I’ve called myself a “vendor-independent storage consultant” for more than a decade now, but my good friend, Greg Schultz, recently challenged me on that statement. Sure, I haven’t worked for a vendor of tin boxes and spinning rust, or the software that runs the stuff, but I’m firmly rooted in the supply side of things. […]
3PAR
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
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 […]
Of Emulated Fibre Channel, Virtualization, And The Right Tool For The Job
EMC’s Chuck Hollis is one smart guy, and a very verbose blogger. As usual, he sparked a bit of a storm recently when comparing unified storage on EMC’s Celerra NX4 to NetApp’s multiprotocol FAS2020 filer. But it was one phrase in particular that got the attention of Alex McDonald and Kostadis Russos of NetApp, Martin/Storagebod, and Tony […]
Top Ten Coolest Enterprise Storage Flops
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 […]
Storage Folks Are Twittering
If reading blogs doesn’t give you your enterprise storage fix, there’s a new option in town: Twitter! Lots of the top folks in the enterprise storage community are now using the microblogging service, and a regular community has evolved. It’s really taken off over the past few months. If you’re interested in enterprise storage, here’s […]