Want to stay current on storage trends and technologies?

Interested in learning more about the Zetta File System (ZFS), the revolutionary file system created by Sun Microsystems?

Wondering how to best take advantage of exciting new ZFS features such as de-duplication?

Curious if you can get a performance boost from adding solid-state drives to your storage systems?

Nexenta Systems, the leading provider of OpenStorage solutions based on ZFS,
is sponsoring a two-day training program targeting storage administrators and IT managers who
want to learn:

•     How and when to use advanced ZFS features such as de-duplication
•     When to deploy solid-state devices and how to measure their performance
•     Best practices for performance tuning storage systems based on ZFS

Instruction will be led by Richard Elling, a well-known industry ZFS expert. Richard is a respected systems architect with extensive experience in network computing, complex systems design, highly-available systems and data storage systems. He was a chief architect and systems engineer at Sun Microsystems and has provided consulting on enterprise IT. In addition to providing ZFS instruction, Richard has also written books and papers on storage performance and clustering.

Also, Christopher George, the Founder/CTO of DDRdrive LLC, will talk about the latest trends and breakthroughs in solid-state technology. Specifically, how SSDs can be applied to accelerating synchronous writes, often a critical bottleneck in NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI performance. DDRdrive is currently shipping its namesake product, the DDRdrive X1, exclusively as a ZFS ZIL accelerator. The X1 integrates a complete solid-state storage system on a PCI-E expansion card and has achieved 300,000+ random read and 200,000+ random write IOPS. Christopher will offer unique insights as the architect of the X1, and go in-depth comparing the two major types of SSDs (Flash and NVRAM).  In addition, he will provide guidance on when and where to use each, and how to measure the performance impact.

Attendees successfully completing the full two-day course will receive Certified NexentaStor Engineer (CNE) accreditation.

The course is structured as follows:

Day 1: (Morning Session) Introduction to ZFS and Nexenta Systems Storage Technologies

This class provides a solid introduction to the Zetta File System (ZFS). ZFS is a revolutionary file system that provides simple administration, end-to-end data integrity, 128-bit checksums, protection against silent data corruption and the RAID 5 "write hole" and the ability to scale well beyond legacy storage solutions. Nexenta Systems has been referred to as the fastest growing storage startup ever, and bases its software storage appliance on ZFS technology.

What you will learn:

•     Capabilities and feature set of the Zetta File System
•     How ZFS differs from traditional file system
•     Capabilities, feature set, and best practices for using the NexentaStor appliance
•     Best practices for choosing hardware and deploying storage appliances

Lecture topics:

•     ZFS introduction
•     Transaction model, checksums and self-healing
•     NexentaStor introduction
•     Replication techniques
•     Snapshots
•     Backups
•     NexentaStor storage services

Day 1: (Afternoon Session) Insights from an SSD Architect

Do you have a storage application bound by the performance of synchronous writes?  Not sure how to validate claims, devise a solution, and determine ROI?  Solid-state technology has an amazing potential to radically reduce storage latency.  However, SSDs are costly and benefits can vary widely based on application workloads.  Christopher George, will walk you through the best practices integral to a successful ZFS Intent Log implementation. Along the way, he will share his insider experiences developing the DDRdrive X1 and why he believes Nexenta/ZFS turns solid-state potential into practice.

What you will learn:

• Best practices for deploying SSD
• Tools for profiling and measuring performance of SSD

Lecture topics:

• Overview:  IOPS the key to SSD
• SSD Types:  ZFS the future today
• ZFS Intent Log:  The Lumberjack
• ZilStat:  TXG to the rescue
• Case Study:  The DDRdrive X1

Day 2: (Morning session) De-duplication in a VM World

System virtualization is a common consolidation technique to reduce server sprawl within a datacenter. However, it adds complexity because it makes it difficult to map an application to its respective storage. Also naive deployments of virtual machines can lead to multiple copies of the same VM images with a corresponding waste of storage capacity. In this class we will talk about ZFS capabilities such as cloning, snapshotting, and de-duplication as well as NexentaStor's Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC) management software.

What you will learn:

•     Best practices and techniques for managing virtual machines and their storage
•     How to leverage clones, deduplication, and compression
•     How to manage growth of virtual machine storage systems

Lecture topics:

•     Snapshots and clones
•     ZFS de-duplication features
•     Comparisons to other de-duplication methods
•     ZFS de-duplication design
•     Compression
•     Snapshots and de-duplication
•     De-duplication and performance
•     Early experiences with de-duplication
•     Cloning and snapshotting virtual machines

This class will also include hands-on exercises with NexentaStor's VMDC.

Day 2: (Afternoon session) Optimizing NAS Performance

ZFS eases storage management and NexentaStor further simplifies administration with its Web-based interface. With NexentaStor file systems can be shared using NFS, CIFS, and WebDAV with a click of a button. However, configuring the system properly to get maximum performance can be a bit more challenging. This course goes deeper into capacity and availability tradeoffs for maximizing NAS performance.

What you will learn:

•     How to understand and analyze space, performance, and dependability trade-offs
•     Common performance pitfalls
•     How to analyze storage performance
•     Techniques to achieve the best performance and dependability

Lecture topics:

•     Configuring NFS
•     Configuring CIFS
•     Setting up file sharing in NexentaStor
•     ZFS intent log
•     ZFS caching
•     ZFS hybrid storage pools
•     DTrace for virtual machines
•     Monitoring de-duplication performance