I am often questioned during my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar presentations about VMware's Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). This system is fairly straightforward and concept: VMware provides native multipathing support for a variety of storage arrays, and allows third parties to substitute their own plug-ins at various points in the stack. But the profusion of … [Read more...] about VMware PSP and SATP in Plain English
Celerra
VMware VAAI Storage Array Support in Plain English
The most exciting enhancements in VMware vSphere 4.1 is the addition of vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI). This new API allows VMware ESX to offload storage processing functions to capable storage arrays, reducing the workload on the server hardware in introducing new and exciting possibilities for performance and efficiency. VAAI in ESX 4.1 includes three separate … [Read more...] about VMware VAAI Storage Array Support in Plain English
Hybrid SSD/Hard Disk Drives: This Time For Sure!
Hard disk drive makers are adding flash storage to their conventional spinning-platter drives to improve performance and are targeting the performance PC market. Wait a second, haven't we seen this before? As Rocky eventually said to Bullwinkle, "but that trick never works!" Flash as a Cache Using flash memory as a disk cache is a pretty good idea. Flash has awesome random … [Read more...] about Hybrid SSD/Hard Disk Drives: This Time For Sure!
Why Do I Ignore NAS?
Why does network-attached storage (NAS) have such a poor reputation? This isn't what the vendors want to be talking about, but some recent product announcements and discussions led to this thought. IT folks as a whole don't trust NAS for real work, and 20 years of effort from big names like Sun, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, and the rest hasn't changed that. Fear Back when I used … [Read more...] about Why Do I Ignore NAS?
The Difference Between “Integration” and “Frankenstein”
When is a solution integrated and when is it a Frankenstein-like mashup of tangled tech? Apparently, that line is crossed when it's your competitor's offering... In my time in the storage industry, I've seen enough franken-storage come and go to make me skeptical whenever a new "integrated" solution is announced. But a lot of this stuff works just fine, so I also know that … [Read more...] about The Difference Between “Integration” and “Frankenstein”