As of today, there's one more all-flash storage array on the market: Nimble Storage convened a big San Francisco shindig to roll out their own "AF" array, complete with lots of XtremIO and Pure Storage comparisons. Finally, Nimble no longer has to suffer the competitive digs and nasty rumors about this missing product, but there's a lot more to this launch than an array sans … [Read more...] about Nimble Storage Rolls Out an All-Flash Array
Compellent
Where Are They Now? A Tech Field Day Presenter Retrospective
Tech Field Day, if you hadn't heard, is my signature event. I bring together a great group of independent "delegates" to meet with interesting IT product vendors. As you might expect, after three years and 34 events, many of our vendors have gone on to bigger and better things. After seeing today's acquisition of Xsigo by Oracle, I decided to go back and look at how many of our … [Read more...] about Where Are They Now? A Tech Field Day Presenter Retrospective
Why Should Anyone Take Dell Seriously in Enterprise Storage?
For a massive IT company, Dell sure doesn't get the kind of respect given their competitors. Time and again, I'll hear the sneers about Dell being little more than a “box shifter” who doesn't “get” real enterprise IT needs. After a series of acquisitions in storage and networking, Dell is trying to stake a claim as a serious competitor to HP, IBM, Oracle, and the like. But why … [Read more...] about Why Should Anyone Take Dell Seriously in Enterprise Storage?
Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
In the previous post, I talked about how the Drobo uses metadata monitoring to solve the telephone game and make de-allocation possible. But that approach is challenging in complex enterprise environments. Instead, most enterprise arrays use a complex chain of semaphores to interpret signals from the connected hosts about the capacity that can be un-provisioned. On the … [Read more...] about Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, December 17, 2010
This regular series features highlights from the week. The big news for me was Wednesday's announcement of Tech Field Day 5 in February, though others might have been paying attention to Dell's acquisition of Compellent. My writing I continued my series on Light Peak by musing about combining Light Peak and USB 3.0 and pondering, what if Light Peak was electrical rather … [Read more...] about Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, December 17, 2010