Today's announcement of the E-Class storage array is an important milestone for Nimbus Data and solid-state storage in the enterprise. Until now, most solid-state storage arrays have been fairly small-scale, focused on point performance rather than enterprise-wide capacity. But the E-Class, which scales to 500 TB and sports a redundant, multi-protocol interface, is the first … [Read more...] about Nimbus E-Class: The First Big, Redundant, All-Flash Enterprise Array
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Processing and Scheduling Thin Provisioning
Although the core issues with thin provisioning revolve around communication, it presents unique challenges to the storage array as well. We talked about granularity of pages, and the comments for that piece were extremely enlightening. Now let's consider another key factor: Scheduling. Note that the "provisioning" part is relatively easy to do on the fly: An array just has … [Read more...] about Processing and Scheduling Thin Provisioning
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: I/O As a Chain of Bottlenecks
Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? What tradeoffs are made for economy and how do they affect the system as a whole? These questions can be puzzling, but there are core truths that are difficult to avoid. Mechanical disk drives can only move a certain amount of data. RAM caching can improve performance, but only until it runs out. I/O channels can be … [Read more...] about The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: I/O As a Chain of Bottlenecks
Use Process Solutions For Process Problems, Technical Solutions For Technical Ones
If there is a universal best practice, it's the simple idiom, "use the right tool for every job". Yet we in IT spend so much time trying to fit square pegs into round holes, it becomes second nature. How else to describe our attempts to solve virtually every business need through added technology? No matter what the request, we think there must be a technological solution. But … [Read more...] about Use Process Solutions For Process Problems, Technical Solutions For Technical Ones