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6TB HGST Helium Drive Continues Move to Two-Tier Storage
Over the years, hard disk drives have steadily increased their speeds, peaking at 15,000 RPM, with only a fleeting attempt by Western Digital to push the boundaries up to 20K. As we know, at that point solid-state drives became more viable than faster HDDs and manufacturers have reined back their aspirations. Recently we’ve seen more… Read more »
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NFS Vendor Benchmarks – Caveat Emptor
This week we’ve seen an update on NFS benchmarks with Hitachi announcing their latest results (via Hu’s blog) using HUS File and FMDs (Flash Module Drives). Of course Hitachi wouldn’t be announcing if they hadn’t beaten EMC with the figures; no-one releases data that makes them look worse, after all. But what are the data… Read more »
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The Psychology of Pricing
It’s been another interesting week in IT. Following on from recent rumours, Nirvanix have finally publicly announced they are closing down, replacing their website with a single holding page directing customers to IBM. Yesterday, Violin Memory released their shares to the public and floated on the New York Stock Exchange. Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot… Read more »
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The Fall of STEC and Rise of Western Digital
In a news announcement yesterday, STEC Inc, makers of solid state flash drives (SSDs) announced a “merger” with (i.e. was acquired by) Western Digital, one of the leading hard disk drive manufacturers. It’s a spectacular fall for a company that at one stage had a share price of over $41/share in September 2009. However an… Read more »
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HP 3PAR 7450 All Flash Array
I mentioned in a previous post that I would delve a little deeper into what HP have done to optimise performance on the new 3PAR 7450. I was lucky to be able to catch up at the 3Par booth with Priyadarshi Prasad, who works in marketing for HP 3PAR. We took some time to talk… Read more »
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Defining Software Defined Storage
The term Software Defined Storage has generally accepted within IT as a process for delivering storage without the lock-in of hardware from the vendor. How has our understanding of the term evolved over recent years? It’s easy to use the examples of server virtualisation and networking as reasons why thinking of storage virtualisation for SDS… Read more »
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Review: AWS Storage Gateway
Cloud Storage Gateways provide the ability to write data directly into a cloud service/storage provider, either via a physical or virtual onsite appliance. There are many vendors in the marketplace today and some are making serious money, (as reported by Chris Mellor today in The Register). Amazon Web Services, seen as a leader in Infrastructure… Read more »
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Violin Memory acquires Gridiron Systems
Yesterday, Violin announced that they have acquired Gridiron Systems, a vendor of cache acceleration hardware and software. At the outset it may seem odd that an all-flash vendor would want to acquire a company offering acceleration for traditional arrays, however this could be a very smart deal indeed in a number of ways. Software is… Read more »
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Vendor Lock-in with Cloud Storage – Good or Bad?
There have been two interesting and contrasting announcements covering cloud storage in the last couple of weeks. The first was NetApp, who have announced “NetApp Private Storage for AWS”. which seems to a proprietary way of replicating data into the AWS cloud. The second comes from Nirvanix and Violin Memory; Violin have deployed their all-SSD… Read more »