Using system memory for storage is something of a lost art these days. Although system RAM capacity has become plentiful, cheap and quick disk storage is just as common. But many of today's I/O intensive tasks can still benefit from the untouchable quickness provided by a ramdisk. Happily, most operating systems are still capable of creating and using ramdisks. This article … [Read more...] about Ramdisks: Back From the Brink of Extinction
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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 trying to get my storage layout … [Read more...] about How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
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”
3PAR Reserves A Seat At The Solid State Disk Drive Table
Last week, I outlined where the various enterprise storage vendors stood on the key question of whether flash memory is a cache or a disk. In that article, I noted that 3PAR is notably absent in the enterprise flash world. In fact Mark Farley, 3PAR blogger extraordinaire, recently made it sound like 3PAR would sit on the fence for a good while longer, even comparing flash with … [Read more...] about 3PAR Reserves A Seat At The Solid State Disk Drive Table