Annotated Bibliography (Last Update: April 2009)
When we began writing this book in April 2001 there were hardly any books about storage networks. Since then a couple of books have appeared on this subject. In the following we introduce a selection of the sources (books, white papers and websites) that have been helpful to us when writing this book, in addition to our daily work. That means, the following list represents our subjective list of readings – there may be a lot of other useful resources available as well.
General Sources
Marc Farley: Building Storage Networks, McGraw-Hill 2001 In our opinion the first comprehensive book on storage networks. When we started to work with storage networks in mid-2000 Farley’s book quickly became the ‘storage bible’ for us. We still use this book as a reference today. The book gives a particularly good overview of the fundamental technologies for storage networks.
Tom Clark: Designing Storage Area Networks: A Practical Reference for Implementing Fibre Channel and IP SANs (2nd Edition), Addison-Wesley 2003 This book gives a good overview about techniques for storage networking and their application.
InfoStor A manufacturer-neutral technical journal on storage and storage networks. For us the companion website is the first port of call for new developments such as IP storage, RDMA, SMI-S or InfiniBand. At InfoStor you can also order a free weekly e-mail newsletter with up-to-date information on storage and storage networks.
Storage The website SearchStorage of the Storage magazine is also an important place to go. The site provides actual news, solid background information and a free email newsletter.
SNIA The Storage Networking Industry Association is an association of manufacturers, system integrators and service providers in the field of storage networks. The website includes a directory of all SNIA members, which at the same time gives a good overview of all important players in the field of ‘storage networks’. Furthermore, the SNIA website provides a couple of other useful information including whitepapers, a dictionary, presentations, a link collection and a regular newsletter. In addition to that, Europeans can subscribe the freely distributed SNS Europe magazine.
IBM Redbooks IBM makes technical expertise and material on its products freely available via IBM Redbooks. Many IBM Redbooks deal with the integration, implementation and operation of realistic customer scenarios. They should thus be viewed as a supplement to the pure handbooks. Many Redbooks also deal with product-independent subjects such as RAID or the fundamentals of storage networks. IBM Redbooks can be downloaded free of charge from the website.
Wikipedia The free online encyclopedia is a useful source to look up many basic definitions.
StorageExplained The homepage of this book. On this page we will publish corrections and supplements to this book and maintain the bibliography. In addition to this, we have provided the figures from this book and presentations to download.
Intelligent Disk Subsystems
We know of no comprehensive representation of disk subsystems. We have said everything of importance on this subject in this book, so that the next step would be to look at specific products.
On the subject of RAID we have drawn upon Marc Farley’s Building Storage Networks, Jon William Togo’s The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management and various IBM Redbooks. By the way, all three sources also provide information about tape and tape libraries.
In a blog hosted by Adaptec we found a spreadsheet from Tom Treadway. We used that spreadsheet to calculate the failure probability of RAID 5 which we presented in Table 2.18.
I/O Techniques
SCSI and Fibre Channel: With regard to SCSI, two sources were important to us. Firstly, we must again mention Marc Farley’s Building Storage Networks and the book by Robert Kembel below. In addition to that you may refer to The SCSI Bench Reference by Jeffrey Stai.
Robert Kembel Fibre Channel: A Comprehensive Introduction, Northwest Learning Associations, 2000. This book is the first book of a whole series on Fibre Channel. It explains the Fibre Channel standard in bits and bytes and also includes an interesting section on ‘SCSI-3 Architectural Model (SAM)’.
IP Storage – iSCSI and related subjects: with regard to IP storage we have drawn upon Marc Farley’s Building Storage Networks, various articles from InfoStor and the relevant standards of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). More and more iSCSI products are coming onto the market, so that more and more information on this subject can be found on the websites of relevant manufacturers. A book has now appeared – Tom Clark’s IP SANs: An Introduction to iSCSI, iFCP, and FCIP Protocols for Storage Area Networks – that leaves no questions on this subject unanswered.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Data Center Bridging (DCB): Silvano
Gai’s Data Center Networks and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) provides an
excellent overview about these new technologies. In addition to that we referred to
the INCITS T11 committee, the IEEE DCB Task Group, the FCIA, the IETF, and the SNIA.
InfiniBand, Virtual Interface Architecture and RDMA: For InfiniBand, Marc Farley’s Building Storage Networks and InfoStor should again be mentioned. We should also mention the homepage of the InfiniBand Trade Association, the homepage of the Virtual Interface Architecture which is no longer available in 2007, the homepage of the RDMA Consortium and various white papers from the homepages of relevant manufacturers.
LAN and WAN techniques: We confess that our coverage of LAN techniques like TCP/IP and Ethernet and of WAN techniques like Dark Fiber, DWDM and SONET/SDH must be improved. As general introduction in computer networks and LAN techniques we recommend Andrew S. Tanenbaum’s Computer Networks. With regard to WAN techniques we recommend the Light Reading’s Beginner’s Guides. Light Reading is also a very good starting point for upcoming WAN techniques like the Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) and the Generic Framing Procedure (GFP).
File Systems
For basic information on modern file systems we recommend that you take a look at the handbooks and white papers of relevant products. Particularly worth a mention are the Veritas File System from Symantec Veritas and the Journaled File System from IBM. A good comparison of NFS and CIFS can be found in Marc Farley’s Building Storage Networks. He gives a very good description of the difficulties of integrating the two protocols in a NAS server. Further information on NAS servers can also be found on the websites of the relevant manufacturers.
For GPFS we primarily used the two IBM Redbooks Sizing and Tuning GPFS by Marcello Barrios et al. and GPFS on AIX Clusters: High Performance File System Administration Simplified by Abbas Farazdel et al.
With regard to DAFS we referred to Marc Farley’s Building Storage Networks and the DAFS homepage which is no longer available in 2007. Also helpful was the article InfiniBand Opens the Throttle by Boris Bialek
Storage Virtualization
Some articles at InfoStor deal with the subject of storage virtualization. The IBM Redbook Storage Networking Virtualization: What’s it all about? is highly recommended. More and more storage virtualization products are coming onto the market, which means that an increasing amount of information on the subject can be found on the websites of the manufacturers in question. There’s also a great technical tutorial booklet on storage virtualization available from SNIA.
SAN Applications
With regard to the application and use of storage networks we unfortunately do not know of any comprehensive book. We can only refer you to the white papers of relevant manufacturers, various IBM Redbooks and to InfoStor and the SNIA on the Internet.
Network Backup
A good representation of the components of a network backup system can be found in Marc Farley’s Building Storage Networks. For the interaction of network backup systems with storage networks and intelligent storage systems, we can again only refer the reader to the white papers of the products in question.
With regard to NDMP we can refer the reader to the same sources. In addition, the NDMP homepage and the standard itself at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should be mentioned.
Digital Archiving
The following sources have been used for the explanations of the legal regulations:
The theories of Jeff Rothenberg contributed to the component-neutral archiving of data. They can be found in his report Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation – A Report to the Council on Library and Information Resources, January 1999.
For data growth we referred to John McKnight, Tony Asaro and Brian Babineau: Digital Archiving: End-User Survey and Market Forecast 2006–2010 , ESG Research Report, January, 2006.
David Bosshart’s citation of about the comparison of technological, entrepreneurial and social change was found in Allgemeine Zeitung of 23.07.2005 in the article Schöne neue Einkaufswelten am Horizont – Funk-Etiketten sollen Warenströme kontrollieren und den Kundenservice verbessern.
The Java Content Repository (JCR) is specified in the Content Repository API for Java Technology Specification, Java Specification Request 170 Version 1.0, 11 May 2005. Information about the eXtensible Access Method (XAM) can be found at the SNIA and information about the Interoperable Enterprise ContentManagement (iECM) can be found at the AIIM.
Business Continuity
Klaus Schmidt’s High Availability and Disaster Recovery is an elementary introduction into that topic. Furthermore we used various IBM Redbooks and product white papers of various vendors.
Management of Storage Networks
Some articles on the management of storage networks can be found at InfoStor. Some IBM Redbooks and white papers also deal with this subject. A detailed representation of the Fibre Channel Generic Services and the Fibre Channel Methodologies for Interconnects for the in-band management in the Fibre Channel SAN is provided by the pages of the Technical Committee T11. Information on SNMP can be found on the Internet pages of the SNMP Research Technology Corporation. A comprehensive description of CIM and WBEM can be found on the websites of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). Information on SMI-S can be found on the Storage Networking Industry Association website.
Removable Media Management
The IEEE Standard 1244 for Removable Media Management can be found at. Related documentation and additional reading can be found at the homepage of the Storage Systems Standards Working Group. There is an IBM Journal of Research & Development volume 47, no 4, 2003: Tape Storage Systems and Technology. Some interesting articles on the future
of tape storage can be found here:
The SNIA Shared Storage Model
The SNIA provides a lot of material on the SNIA Shared Storage Model. Tom Clark’s Designing Storage Area Networks (2nd Edition) covers the model as well.
