Storage
The demand for thin-client (VDI) deployments is increasing driven by a combination of Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC), Security concerns and the scheduled release of Windows 8. This is not a new business requirement, it’s been around for a while, only held back by the twin problems of achieving a sensible ROI and getting VDI [...]
There are three generalised approaches to using flash memory in storage architectures, categorised in the diagram below: Three Categories of Solution Design The Performance Optimised category takes a no-compromise-on-cost approach to designing for performance. A centralised storage controller that leverages flash memory characteristics to dramatically reduce IO latency and improve IOPS. Significant new engineering work [...]
I interviewed Ron Bianchini CEO of Avere Systems about their new third generation FXT appliance. (Ron was the CEO of Spinnaker Networks acquired by NetApp in November 2003 for $300M). We started the conversation by looking at the key values of Spinnaker, it’s ability to scale and cluster NAS filers, a technology long since incorporated [...]
I just finished reading EMC company blogger, Chuck Hollis article about EMC VFCache, a server side flash storage technology that competes with the Fusion-io, ioDrive head on. Most interestingly, the product name is chosen carefully to ensure customers don’t get confused that VFCache might be designed to replace the normal disk based EMC storage array controller products. [...]
Last night a few friends (IT Operations Geeks like me) and I had a great “Brains Trust” event at the OXO Tower in London. The topic was a continuation of the last Hot Aisle blog entry Why do we try to solve backup when restore is the problem? Apart from the food, view and wine [...]
I have been thinking about data storage and protection recently and how our behaviour is driving massive growth in cost and complexity. The issue seems to eminate from the fact that we focus on solving backup when the real problem is restoring data: We need to be able to deal with data corruption and incorrectly [...]
Cloudera struck lucky in getting a $5M A-round away just before the markets shut down in response to the collapse of the global financial system. Backed by Accel Partners and more recently Greylock Partners they are making a bet that Hadoop with a smart scale out approach to managing large amounts of data is a [...]
Recently I spoke to David Emery a friend and colleague from my time at Coopers & Lybrand. He is now working on a major social media initiative for a global mobile telco. I was interested in David’s perspective as he has been working on a set of solutions to process log files at enormous scale. [...]
A while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]
Most people who read this won’t have a clue what a Hollerith punched card is. I only just caught the end of the era at University where I learned to program in FORTRAN coding one punched card at a time. Once the stack of cards was complete, I delivered it to the computer operator for [...]
If you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes: Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular and growing in capacity (2TB soon) There are lots of other disk technologies around like Fibre Channel and SAS but SSD and [...]
Both Seagate and Western Digital announced Q2 results last week perhaps signalling a return of confidence in the disk drive channel. Component manufacturers in the enterprise IT channel are an interesting bellwether of market confidence as orders need to be placed in advance of shipments of finished goods. There is a significant delay in revenue [...]
Application Developer: My new application needs to store some objects. Can I have a bit of storage please? Storage Administrator: So do you want NAS or Block storage? Application Developer: Is there a Java object library for that stuff, what did you call it nasty blocks? Storage Administrator: (mumbles) stupid code monkey… Who knows – [...]
The Hot Aisle ran a poll recently asking you all about Cloud Storage and we got some very interesting results from over 5600 respondents: We asked the question – Does Cloud Storage have to be delivered as an Object Store? Here are my observations:- A surprising number of folks don’t know what Cloud Storage is! [...]
I visited IP Expo at Earls Court today and had a look around and concluded that everyone is on message about the cloud. If vendor push gets a technology going then cloud is moving at the speed of light. I mostly went to interview VirtualGeek, Chad Sakac VP, VMware Technology Alliance at EMC who was [...]
This week we have had two announcements about extreme (and I mean extreme) high performance storage arrays that follow the same basic approach. What they have in common is that they both use solid state (Flash) memory with a twist. Oracle announces the Exadata Storage Server v2 their new Sun built OLTP Database machine and [...]
The Exadata uses Flash, lots of Flash and it uses Infiniband, not Fiber Channel, Ethernet or FCoE. Exadata uses PCI Flash memory modules not Solid State Disks. Actually it is not a general purpose storage controller and it doesn’t support non Oracle Database workload. It is designed from the outset to host Oracle Databases and [...]
I just picked up a neat blog post by Martin Glassborow (@storagebod) discussing a double disk failure in a RAID 5 array which (apparently) caused lost data. RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Disks and the number refers to the type of protection offered. RAID 5 means that there is an extra disks in the [...]
The Storage Area Network (SAN) is now a key component of most reasonably sized IT Infrastructures. The SAN we rely on today evolved from very humble beginnings into a mission critical Enterprise IT component. The first SANs were introduced to handle small numbers of enterprise scale systems (zSeries and iSeries computers from IBM) being connected [...]
I received a very thought provoking article about the relative merits of FCoE and Fibre Channel storage networks from Christian Illmer, Senior Director Application and Solution Management Enterprise, ADVA Optical Networking – 8G FC versus FCoE – distinguishing myth from reality. I publish the article here in it’s entirety and add a bit of analysis [...]
I am giving the Cloud Summit Keynote at Virtualization World (co-located with SNW Europe in Frankfurt on the 27th and 28th October), my subject will be a familiar theme to readers of the hot aisle – The Data Center of the Future – M&E plant to Cloud. I am also chairing a couple of panels, [...]
My friend Dan Gatti who runs worldwide marketing at Verari sent me this picture showing the inside of a FOREST Data Center Scale computer rigged out with 26 Petabytes of disk storage. Verari are market leaders in Data Center Scale compute platforms and have shipped significantly more of these storage and compute units than [...]
