Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 26. Feb, 2010 | View Comments
HP recently commissioned Tolley Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolley focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. What’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?
Extreme Tiered Storage: Flash, Disk, and Cloud
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage on 03. Feb, 2010 | View Comments
In this video, I present the shortcomings of traditional tiered storage and propose a solution: Although merely using different disk types will never deliver the goods, adding flash and cloud to an integrated, automated solution will be truly revolutionary. I look forward to the day when all of today’s buzz-worthy technologies (flash, cloud, thin provisioning, automated tiering, post-RAID) are mixed together to form a really revolutionary storage system.
Microsoft and Intel Push One Million iSCSI IOPS
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 14. Jan, 2010 | View Comments
In March, Microsoft and Intel demonstrated that the combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Xeon 5500 could saturate a 10 GbE, pushing data throughput to wire speed. Today, they showed that this same combination can deliver an astonishing million I/O operations per second, too.
Are Microsoft and EMC beginning a renaissance of geek respect?
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage on 08. Jan, 2010 | View Comments
What’s the difference between naughty and nice when it comes to IT companies? Microsoft and EMC would definitely not have made the nice list over the last decade, but things are changing. With their competition taking dents in the ongoing battles, Microsoft and EMC just don’t look so bad anymore.
Microsoft and Intel Pushing iSCSI Performance Limits
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 07. Jan, 2010 | View Comments
“Maximizing Hyper-V iSCSI Performance with Microsoft and Intel” might sound like another “blah blah” marketing piece, but a little birdy tells me that this webcast will drop a bombshell about iSCSI performance.
The Dumb Disk Fallacy
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Terabyte home on 13. Oct, 2009 | View Comments
I am spending a few weeks examining the truths and fictions that bind our industry together. Let’s start with one of my favorite old canards: That enterprise storage must be overpriced because bare disk drives are so cheap.
I have seen this straw man argument set up by so many throughout my career that it has [...]
We Hold These (Storage) Truths…
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT on 12. Oct, 2009 | View Comments
I usually welcome discussion (and even argument) about the things I know best: There is always more to learn, and the best insights come through engaging those who disagree with us. But some ideas have been argued so well for so long that they deserve enshrinement. For example, although non-scientists like to argue about evolution [...]
The Truth About HP’s Tech Day
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage on 01. Oct, 2009 | View Comments
HP and Ivy did a darn fine job of putting together a set of sessions to tell us what they have. They presented folks who really knew their stuff, warts and all. They invited a variety of independent voices and let us ask and say anything we wanted with no expectations, let alone an NDA. This was a stellar event, and every other IT company should be asking why they didn’t do it first.
We Don’t Need Cloud Standards (Yet)
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 16. Sep, 2009 | View Comments
Championing “open” and calling for standards has become the first stalling action by late-movers in technology spaces. They see opportunity passing by and try to hold back progress and FUD the market by yelling about proprietary solutions, vendor lock-in, and a lack of standards. Many well-intentioned IT folks follow along: After all, who doesn’t want openness, standardization, and interoperability?
EMC V-Max FAST: Coming in December … And 2010!
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 17. Aug, 2009 | View Comments
EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) was one of the most welcome annoucements made during the Symmetrix V-Max introduction. It would be a significant modernization of EMC’s Symmetrix line, and would be one of the first unique features of the Symmetrix V-Max line. But many, including me, were disappointed to learn in May that FAST [...]
