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 […]
Compellent
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 […]
Is Flash A Disk Or A Cache?
There is a battle shaping up in the enterprise storage industry. On one side are those who see flash storage as an upgrade for the disk drive, and on the other are those who see it as a cache between the CPU and the drive. It’s a fundamental difference of opinion – flash chips can […]
SSD: So Close and Yet So Far
Solid state (NAND flash) storage is all the rage right now, but there are many lingering questions regarding its true performance, reliability, and cost. But no question is more important in determining its ultimate usefulness than that of location: Where should flash storage be placed to maximize return on investment? Storage companies have argued that […]
