In this edition of Gestalt News:
– Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at ExtraHop Reveal(x)
– DriveScale’s Tom Lyon sits down for an IT Origins interview
– Russ White considers if flexible scaleout in design could have mitigated the Meltdown vulnerability
NFS
NetApp Heads Into Microsoft’s Azure Cloud
Although most of the attention at NetApp’s “Data Driven” event yesterday in Boulder, CO was focused on the new HCI offering, my interest was aroused by a different announcement: NetApp is now powering an enterprise-class storage offering integrated with Microsoft Azure. In the long run, this move into the cloud might well prove more important than even a solid entrant in the hot hyperconverged infrastructure market.
Veeam Goes Hollywood, Now Has Two Agents
Veeam as a company has largely eschewed agents for their VM backup solutions. But when it comes to physical servers, the company is offer not one, but two agents to help with your backup and recovery needs.
Talon and SoftNAS: A Duo with Dynamism
With an eagle eye for the emerging problems of moving current business application storage to the clouds come a newly announced partnership between Talon and SoftNAS. Now that the (terrible) puns are out of the way, let’s get into the announcement.
Storage Basics: When to use SAN v. NAS
Crowdsourcing is one of the true revolutions of the Internet. It’s nothing short of remarkable, the ability to work collectively with a group of people remotely at a scale and responsiveness that could never have been imaged in ages past. Of course, like much of the issues surrounding the Internet, at scale, very rare problems […]
“Our Storage Array Is Compatible with VMware…” Says Who?
I talk to dozens of companies every week, and every one says the same thing: “Our product is compatible with VMware!†But not everyone’s definition of “compatible†is the same, and some are not compatible with the requirements of production data centers. Therefore, I present to you my spectrum of compatibility for VMware.
Are You a Hypervisor Hugger or a Storage Stalwart?
The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting their vote while the rest flounder. But the storage industry must wake up and embrace the divide.
Is NFS v3 Really That Bad?
Did some pNFS proponent slip a love potion into the coffee at EMC? Suddenly it’s pNFS time at the company known for its reluctance to embrace file sharing and filesystems in general. The purple prose is flying, with Chad Sakac declaring himself “a big fan of the application of NFS” and Chuck Hollis extolling the “inherent simplicity and ease-of-management of NFS.” The NetApp guys must be amused by the bear hug from Hopkinton, but many are seeing deja-vu all over again.
Why Do I Ignore NAS?
Why does network-attached storage (NAS) have such a poor reputation? This isn’t what the vendors want to be talking about, but some recent product announcements and discussions led to this thought. IT folks as a whole don’t trust NAS for real work, and 20 years of effort from big names like Sun, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, and the rest hasn’t changed that.
Iomega Graduates and Goes to Work with the ix12-300r
EMC’s Iomega unit today released the rack-mount storage product we have all been waiting for. The new ix12-300r packs 12 drive bays, scaling from 4 TB all the way to 24 TB, and backs it with quad gigabit iSCSI, redundant power, and everything else the small data center needs.