Wize Up

Some months ago I speculated on the future of IBM’s storage roadmap; a post which I believed caused some consternation in IBM as it foreshadowed some of their recent announcement. I expect that over time even more of that entry’s predictions will become fact. For what is basically a packaging exercise, the v7000 is actually an interesting announcement in that it shows that IBM do want a piece of the storage pie and they are going to use their own products to do so.

Dell + EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina, 3Par = What?

The storage industry got a lot more competitive this morning, as Dell announced plans to buy 3Par. This is the latest round in a well-established race for the enterprise storage dollar, challenging superpower (and Dell partner) EMC in the high-end SAN space. What does this acquisition say about the industry as a whole? Where are we headed?

The Benefits of Wide Striping – Avoiding A Long Tail

One of the “key features” of XIV is the wide striping of data across all spindles, a concept we’re seeing more and more. Have you ever wondered what the point is?

Disastrous Thinking

If you don’t cluster your arrays, how do you protect against the failure of a RAID rank? Statistically unlikely but it is it more or less unlikely than a loss of data-centre? I’m not sure and the failure of a RAID rank for many people could well mean the invocation of the disaster recovery plan. Why?

Enterprise Computing: Is There Any Point Buying From EMC?

Yesterday, EMC announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), their much hyped and much anticipated storage feature enabling the automated moving of data between tiers of storage on a policy basis.  However the most notable missing feature in the EMC announcement was the lack of support for legacy DMX-3 and DMX-4 platforms.  This to me sends [...]