Once Upon A Time... Once upon a time, a happy little storage protocol was born. She was loved by her father, Microsoft, and he asked her to work throughout their small kingdom, delivering packages from the castle to clients all around. Sometimes she would be given other odd jobs, like authenticating a visitor, but mostly she delivered files in the kingdom of LAN. Then one … [Read more...] about A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols
S3
Despite Appearances, SpectraLogic’s BlackPearl Isn’t An Amazon Glacier Clone
This week, SpectraLogic announced DS3 and "BlackPearl", an innovative product for tape storage using a cloud API. Although BlackPearl sounds like an Amazon Glacier clone, it's really nothing of the sort. BlackPearl extends the S3 API for tape storage but this "DS3" API requires well-behaved clients and disciplined access. BlackPearl is exciting, it's novel, and it's useful. But … [Read more...] about Despite Appearances, SpectraLogic’s BlackPearl Isn’t An Amazon Glacier Clone
Is SolidFire out in Left Field, or Are They Playing a Whole New Ballgame?
When I say “cloud storage”, you probably think of Amazon S3: Big, slow, cheap, and distributed. That's probably why the people I talk to about SolidFire usually start shaking their heads and denouncing the company. After all, who would be crazy enough to create an all flash storage array for cloud storage applications? But maybe it's not so crazy; maybe SolidFire is simply … [Read more...] about Is SolidFire out in Left Field, or Are They Playing a Whole New Ballgame?
Overcoming The Limits Of Thin Provisioning With Automatic Provisioning!
I've never been a fan of thin provisioning as a storage management tool. Don't get me wrong, I love having thin provisioning in my toolkit to overcome the limitations of conventional filesystems. Thin provisioning just gets under my skin when folks try to use it to solve business problems like long deployment time and slow purchasing cycles. If you attended any of the thin … [Read more...] about Overcoming The Limits Of Thin Provisioning With Automatic Provisioning!
From CAS to Cloud: Revolutionary Storage
Change is not a word normally associated with storage, and revolution is practically unheard of. Today's modern enterprise storage systems and networks employ massive resources to do one simple thing: Emulate the basic hard disk drives used over three decades ago. But cracks are appearing in our mausoleum of fake disks: Application developers are discovering the value of object … [Read more...] about From CAS to Cloud: Revolutionary Storage