Cloud Data Migration – Shipping Virtual Machines

Previously we discussed the use of content migration tools to get data into public cloud services.  Another alternative is to ship entire virtual machines into the cloud, including the application and data. Why VMs? Why would it be more practical to ship an entire VM than just the data?  In some instances and with some… Read more »

QLC NAND – how real is it and what can we expect from the technology?

Since NAND flash storage was first introduced into enterprise computing, we’ve seen a rapid explosion in the types and capabilities of flash products that can now be deployed in servers, HCI solutions and storage arrays.  QLC is the next evolution of cost reducing, space increasing flash technology.  What is it and what can we expect… Read more »

Flash Diversity: High Capacity Drives from Nimbus and Micron

The desire to provide cheaper and greater capacity storage devices knows no bounds and has been a focus of the industry for the last 60 years.  Following on from Seagate’s 60TB “concept” flash drive, we now have two vendors selling 50TB OEM flash drives from Nimbus Data.  Let’s put that into context – the largest… Read more »

Scale Computing Moves Deeper Into the Enterprise With All-Flash HCI Nodes

Sometimes a technology captures your imagination and shows real promise for developing into something of real value for the customer.  Scale Computing is one such company that has continued to demonstrate technical innovation and a continuning evolution in their platform.  The most recent announcements bring to the market higher performance and capacity appliances, including an… Read more »

Cloud Data Migration – Data Transfer Using Physical Shipping & Appliances

One of the most interesting challenges with using the public cloud is how to get data into cloud storage platforms so it can be used with services like analytics or e-discovery.  One scenario is to use “analogue” shipping services to send physical devices like hard drives and appliances to the cloud provider. Shipping a Drive… Read more »

Dude, Where’s My 100TB Hard Drive?

It wasn’t that long ago we were being promised hard drives of unimaginable capacities.  I’m sure that at some stage triple digit numbers were being talked about.  However today we’re stuck with a “mere” 12TB of capacity per drive.  So what went wrong, or are we just being a little too hopeful? I did some… Read more »

Scality Introduces Zenko – A Multi-Cloud Data Controller

When I met with Scality CEO Jerôme Lecat last week, he was at pains to ensure that Zenko – the company’s latest software product – wasn’t described as a storage gateway.  Jerôme sees gateways as protocol conversion devices, which as we will discuss is definitely not what Zenko is about.  So what is it exactly? … Read more »

Tintri IPO: What Next?

Despite a little hiccup and a delay of a day, Tintri Inc (NASDAQ:TNTR) finally successfully executed their Initial Public Offering of shares on 30 June 2017.  It looks like the extra day was used to rethink the opening share price, which reduced from $10 to $7 a share, netting the company around $60m.  So far,… Read more »

Pure1 META – Analytics for Pure Storage Arrays

It seems storage array analytics solutions are like opinions – everybody has one!  Pure Storage is the most recent entrant into the platform analytics game, with the introduction of Pure1 META at Pure Accelerate last month.  META claims to analyse the data from 1000’s of storage arrays, with over 7 petabytes of stored data and… Read more »

DataGravity Pointed The Way to Data Rather Than Storage Management

It’s interesting to see The Register report that DataGravity, a storage startup has been acquired.  At this stage there are rumours, but as yet the buyer has not been officially identified.  As a concept the company pushed a sensible idea; know more about the data your are storing to be able to offer value-add data… Read more »

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Latest

  • Flash Consolidation: NetApp to Acquire SolidFire

    Amid much rumour, Monday finally saw the announcement that NetApp Inc intends to acquire SolidFire Inc, an all-flash storage startup.  The agreement sees the company acquired for $870 million in cash, somewhat short of the $1.2 billion rumoured value.  Those of you following my posts (and other work) will know I’ve talked about both companies… Read more »

  • 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 »