EMC V-Max FAST: Coming in December … And 2010!
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 17. Aug, 2009 | View Comments
EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) was one of the most welcome annoucements made during the Symmetrix V-Max introduction. It would be a significant modernization of EMC’s Symmetrix line, and would be one of the first unique features of the Symmetrix V-Max line. But many, including me, were disappointed to learn in May that FAST [...]
Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 21. Apr, 2009 | View Comments
VMware officially launched their next-generation (version 4) enterprise family of products today under the “vSphere 4″ name. As I’ve been doing for the last few major ESX releases, I’m focusing this post on the storage changes present in vSphere 4.
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 [...]
Storage Utilization Remains at 2001 Levels: Low!
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 13. Jan, 2009 | View 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 [...]
Symantec’s Thin API: The Plot Thickens
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 24. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Last week, I lauded Symantec for introducing an API in Storage Foundation which will interact with the thin storage capabilities of supported arrays. Since then, I’ve learned more about this capability, and I am writing this update to share that knowledge. As I noted last week, the press release was a bit hard to follow and [...]
Storage Virtualization Charlotte: Thoughts and Reactions
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage on 21. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
I’ve just finished my day in Charlotte on my Storage Virtualization Seminar tour for TechTarget. We had another great crowd – everyone seemed interested even if some were shy about speaking up. I was especially pleased to see the optimism about the city’s post-Wachovia future.
Comments at the event focused on management, with my concerns about [...]
Symantec’s Thin API Is A Step In The Right Direction
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage on 16. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Symantec announced that their widely-used Veritas Storage Foundation software (more commonly known as Veritas Volume Manager and filesystem) will now include thin provisioning, migration, and a new API which allows it to directly communicate with thin-capable storage arrays. This is a smart step, certainly, and ought to be useful, but storage managers should still try [...]
What is VMware VDC-OS vStorage?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 19. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
VMware packed a lot into their 2008 VMworld conference, including an outline of their “three pillars” strategy, focused on vClient, vCloud, and something they are calling the Virtual Datacenter Operating System. While it is debatable if this last item really is an operating system, it’s certainly a major strategic change in messaging.
VDC-OS is divided into [...]
greenBytes Embraces and Extends ZFS
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 15. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
I’ve long hollered that ZFS is a real storage revolution in the making, but recognized that it still had a way to go before replacing UFS, HFS+, and most volume managers. Well, a little Rhode Island company called greenBytes comes out of stealth today to announce that they’re doing just that – taking the solid [...]
3PAR’s Thin Un-Provisioning is Slightly Less Bad
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 02. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
3PAR just introduced their third-generation storage hardware, bringing a novel feature to the world of thin provisioning: Hardware-assisted “zero-detection” to convert standard storage to thin provisioning. Although only certain special-case users will benefit from this technology, it’s nice to see someone working on one of the pitfalls of the technology – that it’s really [...]
