This is one of a series of posts discussing the presenters at Tech Field Day 10, occurring 3rd – 5th February 2016 in Austin, Texas, at which I am an attending delegate.  See links at the end of this post to other presenting vendors.  Details of the event can be found on the Tech Field… Read more »

Just when we thought there were enough all-flash products on the market, Hitachi (or HDS if you prefer) has released a new line of all-flash systems under the brand name “Hitachi Flash Storage” or HFS.  The Cheetah reference in the title is the project name of the product during its development.  Before digging into technical… Read more »

A few years ago I worked with a company called Storage Fusion that provided a SaaS offering for analysing storage systems.  With a few simple scripts it was possible to collect the configuration information on one or more storage arrays and use that data to gain insights into metrics such as utilisation, performance and efficiency.  One benefit of… Read more »

This week Atlantis Computing, a vendor of hyper-converged and software defined storage solutions, released a new hardware appliance in their “Hyperscale” range, aimed at the ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office) market.  I’ll come back to the details in a moment, however what is interesting in this announcement is that despite appearances to the contrary, hardware still… Read more »

“The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from” This quote is variously attributed to Grace Hopper and others in the computer industry and in some respects it’s ironic that a statement about multiple standards is attributed to multiple authors!  However, that said, it is true that technology seems… Read more »

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 »

The early days of shared storage were focused around fixing some of the problems experienced with having multiple disk drives in every server, namely – availability, resiliency, shared access and efficiency.  Shared storage arrays resolved many of these issues by providing centralised shared, optimised and managed storage resources.  The popularity of shared storage was made… Read more »

As the year closes, news has emerged that Nutanix Inc, a vendor of hyper-converged solutions has finally filed an S-1 with the US SEC for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), presumably to happen in early 2016.  There are rumours that the timing was chosen as “a good time to bury bad news” (a reference to… Read more »

My first opportunity to see OpenStack in action was a 2011 event at Vinopolis in London (sadly Vinopolis closes at the end of this year, so that experience won’t be repeated).  Throughout the presentations I was surprised to see a focus on how fast code had been written (statements like, “we did that in 2 days”,… Read more »