The news came out this morning that Dell is in exclusive talks to acquire network storage specialist Compellent for just under $900 million. I will leave it to the real reporters to track the ups and downs of the story; what piques my interest is the value Dell gets from Compellent's technology and … [Read more...]
Market positioning Acadia, EMC, Cisco and the whole vBlock Idea
May 20, 2010 by 2 Comments
So a while back, Cisco, VMWare and EMC announced that they are forming a partnership to co-operatively sell and support products. This joint venture is named Acadia and is made up of a specifically screened and selected sales people and engineers from each company. What is particularly notable is … [Read more...]
EMC VPLEX: New Device or Future Array?
May 13, 2010 by 2 Comments
Okay, some more riffing on the subject of VPLEX; just idle speculation and I expect either no comment or complete denial from EMC. In VPLEX, do we see the future of EMC storage? Or more accurately, do we see the future of Symmetrix? Is it the beginning of the end for Symmetrix and more … [Read more...]
Iomega Graduates and Goes to Work with the ix12-300r
May 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Iomega's new ix12-300d brings EMC's SOHO company into the data center EMC’s Iomega unit today released the 12-drive rack-mount storage product we have all been waiting for. It was never a question of whether Iomega could produce such a beast: The EMC LifeLine software and Iomega hardware were … [Read more...]
The Assymetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) mode on CLARiiON
March 26, 2010 by 2 Comments
I’ve noticed that I have been getting a lot of search engine hits relating to the various features, specifications and problems on the EMC CLARiiON array. One of the searches was related to a feature that has been around for a bit. It was actually introduced in 2001, but in order to give a full … [Read more...]
Dell Scoops Up Exanet After All
February 8, 2010 by 2 Comments
Dell picked up clustered NAS pro Exanet, finally signing the dotted line after months of speculation. The US $12 million purchase follows reports that the company was going into receivership in December after failing to repay a US $10 million loan from Kreos Capital. Exanet was founded in 2000 and … [Read more...]
Ellison Ain’t No Sun King
February 1, 2010 by 4 Comments
That arrogant Larry Ellison has just become the Sun king. We knew it was going to happen and now Oracle is our newest competitor. We need to respond appropriately to this. We've been having a tussle with Oracle over running RAC under VMware and Oracle doesn't like its customers doing this because, … [Read more...]
Enterprise Computing: CLARiiON; Your Mileage May Vary
December 15, 2009 by 2 Comments
As part of my work at Storage Fusion, I get to dig into the inner workings of storage arrays in a way most people don’t (either through inclination or time). One interesting anomaly we discovered this week was the variability in capacities of CLARiiON disks. What results from this is that … [Read more...]
FAST: Features, Drawbacks, Applications and some Questions
December 11, 2009 by Leave a Comment
FAST (FULLY AUTOMATED STORAGE TIERING) FAST made a debut in the storage market yesterday (12/08/09). Finally after the market buzz we got a preview of the product in terms of its features, functionality, characteristics, possible shortcomings and use cases. This blog post focuses on the … [Read more...]
After all, FAST makes a debut
December 10, 2009 by Leave a Comment
So EMC has proved critics like me wrong and have introduced EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) as an offering in Dec 2009. There were many skeptics like me that saw this product release being stalled because of various reasons, here. FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) … [Read more...]