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?

Nexenta Systems, the leading provider of OpenStorage solutions based on ZFS, and rojoli, a managed sevice provider specializing in virtualization and small business services, are co-sponsoring a three-day training program targeting storage administrators and IT managers who want to learn:

• best practices associated with advanced ZFS features such as de-duplication
• how to get maximum benefit from NexentaStor storage appliances*
• best practices for performance tuning of ZFS and NexentaStor storage systems

* Note that attendees are not required to be NexentaStor customers

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.

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

Attendees can choose to attend the three-day program, or the two-day advanced portion. The course is structured as follows:

Day 1: Introduction to ZFS and Nexenta Systems Storage Technologies

Day 2: De-duplication in a VM World

Day 3: Optimizing NAS Performance

Attendees should have some familiarity with storage concepts and terminology, but does not assume any knowledge of ZFS or familiarity with the NexentaStor storage appliance.

The course will include hands-on exercises with ZFS and NexentaStor.

Lunch will be provided each day.

The following sections describe each day's program.

Day 1: 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 2: 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 3: 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