How fast is a hard disk drive? How about the various flavors of SATA and Fibre Channel? Check out this handy Pack Rat infographic to answer the question, “how fast is it?”
Fibre Channel over Token Ring: In-Depth Analysis
July 16, 2010 By 2 Comments
Industry veterans fondly remember the LAN wars of the early 1990′s, when a diverse set of excellent data link protocols competed for dominance. Although the victory seemed to have gone to Ethernet, industry insiders are looking for a resurgence of better alternatives. One technology, Token Ring, is undeniably superior for transporting modern protocols, especially Fibre Channel for storage. Let’s take a look!
FCoE Symbolism
April 25, 2010 By 4 Comments
Visitors to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) booth at Storage Networking World in Orlando were greeted by a strange symbol, but what is the symbol exactly? I was amused to get some puzzled looks (and no correct answers) when I polled a number of industry insiders.
Microsoft and Intel Pushing iSCSI Performance Limits
January 7, 2010 By 6 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.
Of Emulated Fibre Channel, Virtualization, And The Right Tool For The Job
December 12, 2008 By 21 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 [...]
Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3
November 7, 2008 By 3 Comments
Just over three months after releasing Update 2 for ESX 3.5, VMware has released Update 3. That last Update brought major storage changes like VSS support, hot VMFS extension, Storage VMotion across Fibre Channel and iSCSI, and support for 10 Gb Ethernet and 8 Gb FC support. For more information on Update 2, see my [...]
Reality Check: The FCoE Forecast
October 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment
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. There has been a lot of discussion in the storage industry about Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), making it the toast of Storage Networking World, but this technology remains relatively unknown [...]
A Consultant’s View Of The Enterprise Storage Market
September 21, 2008 By 2 Comments
Xen 3.3 Update Brings Paravirtualized SCSI
August 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment
One of the new features in Xen 3.3, released this week, caught my eye: Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI), which allows a guest OS to directly interact with a SCSI (or Fibre Channel) HBA. This should allow more specialized applications to be virtualized in Xen environments that use SCSI or FC storage without requiring the addition of [...]
Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 2
July 28, 2008 By 5 Comments
VMware just released Update 2 for VMware ESX Server 3.5 (Virtual Infrastructure), and it includes some storage fixes of note: Support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for filesystems Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 guests. This means VMware services like VCB and SRM can now signal Windows Server to quiesce filesystems before creating a [...]
