February 10, 2012

Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, January 7, 2011

It’s been a slow week (the holidays) and a crazy one. I’ve started pouring out the thin provisioning series, with 10 posts so far, as well as launching a new video “talk show” about enterprise IT. And I’ve got a new post over at SearchStorage, too. Whew!

Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, November 5, 2010

Interesting Links from the week of November 5, 2010, including vBlocks, networking, Microsoft, and 4G wireless

The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: I/O As a Chain of Bottlenecks

We continually shift between parallel and serial I/O paradigms

It is tempting to think of storage as a game of hard disk drives, and consider only The Rule of Spindles. But RAM cache can compensate for the mechanical limitations of hard disk drives, and Moore’s Law continues to allow for ever-greater RAM-based storage, including cache, DRAM, and flash. But storage does not exist in a vacuum. All that data must go somewhere, and this is the job of the I/O channel.

Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, October 17, 2010

A while back, I started a series called “back from the pile” featuring interesting links from the week. Bonus points if you recognize that title reference! This week’s highlights included lots about NFSv4 and IBM’s new Storwize V7000. Some great networking content, too!

Overland Snaps Up MaxiScale to Scale Up Snap

Overland's SnapServer will soon scale out to hundreds of nodes, thanks to MaxiScale's technology

Overland Storage is showing intriguing signs of life. Once relegated to OEM tape library duty, Overland received an injection of cash and (more importantly) talent this year. Now the company is stepping up the technology behind their SnapServer NAS array by acquiring scale-out file storage company, MaxiScale. They intend to bring the scalable capacity and performance normally associated with enterprise and high-performance computing systems to the mass market.

Is NFS v3 Really That Bad?

Do we really need parallel NFS?

Did some pNFS proponent slip a love potion into the coffee at EMC? Suddenly it’s pNFS time at the company known for its reluctance to embrace file sharing and filesystems in general. The purple prose is flying, with Chad Sakac declaring himself “a big fan of the application of NFS” and Chuck Hollis extolling the “inherent simplicity and ease-of-management of NFS.” The NetApp guys must be amused by the bear hug from Hopkinton, but many are seeing deja-vu all over again.

Garth Gibson: Still Relevant After All These Years

Garth Gibson, author of the seminal paper which presented the redundant array of inexpensive independent disks (RAID) to the world, has a nice quick interview over at eWeek. It’s worth a read, since Gibson’s long been on the forefront of storage tech. He talks about how parallel NFS (pNFS) is set to trickle down to [...]