I’m really excited about the prospects of memory-addressable flash. Moving flash closer to the CPU and addressing it as memory rather than block storage brings tremendous performance benefits, and is a once-in-a-generation radical change to system architecture. But questions remain as to how it can be integrated with today’s applications. Now Plexistor is here with a promising solution: Their “Software-Defined Memory” concept is a generic filesystem for storage, from NVDIMM to NVMe to SSD.
Marketers: Fudging the Meaning of Buzzwords Matters (To You!)
Too many marketers and salespeople play fast and loose with words, but they’re only hurting themselves. Improper usage is embarrassing and causes a loss of credibility with the people they most want to reach. It would be wise to spend a lot more time being correct and a little less time jumping on bandwagons and buzzwords!
Every Device Can Speak SMB Protocol Thanks To Visuality Systems
Microsoft’s place in the datacenter is secure, and Windows Server really hums with SMB 2/3 storage. The enterprise storage industry needed an alternative to Samba and do-it-yourself SMB servers, and it’s good to see Visuality Systems step up with NQ Storage. Although I have not seen it in action, their OEM claims sound good and their roadmap looks right.
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance Are Coming To Life!
A few years back, I wrote an immensely-popular series of blog posts outlining the four things that were holding storage system performance back, and the ways to fix them. At the time, I created some presentation content to go along with these posts, and even considered pulling them into a white paper, but nothing came of that. Now, however, I’m pleased to announce that my Four Horsemen are accompanying me to the stage November 10, 2015 at the DeltaWare Data Solutions Emerging Technology Summit in Edina, Minnesota.
Doodling on the Value of EMC, VMware, and Dell’s Offer
I’m not a stock analyst, and this is merely my own quick calculation, but this doesn’t seem like a good deal for shareholders. Dell walks away with a huge amount of value and shareholders are left hoping for the best. No wonder shares of EMC are still well below the alleged “$33.15 per share” offer price! Right now, it looks like they’re valuing that VMware tracking stock at only $4 per share, not the $9 Dell hoped.
Infinidat’s Solution For the I/O Blender: Math
I’ve talked a lot about the I/O blender in the last decade or so.[1. I’ve even been told I invented the term!] I’ve always said that information is the solution, allowing arrays to de-multiplex data. But a new enterprise storage company, Infinidat, claims that they can beat the I/O blender using math. Here’s their concept.
Your Mileage May Vary: Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks
The hot story in the news this week is Volkswagen’s reported brazen cheating in diesel engine emissions testing. This brought to mind a host of similar occurrences, from Samsung/HTC cheating at benchmarks to alleged cheating in SPC enterprise storage performance testing. Cynics say we should just assume we’re being cheated, but is this a world in which we want to live?
Diablo Memory 1 Takes Memory Channel Flash To The Next Level
Memory 1 is the next game-changer from Diablo. I’ve been very impressed by the company’s offerings in the past, and this is the logical next step for them. And it ought to be absolutely killer since it no longer requires special motherboard tweaks. I expect it’s going to be huge in the cloud datacenter.
Waves of Storage Innovation
Waves of innovation and waves of companies, crash on the storage market, but the same incumbent leaders and product lines survive for decades. Are things changing? It’s hard to see sometimes, but real progress has been made.
Today’s Storage: Same As It Ever Was
Data storage has always been one of the most conservative areas of enterprise IT. There is little tolerance for risk, and rightly so: Storage is persistent, long-lived, and must be absolutely reliable. Lose a server or network switch and there is the potential for service disruption or transient data corruption, but lose a storage array (and thus the data on it) and there can be serious business consequences.