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

  • Dell Acquiring EMC – The Federation

    This is the second of a series of posts on the pending acquisition of EMC by Dell. One of the biggest features of the modern EMC has been the idea of a federation of independent businesses, established when EMC acquired VMware in 2004 (although public shares weren’t released to the market until 2007). EMC (more… Read more »

  • Dell Acquiring EMC – The Facts

    As I’m not a journalist, I don’t have a need to leap in and make commentary when big announcements/acquisitions are made. Instead I’ve taken the time to look at all of the comments already out there and formulate a more considered opinion. I doubt the acquisition of Dell by EMC has escaped most people’s attention… Read more »

  • PernixData FVP – Feature or Platform?

    A couple of weeks ago I was briefed on the latest technology to come out of PernixData; a software suite known as Architect, which provides insight into the I/O workload of virtual machines in a VMware vSphere environment.  The company’s previous (and still current) product is FVP, a caching software layer for the hypervisor that… Read more »

  • Standard SSDs or Custom NAND Modules?

    At VMworld last week I took part in a Tech Field Day presentation from Violin Memory, one of the earliest all-flash array start-ups.  Violin are “relaunching” the company, following on from many senior management changes and a lot of work to make their products more relevant.  One point of discussion (specifically from me) was whether… Read more »

  • Kaminario Releases K2 v5.5 With $1/GB Price Point

    Last week Kaminario Inc, a start-up vendor of all-flash storage solutions released an upgrade to their K2 platform.  The release, introduces three main new features: 3D TLC NAND, achieving a $1/GB price point (usable). Native data asynchronous replication, based on snapshots. A feature called “Perpetual Array” to take some of the operational and financial cost… Read more »

  • Flash Economics: Choosing The Right SSD

    This post first appeared on the Kaminario Blog – http://kaminario.com/blog/flash-economics-choosing-right-ssd/ At a superficial level, it’s easy to assume that all solid-state disks (SSDs) are the same. In reality, that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. SSDs continue to evolve and are dividing into a broad product category, in much the same way that hard disk… Read more »

  • Avoiding The Forklift Upgrade – Kaminario Guest Post

    I’ve recently started working with Kaminario, an all-flash array startup vendor and will be publishing a series of posts and papers on the Kaminario site.  I’ll also be linking them here for convenience.  The first post covers scale-out architectures as a way to avoid the continual replacement of technology – the so called forklift upgrade…. Read more »

  • Nutanix Goes After Private Cloud with XCP

    This week Nutanix held their .NEXT conference in sunny Miami, around plenty of anticipation for what was to be announced.  In the hyper-converged market-place there’s not a lot of love lost between the incumbents like VMware and the upstarts like Nutanix, as can be seen from recent blog posts that play on the polarisation of… Read more »

  • HP Expands 3PAR Range with New 20800 Arrays

      In what has become somewhat of a tradition at HP Discover, the HP 3PAR StoreServ platforms were extended this week with the announcements of new products and features, including the massively scalable 20800 series.  HP released two new models: 20800 “Converged Flash” – a hybrid system, scaling up to eight nodes, 33.8TB of cache,… Read more »