“Maximizing Hyper-V iSCSI Performance with Microsoft and Intel” might sound like another “blah blah” marketing piece, but a little birdy tells me that this webcast will drop a bombshell about iSCSI performance.

EMC caused a major stir on April 14 as they announced the next-generation Symmetrix enterprise storage array, the V-Max. Since that time, many of the features have been discussed and dissected on various blogs at the same time as EMC moves forward with sales of the new system. But one question remains: When can end-users actually purchase and use the V-Max system as described? And in particular, When does the V-Max get the most desirable and hyped Fully-Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) and scale-out features?

Is the adoption of a unified fabric an inevitability? If so, will it be FCoE or iSCSI that leads the charge?

Although there is no word on a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) initiator in the vein of their wildly successful iSCSI offering, Microsoft announced today that they are will be creating a logo program with test requirements for the new protocol. This certification program will likely follow the company’s similar work with iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and other products to ensure functionality and perhaps interoperability in the Windows market.

As part of my work with Storage Fusion, I’m reporting on capacity and utilisation figures for different array vendors.  Part of this includes analysing exceptions and wastage.  DMX and Symmetrix seem to have more issues than any other platform.  Is this by design?

The announcements are starting to pile up; nothing dramatic yet tho’ but we are probably at the start of the year when most Storage vendors refresh their main product lines and it’s going to be interesting to see the variety…

The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990’s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets trying to get my storage layout just right, balancing the workload across every available disk.