Can this article on The Register be true?  Has Microsoft removed Storage Spaces Direct from the latest Windows Server build? To be honest I’d initially not given this article much thought until I decided to have a look at the latest Windows Server build myself.  I was interested to find that I can’t actually download… Read more »

It appears we’re reaching a consensus that persistent storage is needed for containers.  Despite early resistance, with an assumption that containers and their data should be transient, the logic of data persistence is starting to take hold.  To be honest it simply makes sense. Yes, I could keep my data in sync between multiple nodes… Read more »

I recently met up with the CEO of Violin Systems, Ebrahim Abbasi, for a chat about the industry and the future of the company.  Those who knew Violin Memory will be familiar with this company as it is essentially the assets and IP of the failed Violin, acquired by the Soros Group and relaunched as… Read more »

Another day goes by and we have another story about hard drive technology.  Yesterday, Western Digital held a media event (I wasn’t invited) to announce MAMR, the latest technology for improving hard drive density.  MAMR stands for Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording and is a process to increase the stability of recording with very small grain… Read more »

The idea of improving the performance of applications through the use of parallel computing isn’t a new concept.  Look back 50 years and we can see that Amdahl’s Law shows how to predict the performance improvement that can be achieved by using multiple processors.  You can find details of Amdahl’s Law on Wikipedia, but essentially… Read more »

This week we’ve seen the announcement of 14TB 3.5” hard drives from one vendor and 12TB from another. It’s hard to imagine the concept of 14TB in a single hard drive when ten years ago we were looking at only 1TB devices. However, these devices have a problem. The throughput and latency has remained relatively… Read more »

One of the big announcements coming out of NetApp Insight in Las Vegas is the release of Microsoft Azure Enterprise NFS Service using Data ONTAP technology.  The idea that a cloud hyperscaler could use a mainstream technology for storage instead of building their own is unique enough, but the more interesting scenario is the ability… Read more »

Hyper-converged infrastructure is a great technology for running a range of mixed workloads.  With HCI how do you manage DR?  Typically the standard solution might be to run up another cluster in a separate data centre and run both 50% active/active or have one purely for standby.  What about running in the public cloud?  With… Read more »

Over the last few weeks, I’ve talked a lot about data mobility and exactly how we should get data into the public cloud from on-premises locations.  You can find links to the posts at the end of this blog entry.  Much of what I’ve talked about revolves around moving data in a relatively static way,… Read more »