Flush Time

Flush Time

Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 19. Oct, 2009 | View Comments

Single-parity RAID is under attack. Caching is the hottest trend in storage. The end of the high-performance disk drive is imminent. What happened? Increasing areal bit density has caused disk capacity to grow much faster than disk performance. A presentation at Storage Networking World by Ronald Bianchini of Avere exposed the mathematics of this phenomenon.

We Hold These (Storage) Truths…

Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT on 12. Oct, 2009 | View Comments

I usually welcome discussion (and even argument) about the things I know best: There is always more to learn, and the best insights come through engaging those who disagree with us. But some ideas have been argued so well for so long that they deserve enshrinement. For example, although non-scientists like to argue about evolution [...]

Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House

Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House

Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 16. Apr, 2009 | View Comments

Iomega’s StorCenter Pro ix4-200r sports iSCSI and NAS plus VMware ESX support – it’s a small business or lab monster!

Iomega has been a staple of the desktop computing environment for decades, but the company’s products have never been quite at home in even small corporate data centers. That changes today with the introduction of the [...]

Drobo For Pros But Not Me

Drobo For Pros But Not Me

Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 09. Apr, 2009 | View Comments

DroboPro is here, and it’s quite a compelling offering. It’s generating buzz (DroboPro was the number one trend on Twitter for a while on Tuesday) but is it deserving? In a word, yes. But I’m still not going to buy one!
The Drobo for Pros
Just as in Apple’s Mac and MacBook lineup, the “Pro” name denotes [...]

Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4

Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 31. Mar, 2009 | View Comments

Like clockwork, VMware has cranked out another update to their flagship enterprise product, ESX 3.5. The last update came out in early November, 2008, and included some major new functionality. What’s in store this time to intrigue storage folks? Not much.
For more information on earlier updates, see my articles:

Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 [...]

The New Mac Mini is Finally Here!

The New Mac Mini is Finally Here!

Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 03. Mar, 2009 | View Comments

I’ve been waiting on a Mac Mini to replace my sluggish and crash-prone Firefly/NSLU2 home music and file server, and Apple finally delivered the goods today, after leaving us in the lurch at Macworld 2009! I’ve placed my order for a base-model Mac Mini, and look forward to using Apple’s iPhone Remote with the Airport [...]

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation

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 Innovative Enterprise Storage Hardware Products

Top Ten Innovative Enterprise Storage Hardware Products

Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 15. Nov, 2008 | View Comments

Looking around at the enterprise storage landscape, it is plain that certain archetypes rule: Monolithic enterprise arrays, dual-controller modular arrays, standard-sized hard disk units, NAS servers, tape libraries. Are these really the optimal designs for storage in our modern open systems world?
On the contrary, I suggest that the enterprise storage world we know was shaped [...]

Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management

Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management

Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 05. Oct, 2008 | View 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.

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