Will Snow Leopard Finally Bring iSCSI To The Mac?
Posted by Stephen in Apple on 18. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
ZFS wasn’t the only AWOL storage technology in Apple’s OS X 10.5 – early builds of Leopard included a built-in iSCSI initiator. When the operating system was finally released in October of 2007, both ZFS and iSCSI were quietly dropped, making room for 300 other features Apple felt were more prime-time-ready.
With the next major OS [...]
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 [...]
Essential Reading for VMware ESX iSCSI Users!
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 26. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
Update: Check out the latest multi-vendor iSCSI post!
I usually don’t write about other peoples’ articles on this blog, preferring to stick to my own independent work. But this time I’m making an exception.
If you use or are interested in VMware ESX 3.x and iSCSI, you simply must go read Chad Sakac’s post on the topic. Co-written [...]
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 the FCoE Starting Pistol Aimed at iSCSI?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 16. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
To hear this week’s storage industry news reports, one might think that Wagner’s fat lady came to Storage Networking World (SNW), singing her song as the iSCSI world collapses. Storagebod wonders what iSCSI’s death will look like. Chris Mellor at The Register says “Game Over” as NetApp, QLogic, Emulex and VMware join EMC and Cisco in singing the [...]
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 [...]
HP Picks Up iSCSI Contender, LeftHand Networks
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage on 01. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
It’s all over the industry news – HP will acquire LeftHand Networks for a reported $360 million in cash. The last funding press release I could find was dated September 8, 2005, when Valhalla Partners led a $25 million round, bringing LeftHand’s total funding to $75 million. This is a very nice payday for the [...]
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 [...]
Grapples and Tangelos: Why it’s Impossible to Compare Fairly
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage on 28. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
I get the same questions all the time: Should I buy X or Y? Is Z better than Q? But as much as it sounds like a cop-out, I always answer, “well, this sounds like a cop-out, but that depends on what you’re doing with it…”
Now EMC’s Chuck Hollis has (bravely) stuck his neck out [...]
