This is the second entry in my Top-Ten in Storage series. Not every innovative product can succeed in the market, and no matter how good some ideas seem, they can fail to make much of an impact. The truth is, people buy solutions, not technologies. This list includes products so cool, so ahead of their [...]
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 [...]
Flash Forward or Flash Back?
November 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I am posting every Sunday. The tech industry has been buzzing about solid state drives (SSDs) again lately, but many questions remain. Even after many major vendors (Apple, EMC, and Dell to name a few) have introduced NAND flash-based disk into their core products, it is [...]
Compellent Does Enterprise SSD Right
October 13, 2008 By 8 Comments
Yes! Compellent has just announced at Storage Networking World that they’ll be adding enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) to their excellent fully-virtualized storage arrays. Why is this worth shouting about? Simply because their automated block-based tiered storage architecture ought to be able to really take full advantage of the performance offered by SSDs. If you’ll [...]
Turning the Page on RAID
September 14, 2008 By 4 Comments
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. It has been the core technology behind the storage industry since day one, but the sun is setting on traditional RAID technology. After two decades of refinement and fragmentation, we are [...]
Flash! EMC’s DMX is the New New Thing Again
January 14, 2008 By 10 Comments
Who’d have thought that EMC’s storage teenager, the Symmetrix/DMX, still had the ability to surprise us with something new? Well, as reported just about everywhere, EMC today introduced two major new features in the DMX. But don’t get fooled – this is still traditional high-end EMC stuff, and you had better be sitting down when [...]
Thoughts on Mark Lewis’ Future Storage
August 8, 2007 By 2 Comments
NetApp heads to the buffet
June 21, 2007 By 1 Comment
