All Posts Tagged With: "SAN"
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. [...]
Continue ReadingMost 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 [...]
Continue ReadingIf 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 SATA are getting [...]
Continue ReadingEveryone I speak to in the industry agrees that IT components are getting harder to integrate. It’s not a new issue, this complexity, it’s just got harder and harder over the years to make sense of how everything should plug together. So when I speak to friends in the industry who are faced with delivering [...]
Continue ReadingThe 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!
Most people thing that [...]
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 makes [...]
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 [...]
Continue ReadingI 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 group [...]
At ESG we’ve teamed up with Dell, Microsoft, Symantec, VMware, and Intel on the Virtualization Tour show that’s all over North America (for now)! From September 29th pretty much every day through the end of October, we’ll be in a US city!
The content is excellent – based on some killer ESG research and [...]
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 [...]
Continue ReadingI 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 myself [...]
I am doing some work on understanding the size of the market for Data Center Scale systems. Sytems like SGI (Rackable) Ice Cube, Verari’s FOREST, HP’s POD, Sun’s Container and AST-Global’s dual container solution. Talking around the market my sense is that although the unit value is quite high ($4-$6M per container) the volumes are [...]
Continue ReadingAs a further takeaway Anix stated that the configuration work of the XIV during the Proof of Concept was very simple, taking minutes to complete – “far quicker then using the existing EMC and IBM infrastructure ”
Today I spoke to a UK based Infrastructure Consultancy Anix (now part of ACS) about an XIV storage solution [...]
Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with their data centers compared to industry norms. The first take away is that almost none of them conform [...]
Continue ReadingI spend a lot of time thinking about data centers and how to make them better, more efficient, more reliable, higher performance , easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Lots of very smart and experienced people have been doing the same for many years and whilst there is no single, agreed best practice, model [...]
Continue ReadingThere are some pretty big movements happening right now resulting from the Cisco announcement of California – Unified Computing System (UCS) – their networked server offering. Politically this has partially alienated HP and IBM, who have big Server businesses and also buy a ton of Cisco equipment. So we are seeing a polarization of network [...]
Continue ReadingI have just spent the last few days at EMC World in Orlando (Florida) getting wet hearing the cloud and virtualization story unfold. We saw lots of clouds in the skies over Orlando as we endured a pretty constant downpour from Sunday when I arrived.
There is no doubt that virtualization is warming up with lots [...]
Just had a very nice lunch at Boisdales in London’s finance district, with my old friend and ex BT colleague Chris Brandon now Technical Director at Xsigo. Chris took me through what Xsigo do and why they think they have something to say.
You will remember a few weeks back the Cisco California announcements and the [...]
Long time disk manufacturer Fujitsu have pulled out of the disk business, selling their design and manufacturing facilities to Toshiba.
Toshiba and Fujitsu have concluded a definitive agreement on the transfer of Fujitsu’s hard disk drive (HDD) business to Toshiba. Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Toshiba will acquire Fujitsu’s HDD design, development, manufacturing, sales [...]
Continue ReadingFusion-io announced today at SNW that it closed $47.5 million in Series B funding from a group of investors led by global venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The company also announced that David Bradford, a Novell Inc industry veteran, has been named CEO of Fusion-io, in Bradford’s last three years at Novell, he reported directly to [...]
We have all been doing this – buy some new light bulbs, screw them in, and save the planet – simple. It was until I picked up an interesting article in today’s New York Times:
A lot of people these days are finding the new compact fluorescent bulbs anything but simple. Consumers who are trying them say they [...]
I have been in Milford MA with my friend and colleague Steve Duplessie of the Enterprise Strategy Group this week working with Steve and his team around a number of key announcements from Cisco on their entry into the Data Center Server market.
There is a lot of information to take in but here is my [...]
Last year I spoke to Ron Croce COO of Validus DC Systems about their unique approach to Data Center power provision. He and I both share strong backgrounds in power engineering and the certain knowledge that the way that data centers are powered today is fundamentally flawed.
Today’s data centers take power from the grid distribution [...]
David Strom writes in the New York Times about how to stop your commercially sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands:
As more small businesses rely on e-mail and instant messaging for their communications, they would do well to use a number of inexpensive methods to preserve privacy and ensure that messages are read only [...]
Pillar Data Systems, a San Jose storage company backed by billionaire Larry Ellison, terminated 150 employees today, about 30% of it’s global workforce.
Pillar is making these personnel cutbacks “to weather the storm,” company spokesman Chris Drago said. Ellison did not “mandate” the layoffs but supported the decision, Drago said: “Larry’s fully committed to Pillar and [...]
