Way back in the 1990's, UNIX admins delighted in upgrading from NFSv2 to NFSv3. Then NFSv4 came around and ... crickets. Now VMware has become the first major/useful/mainstream application for NFSv4.1, so the floodgates are open! But are they? A Little History A long, long time ago, when Sun was the dominant server company and x86 was still a desktop CPU, computers needed … [Read more...] about vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?
Virtual Storage
Why Big Disk Drives Require Data Integrity Checking
Hard disk drives keep getting bigger, meaning capacity just keeps getting cheaper. But storage capacity is like money: The more you have, the more you use. And this growth in capacity means that data is at risk from a very old nemesis: Unrecoverable Read Errors (URE). Let's get one thing out of the way from the start: The only thing protecting your data from corruption … [Read more...] about Why Big Disk Drives Require Data Integrity Checking
The Rack Endgame: Open Compute Project
On reading my thoughts about the evolution of enterprise storage, culminating in what I called “The Rack Endgame” where a rack of storage, networking, and compute becomes a the basic entity of the datacenter, many pointed out that this looks an awful lot like the Facebook-led Open Compute Project (OCP). This is entirely intentional. But OCP is simply one expression of this new … [Read more...] about The Rack Endgame: Open Compute Project
Cisco’s Trojan Horse
Industry watchers like me have long wondered when Cisco will transform itself into a full-line IT infrastructure vendor. This strategy was tipped in 2009 as Cisco barged into the server market with UCS. But one leg of the stool is still missing: Storage remains the province of Cisco partners like EMC and NetApp. The Rack Endgame I recently wrote about “The Rack Endgame”, a … [Read more...] about Cisco’s Trojan Horse
The Rack Endgame: A New Storage Architecture For the Data Center
Although today’s enterprise storage arrays target "the fat middle" of the market, virtualized and distributed storage change everything. What form does enterprise storage take in the new data center? Think top-of-rack flash, bottom-of-rack capacity, and a whole world of new interconnects! Here's the Rack Endgame series: The Fat Middle: Today’s Enterprise Storage … [Read more...] about The Rack Endgame: A New Storage Architecture For the Data Center