“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.

I’d like to think I’ve visited a lot of customer sites over the years.  Admittedly most of these are “enterprise” class with multi-terabyte if not petabyte quantities of storage.  None of those customers have ever bothered deploying iSCSI as their storage protocol.  Invariably block storage has been implemented using fibre channel and file using CFS [...]

Enhancements to EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems is possibly around the corner (FY09 Q4). FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) is due this quarter and will be one of the most awaited software release in the enterprise storage space by EMC. Bundled together with FAST, possibly a new microcode version the enables FAST (its associated features) and other expected enhancements.

A while back, I discussed speculation from EMC around Emulex’s proposed cloud-block storage appliance, E3s (Enterprise Elastic Storage). With my current focus on Cloud Storage, I thought it would be good to delve a bit deeper into some of the aspects of why block-based cloud computing could prove tricky and why without an appliance it may be impossible.

Coming out of stealth at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, startup EvoStor exemplifies this new virtualization-optimized storage concept. Taking existing storage concepts like scale-out grid and automated storage layout, EvoStor’s offering is designed exclusively to support the VMware vSphere platform.

Just five days after HP announced it would acquire IBRIX, another scale-out NAS provider has been purchased. LSI announced today that it would acquire ONStor for $25 million in cash. The company sold a range of SAN and NAS storage systems, but was best-known for its Bobcat clustered NAS gateways.

You may recall that I wrote about how to enable jumbo frames on VMkernel ports used for IP-based storage early last year. Here are some updated instructions on how to do the same with vSphere, only this time using a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS).

HDS telegraphed that a big announcement was coming today. They even made it fun, with a (literally) cryptic blog entry to make sure we were all watching. But the announcement of High Availability Manager, a software product to manage existing HDS USP-V and USP-VM arrays, underwhelmed. It isn’t HDS’ answer to the EMC Symmetrix V-Max and it’s forthcoming FAST technology.

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?

Windows Storage Server is one of the most interesting products from Redmond, a specialized version of Windows Server with integrated storage target capabilities, including iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and single-instance storage (file-level deduplication). Although Windows Server 2008, with its many storage feature updates, was released last year, the updated version of Windows Storage Server was still under construction until last month. But Windows Storage Server 2008 is available to manufacturers today.