Yesterday, Visuality Systems released the beta of their new NQ Storage stack, which brings Microsoft's SMB protocol to OEM storage arrays. This established company has been the main supplier of SMB support in the embedded device market for over a decade, but NQ Storage brings their technology to the enterprise. Eight well-known storage array companies have already licensed the … [Read more...] about Every Device Can Speak SMB Protocol Thanks To Visuality Systems
SMB 3.0
vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?
Way back in the 1990's, UNIX admins delighted in upgrading from NFSv2 to NFSv3. Then NFSv4 came around and ... crickets. Now VMware has become the first major/useful/mainstream application for NFSv4.1, so the floodgates are open! But are they? A Little History A long, long time ago, when Sun was the dominant server company and x86 was still a desktop CPU, computers needed … [Read more...] about vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?
A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols
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
EMC Redefine Possible (TL;DR Edition)
EMC made quite a few announcements today at their "Redefine Possible" event in London. There's a lot of coverage out there already, so I decided to present a summary of the whole thing in "too long; didn't read" (TL;DR) fashion. Note that this isn't an attempt to list everything from the event but rather to pull out what I found to be important. And check out "Stephen's Stance" … [Read more...] about EMC Redefine Possible (TL;DR Edition)
Is Storage the Killer App for Software-Defined Networking?
Software Defined Networking (SDN) has always looked a bit like a solution in search of a problem, at least in the enterprise data center. But there are lots of potential applications that need a dynamic and scalable network. In my mind, storage is chief among these, since scalability and flexibility has always been extremely difficult to achieve. As I have written before, … [Read more...] about Is Storage the Killer App for Software-Defined Networking?