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.

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.

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 the capacity you expect [...]

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 features, the drawbacks and some applications around FAST. By no means is this a comprehensive or an exhaustive list of the above.

Truly this was one of the most awaited products of 2009 from EMC after the initial announcement by EMC back in April 2009 along with the release of Symmetrix V-Max. Along with FAST, EMC has also introduced some new enhancements to the EMC Symmetrix V-Max, Clariion CX4 and Celerra NS platforms. Currently FAST will be available on the above 3 platforms at debut and will provide automated storage tiering “in-the-box” for Symmetrix V-Max, “in-the-box” for Clariion CX4 and “out-of-box” for Celerra NS platforms.

The concept of Global Hot Spares has been supported in Clariion environments since the first generation of FC & CX platforms. Now the technology has been extended into the CX3 and then the CX4 platforms. The primary purpose of global hot sparing is to protect the system against disk drive failures.

So next year will mark a history of Symmetrix Products within EMC, still classified as one of the most robust systems out there after 20 years of its inception. In this blog post, we will talk about some facts on Symmetrix products as it relates to its features, characteristics, Enginuity microcode versions, model numbers, year released, etc.

Previously I had explained the evolution of the EMC Clariion Technology including the AX products and the flare code that is associated with the success of this platform. This post describes the 4 available models within the AX4 Platform and the naming conventions used.

Over the past 3 months, quite a few readers have asked me to write about various models that are associated with the EMC CLARiiON Generation of machines and its features.

In this post, we will discuss all requirements and limitations that are associated with EMC Clariion RAID-6 Implementation.