Why HCI Data Protection is Different

When so many businesses are totally dependent on their digital information, data protection becomes a key requirement for every IT organisation.  The way in which we implement technology changes almost daily and this affects the choices on how we protect it.  Where 20 years ago the standard model for deployment was based on physical servers,… Read more »

Droplet Computing delivers universal app virtualisation

The IT world is great at delivering technically elegant solutions that intrigue and pique my (and others) interest.  In recent years the entire virtualisation and containers movements have been good examples of this.  Producing something technically interesting doesn’t always lead to a solution that benefits the business.  However, in the case of Droplet Computing, the… Read more »

Building a Model of Hybrid Cloud

For the past few months, I’ve been working with the idea of building a model for the adoption of hybrid cloud.  Some people may say that hybrid is already here, but I think what we see today is a set of tactical implementations.  Instead, we need a bolder vision of what the use of hybrid… Read more »

Comtrade Software Becomes HYCU and releases HYCU 3.0

Data protection has featured heavily on the blog over the past few months.  Solutions are moving on from the traditional self-build of the last 15 years to more targeted software and appliances.  Another company doing something different with data protection is HYCU, formerly Comtrade Software.  The company recently rebranded and released version 3.0 of their… Read more »

What is a Forklift Upgrade?

Technology terms get dropped into conversations in the storage industry, with perhaps little explanation of where they come from. Forklift Upgrade is one example.  What does it mean and what’s the context behind it? Legacy Storage If you look back 10-15 years ago, the process of replacing storage was pretty arduous.  Although Fibre Channel as… Read more »

The Three Facets of Backup

All technology evolves over time and backup is no different.  I started protecting data with tapes – the kind that are stored on reels as shown in this lovely picture I took at the Computer History Museum recently.  While at Cloud Field Day 3 last week we saw three different facets to how backup is… Read more »

AWS Introduces Cheaper, Less Reliable S3 Option

Amazon Web Services recently introduced a new class of S3 Object storage called S3 One-Zone Infrequent Access.  This extends the options for S3 to four levels of availability and associated cost.  What is the point of introducing another option and what could it be used for? S3 Options Until now there were three S3 classes. … Read more »

INFINIDAT InfiniSync – Infinite Sync Replication

Data replication is a core enterprise feature for implementing data protection.  Synchronous replication provides the ability to maintain an identical copy of data at another location.  While not a panacea for every problem, sync replication simplifies the protection process for servers and applications that are contained on one or more LUNs/volumes. INFINIDAT recently announced InfiniSync,… Read more »

Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Riverbed

This post is one of a series of previews of companies presenting at Cloud Field Day 3, an invitation-only event in Silicon Valley, taking place 4-6 April 2018.  For more information, see the dedicated CFD3 events page https://blog.architecting.it/events/cloud-field-day-3/. If someone asked me what business Riverbed was in, I’d have said WAN acceleration.  In past lives, I’ve… Read more »

Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Delphix

This post is one of a series of previews of companies presenting at Cloud Field Day 3, an invitation-only event in Silicon Valley, taking place 4-6 April 2018.  For more information, see the dedicated CFD3 events page https://blog.architecting.it/events/cloud-field-day-3/. There’s a very interesting theme to the presenters at CFD3 and that highlights one of the challenges of… Read more »

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Latest

  • 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 officially 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… Read more »