Pure Accelerate: FlashArray Gets Synchronous Replication

Synchronous replication is a key feature that many enterprises depend on for data protection as it offers the ability to ensure data is 100% copied to a remote site in the event of a disaster.  On flash storage, sync replication may seem a little at odds with the idea of providing high performance, but the… Read more »

HPE 3PAR and Nimble – Finding that Differentiating Niche

Update: I initially wrote this post and had it in draft for publication, however my views were changed by an announcement made today (see later in the post) I had some interesting feedback from one of my recent previous posts, in which I suggested that HPE might be planning to retire the 3PAR platform in… Read more »

Has Dell EMC Redesigned XDP on XtremIO?

Earlier this month Dell EMC announced XtremIO X2, the next generation hardware platform of their once flagship all-flash storage offering.  With the new systems, storage capacity per node has been increased from 25 to 72 drives.  The numbers quoted for initial deployments and upgrades seems to counter the original design of data protection on XtremIO,… Read more »

Recent Cyber Attacks Show a Massive Misunderstanding About Technology

The cyber attack affecting a large part of the UK NHS (and also more globally) has been widely reported over the weekend.  As usual, I find myself screaming at the TV, due to the misdirection being put forward by the media as to the causes and solution to the problem.  This morning I read an… Read more »

rook.io – an attempt at Flocker 2.0

At the end of 2016 ClusterHQ, the developers of Flocker decided to shut down the project with a rather blunt blog post (link).  Rather than take additional funding, CEO Mark Davis (and presumably the board) decided to shut the company down on the assumption that it wasn’t clear where revenue would come from. Based on… Read more »

What Next for the new Tier 0 Storage?

As flash storage moves to mainstream adoption, a new breed of products are set to become the new tier 0 storage.  However with the demise of DSSD, is the market set to falter? Tier 0 has come to represent the fastest of the fast, almost a specialist category of super fast storage.  The tier 0… Read more »

Learning from The Instapaper Outage

Instapaper (the SaaS-based solution for keeping track of bookmarks and interesting websites) suffered a catastrophic outage to their service last month.  I’ve only just got round to reading the port-mortem account of the incident and it doesn’t make pretty reading.  First of all, it’s worth saying that we’ve all been there and experienced that awful… Read more »

Nimble, HPE and 20-Year Old Architectures

This week, HPE offered to acquire Nimble Storage for around $1.09 billion, plus another $200 million in share options.  Nimble sells all-flash and hybrid storage solutions, with a lot of intellectual property focused around storage analytics in the form of their “Infosight” SaaS platform. Commentators are seeing this as a good deal for both Nimble and… Read more »

Should We Worry About The S3 Outage?

Last week, Amazon Web Service’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) suffered what was termed “high error rates” and essentially became unusable for a number of hours to users in the US-East-1 (Virginia) region.  There have been a lot of stories circulating talking about the number of SaaS-based applications that were affected, with people being quick to question the… Read more »

Google Spanner – fixing the problem of distributed SQL databases

I’ve been messing about with databases for a long time.  I say “messing about” because I’ve never been a DBA, but as a systems programmer and storage administrator, I’ve been on the periphery of the application layer and of course I’ve deployed many personal databases.  I was intrigued to read about the new global distributed… Read more »

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Latest

  • AWS Provides Pricing via API

    At the beginning of December, AWS (Amazon Web Services) announced that pricing for their service offerings were now being made available via API (as well of course as via the web).  Customers and prospective customers can now query the cost of services such as EC2 and S3 through REST API calls, receiving the output either… Read more »

  • The Evolution of Storage Virtualisation

    Storage virtualisation is a technology that’s been around for many years and acts to abstract, in some form, the physical hardware from the LUN or volume the host/user sees.  The aim is to use this abstraction to reduce management overhead (for example with transparent migrations), to provide an ingest path (e.g. moving data from a… Read more »

  • The Ideal of Composable Infrastructure

    With the release of Synergy (see my recent post), HPE is moving towards a future that sees IT resources aggregated into applications deployed on-demand and in a totally automated fashion. In reality though, has HPE reached that stage with Synergy and can we put a definition on what Composable IT really means? If we look… Read more »

  • Composable IT – HPEs Next Big Thing

    At HPE Discover earlier this month HPE (or Hewlett Packard Enterprise as we now have to call them) announced their next evolution in managed infrastructure for which the company has coined the term Composable Infrastructure. The idea is to break down technology into its constituent parts and build or “compose” the pieces that allow for… Read more »

  • A New Paradigm for Computing

    The Christmas 2015 edition of Magpi magazine created a world’s first – an entire computer given away on the front of a magazine.  A free Raspberry Pi Zero is certainly a step up from a disk of software, or even the annoying AOL CDs that we know from years gone by.  This is an entire functional… Read more »

  • Do we need Storage QoS?

    I recently had a discussion with a vendor (who shall remain nameless) as to whether we really needed Quality of Service in shared storage arrays.  His thinking went as follows; if we have a storage array and network with sufficient bandwidth/IOPS, then why bother implementing QoS?  At first this seems like a reasonable assumption; if… Read more »

  • All Storage is Commodity

    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 »

  • The Move to 3D-NAND for All-Flash Storage Vendors

    This week has seen two announcements from flash array vendors that are moving to support 3D-NAND technology in their products. On Tuesday Pure Storage announced that 3D TLC NAND would be supported in their FlashArray//m platform from 1Q2016. The new drives will increase capacity from around 30-40TB to 60TB per rack unit (depending on the… Read more »

  • Conflating Reliability and Endurance in SSDs

    Last week I sat through a presentation by Samsung on the evolution of their DRAM and flash business. One question raised by a journalist in the room related to the reliability of flash drives. The presenter proceeded to talk about the industry and how endurance means flash has a finite lifetime, one which now varies… Read more »