Martin "Storagebod" Glassborow suggests two reasons EMC reversed course on virtualizing behind the VMAX: Maintaining margin on controllers and adapting to a flash-filled world. Both are reasonable ideas... The speed of change in the spinning rust market appears to be slowing, certainly the … [Read more...]
EMC VFCache (aka “Project Lightning”) Is One Small Step, But an Important One
February 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
EMC will today unveil a new product, and will no doubt attract a great deal of press. The modest technical capabilities of VFCache 1.0 limit its use case, but the announcement is big news, since it marks EMCs first foray into the hot server-attached storage market. EMC VFCache is a Simple Read … [Read more...]
NetApp Deduplication An In-depth Look
September 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the NetApp deduplication technology, especially on twitter. We had a lot of misinformation and FUD flying around, so I thought that a blog entry that takes a close look at the technology was in order. But first a bit of disclosure, I currently … [Read more...]
Flash Storage and Automated Storage Tiering
September 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment
In recent years, a move toward automated storage tiering has begun in the data center. This move has been inspired by the desire to continue to drive down the cost of storage, as well as the introduction of faster, but more expensive storage in the form of Flash memory in the storage array … [Read more...]
Avere: Live From Tech Field Day San Jose
November 12, 2010 by Leave a Comment
The Tech Field Day staff have been working behind the scenes to improve the quality and timeliness of video output from our event. We are pleased to present the first result of this work, in the form of live streaming from Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week. NAS acceleration specialist Avere, … [Read more...]
Violin Memory Inc Release New All-SSD Array
May 27, 2010 by 1 Comment
I’m not a fan of making press releases on behalf of other companies however once in a while, a news item catches my interest. So it is with the announcement of the Violin Memory Inc. 3200 series of all-memory storage arrays. Why are these interesting? Because I think they are moving and … [Read more...]
STEC Spills the Beans on ZeusRAM SSD
May 12, 2010 by Leave a Comment
STEC may not have been quite ready to reveal their next-generation ZeusRAM solid-state disk (SSD), but they are demonstrating it anyway at EMC World in Boston this week. The ZeusRAM is a fundamentally different animal from the existing ZeusIOPS drive in one critical way: Rather than using flash … [Read more...]
Podcast 4: Virtual Field Day Nimbus Roundtable
April 26, 2010 by 1 Comment
This week's virtual Tech Field Day roundtable discussion focuses on Nimbus Data Systems. Tom Isakovich, CEO of Nimbus, gave the Tech Field Day Delegates a sneak peek at their new S-class solid state iSCSI storage array. Nimbus claims that the S-class will deliver new levels of performance in a … [Read more...]
Extreme Tiered Storage: Flash, Disk, and Cloud
February 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment
My presence at Storage Expo NL may have been cursed, but my presentation went off without a hitch thanks to the creativity and flexibility of the VNU staff and Expo volunteers like Ilja Coolen. In my session, I talked about the shortcomings of traditional tiered storage as a way to advance the Noble … [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...]