@ChrisMEvans Archives

QLC NAND – how real is it and what can we expect from the technology?

August 18, 2017 by Rich Stroffolino Leave a Comment

In storage, there is an inexorable march toward greater capacity. In general this means denser storage. Spinning disks have come up with a variety of ways to skirt the laws of physics to put more bits in a single drive enclosure. Platters were added, drive heads were made more precise, and some companies have tried write schemes like Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR).

Flash storage has gone through similar iterations to increase density. Chris Evans outlines the challenges and opportunities afforded by quadruple-level cell flash storage.

Rook is the New Flocker?

April 21, 2017 by Rich Stroffolino Leave a Comment

Flocker is dead, long live Rook! Or maybe not. Chris Evans gives a look at this ersatz replacement to the recently deceased Flocker, who decided to shutdown in December when they released they had no path to revenue, bucking typical venture capital wisdom.

PernixData and Nutanix – Where’s the Synergy?

August 10, 2016 by Tom Hollingsworth Leave a Comment

Chris Evans of Architecting IT comments: Although not officially announced, it looks like the acquisition of PernixData by Nutanix is a done deal. Confirmation came from Frank Denneman, Dutch blogger and former tech evangelist for Pernix who has now left the company. So what can we make of this? Great ideas here from Chris on […]

The Four Stages of All-Flash Storage

May 5, 2016 by Stephen Foskett Leave a Comment

Chris Evans of Architecting IT comments: This week has seen yet more stories and announcements on all-flash storage. IBM released new FlashSystem products based on XIV and an all-flash version of their mainframe/enterprise platform, the DS8888. I had another briefing from Violin (although that didn’t reveal anything new) and rumours started to swirl that X-IO Technologies might be […]

When Did Hard Drives Get Workload Rate Limits?

April 27, 2016 by Stephen Foskett Leave a Comment

Chris Evans of Architecting IT comments: A recent article on The Register reminded me that we’ve started to see hard drive vendors introducing warranty limits on their hard drives for the amount of data that can be written to them in any one year. Solid state drives have always had this restriction, because we know […]

ZeroStack – A Better Way to do OpenStack

January 6, 2016 by Tom Hollingsworth Leave a Comment

Chris Evans of Architecting IT writes: My first opportunity to see OpenStack in action was a 2011 event at Vinopolis in London (sadly Vinopolis closes at the end of this year, so that experience won’t be repeated). Throughout the presentations I was surprised to see a focus on how fast code had been written (statements like, “we did […]

Flash Consolidation: NetApp to Acquire SolidFire

December 29, 2015 by Stephen Foskett Leave a Comment

Chris Evans of Architecting IT comments: Amid much rumour, Monday finally saw the announcement that NetApp Inc intends to acquire SolidFire Inc, an all-flash storage startup. The agreement sees the company acquired for $870 million in cash, somewhat short of the $1.2 billion rumoured value. Those of you following my posts (and other work) will know […]

Why VSAN and VVOLs are Not Software Defined

May 4, 2015 by Tom Hollingsworth Leave a Comment

Chris Evans of Architecting IT Blog comments: Every so often another attempt is made by the vendor community to put a definition to what we call “software defined storage” or SDS. The current discussion is on VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) and VVOLs, software features focused on storage within the vSphere hypervisor ecosystem. This seems like a […]

End-to-End Data Management

April 27, 2015 by Chris Evans Leave a Comment

This is post 7 of 9 in the series “NexGen Storage ioControl Tech Talks” In previous posts I’ve discussed the need to “move up the stack” with reference to the way we manage data. To recap, what we mean here is focusing less on the bits and bytes of how data is stored and moving […]

Storage Field Day 7 – Initial Thoughts

April 2, 2015 by Tom Hollingsworth Leave a Comment

Chris Evans of Architecting IT writes: Storage Field Day 7 (11-13 March 2015) proved to be yet another impressive and thought provoking event, with lots of new ideas demonstrating that the storage industry is one of the most innovative and competitive sections of the technology landscape. Over the next few weeks, I’ll deep dive into some […]