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.
Is TRIM Useful For Thin Provisioning?
January 7, 2011 By 3 Comments
What is WRITE_SAME? Green Eggs and Ham!
January 5, 2011 By 1 Comment
Why Do I Ignore NAS?
May 7, 2010 By 4 Comments
Why does network-attached storage (NAS) have such a poor reputation? This isn’t what the vendors want to be talking about, but some recent product announcements and discussions led to this thought. IT folks as a whole don’t trust NAS for real work, and 20 years of effort from big names like Sun, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, and the rest hasn’t changed that.
Multipath: Active/Passive, Dual Active, and Active/Active
March 30, 2010 By 6 Comments
Although it’s rare in the PC world, multipath I/O is not new in enterprise IT. I’ve been juggling paths to storage and networks as long as I’ve been a systems administrator, and that’s a bit longer than I care to admit. But the proliferation of technologies has made it difficult to understand path management. What’s the difference between “dual active” and “active/active”? Is “active/passive” really that bad?
Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4
March 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment
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 [...]
Essential Reading for VMware ESX iSCSI Users!
January 26, 2009 By 9 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 [...]
Top Ten Innovative Enterprise Storage Hardware Products
November 15, 2008 By 13 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 [...]
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 [...]
