Storage protocols continue to mimic direct attached storage, with the concepts of block and file at its core. No amount of virtualization, and no new protocol, will fix this – we need a storage revolution.
Changes in Technology Drive Changes in IT Organizations and Roles
April 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Lots of my IT infrastructure management clients are talking about how the advent of Ethernet/IP and virtualization is changing the roles of storage, server, and network administrators. The evolution of the storage role in particular in enterprise IT organizations has been a topic of particular interest to me for a while: I definitely remember thinking about [...]
Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
April 19, 2011 By 2 Comments
Many storage challenges focus on the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.
Interested in VMware and Storage? Tune In to the VMware Communities Podcast!
April 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment
10 GbE, iSCSI, FCoE, Microsoft, and the Future
March 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment
EMC LifeLine Spreads To The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-100
February 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment
As I expected, EMC’s Iomega subsidiary today rolled out the StorCenter Pro ix4-100 a big brother to the popular but plain StorCenter ix2 NAS device. This new model add hot-swappable drives (there are four now), RAID-5, and a longer warranty to make it suitable for small office use. It uses a blacked-out version of the [...]
Storage Utilization Remains at 2001 Levels: Low!
January 13, 2009 By 7 Comments
I’ve been talking about storage capacity utilization for my entire career, but the storage industry doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Every year or so, a new study is performed showing that half of storage capacity in the data center is unused. And every time there is a predictable (and poorly thought through) “networked storage is [...]
EMC Makes Iomega Relevant Again
January 7, 2009 By 4 Comments
Pity poor old Iomega. The company responsible for hot products like the Zip drive and coulda-beens like the Clik drive was stumbling in the early part of this decade, unable to distinguish itself from all of the other providers of commodity external storage devices for consumers. Although the company had built the Zip into a [...]
Who Will Capture the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Crown?
December 19, 2008 By 3 Comments
Today, Brocade announced that it has completed its acquisition of Foundry Networks. This is just the latest move in the strategic game to control the next generation of Ethernet, and possibly all local connectivity, including storage. Although 1 Gb Ethernet, 4 and 8 Gb Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand are all still going strong, the attention of the industry, [...]
Storage Folks Are Talking 10-Gig and FCoE
November 21, 2008 By 2 Comments
I continue to be amazed by the level of interest I’m seeing in Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and 10 Gb Converged Ethernet among storage people. As I noted after my Charlotte virtualization seminar, end users at the largest enterprises seem to think that FCoE is their future, not just one of several options. But [...]
