Vendors love buzzwords and phrases and nothing exemplifies this more than the term Software Defined Storage or SDS. Look back a few years ago and storage appliances were going to be replaced by commodity hardware driven by software. Naturally that was the hope of those vendors selling software-only solutions; they needed end users to believe that… Read more »
Yesterday as part of the first A3 Tech Live event, I sat through a presentation from Memblaze, a vendor of NVMe and PCIe flash storage products. Although the conversation was good natured and “robust”, I couldn’t help feeling that the company (like so many others in this market) have little to differentiate their products, other… Read more »
A couple of weeks ago I was briefed on the latest technology to come out of PernixData; a software suite known as Architect, which provides insight into the I/O workload of virtual machines in a VMware vSphere environment. The company’s previous (and still current) product is FVP, a caching software layer for the hypervisor that… Read more »
This post first appeared on the Kaminario Blog – http://kaminario.com/blog/flash-economics-choosing-right-ssd/ At a superficial level, it’s easy to assume that all solid-state disks (SSDs) are the same. In reality, that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. SSDs continue to evolve and are dividing into a broad product category, in much the same way that hard disk… Read more »
I’ve recently started working with Kaminario, an all-flash array startup vendor and will be publishing a series of posts and papers on the Kaminario site. I’ll also be linking them here for convenience. The first post covers scale-out architectures as a way to avoid the continual replacement of technology – the so called forklift upgrade…. Read more »
In what has become somewhat of a tradition at HP Discover, the HP 3PAR StoreServ platforms were extended this week with the announcements of new products and features, including the massively scalable 20800 series. HP released two new models: 20800 “Converged Flash” – a hybrid system, scaling up to eight nodes, 33.8TB of cache,… Read more »
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 good opportunity for me to review what… Read more »
Storage virtualisation is a technology that is well established in our industry. In the current “x86” era, I’ve been using and talking about it for over 10 years, using it to reduce costs, extend the life of older assets and in data migration. All of the original storage virtualisation solutions (with the exception of Invista) sat… Read more »
Earlier this month SanDisk announced InfiniFlash, their first entry into the All-Flash storage array (AFA) market. I briefly blogged on the market impacts over on my company blog at Langton Blue; here I’m going to look a bit more into the specifics of the platform. First of all, let’s look at the detail here. From a… Read more »
