows

Windows 7, booting from VHD, converting between VHD and VMDK

September 9, 2009 by Stefan Didak 3 Comments

Virtual Machines are great. I rely on them for my work every day and most of my home office network depends on several Virtual Machines (VM’s) for the core infrastructure (SMTP, DNS, AD, backup management, centralized automation, build farms, continuous integration, etc.) but sometimes you just want the abstraction and ease of use of a Virtual Machine while having full support of the host’s hardware (graphics cards, drivers, etc.) and often you don’t want to mess around with the, often complex or entangled, multi-boot scenarios. If you’re in need of that, Windows 7 (and 2008 Server R2) and their native support for Virtual Harddisks (VHD’s) will come in extremely handy. Especially now that you can install and boot your system from a VHD, directly. The following is a bit of a quick start to using VHD’s, some additional details on how I’ve been using them, and a quick look at Starwind’s free V2V conversion application.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Software, Windows Software Tagged With: Booting, OS, StarWind, Storage, VHD, Virtualization, VMDK, Windows

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You really think my local storage is insane?

StarWind Server: SAN Made Simple

Windows 7, booting from VHD, converting between VHD and VMDK

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