Thin Provisioning and Cloud Storage: My Interop 2010 Topics
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage on 16. Mar, 2010 | View Comments
I’m pleased to be heading back to Interop this spring with two sessions on enterprise storage. Although significantly changed from the old “Networld + Interop” days, the event is enjoyable and technical, with many interesting sessions and speakers. And the New York show at least had plenty of end user attendees!
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 [...]
If Storage Vendors Were Automakers…
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Personal on 07. Aug, 2009 | View Comments
If the enterprise storage market was the auto market, who would be who?*
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 09. Feb, 2009 | View Comments
The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990’s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets [...]
Of Emulated Fibre Channel, Virtualization, And The Right Tool For The Job
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 12. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
EMC’s Chuck Hollis is one smart guy, and a very verbose blogger. As usual, he sparked a bit of a storm recently when comparing unified storage on EMC’s Celerra NX4 to NetApp’s multiprotocol FAS2020 filer. But it was one phrase in particular that got the attention of Alex McDonald and Kostadis Russos of NetApp, Martin/Storagebod, and Tony [...]
Top Ten Coolest Enterprise Storage Flops
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 06. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
This is the second entry in my Top-Ten in Storage series.
Not every innovative product can succeed in the market, and no matter how good some ideas seem, they can fail to make much of an impact. The truth is, people buy solutions, not technologies.
This list includes products so cool, so ahead of their time, that [...]
Is Flash A Disk Or A Cache?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 22. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
There is a battle shaping up in the enterprise storage industry. On one side are those who see flash storage as an upgrade for the disk drive, and on the other are those who see it as a cache between the CPU and the drive. It’s a fundamental difference of opinion – flash chips can [...]
SSD: So Close and Yet So Far
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 15. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Solid state (NAND flash) storage is all the rage right now, but there are many lingering questions regarding its true performance, reliability, and cost. But no question is more important in determining its ultimate usefulness than that of location: Where should flash storage be placed to maximize return on investment?
Storage companies have argued that flash [...]
Compellent Does Enterprise SSD Right
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 13. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Yes! Compellent has just announced at Storage Networking World that they’ll be adding enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) to their excellent fully-virtualized storage arrays. Why is this worth shouting about? Simply because their automated block-based tiered storage architecture ought to be able to really take full advantage of the performance offered by SSDs. If you’ll [...]
Turning the Page on RAID
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 14. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.
It has been the core technology behind the storage industry since day one, but the sun is setting on traditional RAID technology. After two decades of refinement and fragmentation, we are abandoning [...]
