Last week, I let the cat out of the bag regarding the next Tech Field Day event, which kicks off in just three days! Today, let’s take a look at the great lineup of companies that will be presenting at this event. Many are new startups, including Nutanix, Pure Storage, and SolidFire, while others are more established, like Nasuni, Symantec, DataDirect Networks, Arista and Arkeia.
Veritas
The Bridge: Veritas Thin (Provisioning) API
Thin provisioning needs communication to function, and zero page reclaim is only the array side of the story. WRITE_SAME helps reduce I/O load, but the server needs to use it. Wouldn’t it be nice if the operating system, file system, or volume manager would use these commands to help recover capacity?
Multipath: Active/Passive, Dual Active, and Active/Active
Although it’s rare in the PC world, multipath I/O is not new in enterprise IT. I’ve been juggling paths to storage and networks as long as I’ve been a systems administrator, and that’s a bit longer than I care to admit. But the proliferation of technologies has made it difficult to understand path management. What’s the difference between “dual active” and “active/active”? Is “active/passive” really that bad?
PowerPath To The Virtual People
Hiding in the shadow of the huge VMware vSphere 4 announcement was a very interesting introduction by EMC: PowerPath/VE. As I mentioned in my post on storage changes in vSphere 4, PowerPath/VE plugs into the new pluggable storage architecture (PSA) found in vSphere 4 versions of ESX and takes over the decision-making and heavy-lifting tasks related to communicating with storage systems.D
Symantec’s Thin API Is A Step In The Right Direction
Symantec announced that their widely-used Veritas Storage Foundation software (more commonly known as Veritas Volume Manager and filesystem) will now include thin provisioning, migration, and a new API which allows it to directly communicate with thin-capable storage arrays. This is a smart step, certainly, and ought to be useful, but storage managers should still try […]