Conflating Data Protection and Data Mobility

Sitting on the sidelines, I’ve been watching some of the traffic and communications coming from VeeamON this week.  Chris Mellor just posted a quick article summing up the ambitions of Veeam as a company.  It struck me that we continue to conflate the idea of data protection and data mobility.  To me, these are two… Read more »

NetApp Extends Cloud Volumes to GCP

Following their introduction on Microsoft Azure last year, native NetApp Cloud Volumes are to be made available through Google Cloud Platform.  NetApp now offers Cloud Volumes in some form on the three major (Western) cloud providers, AWS, Azure and GCP.  How should we view this, especially in respect of how cloud services are evolving? Maturity… Read more »

PowerMax, VMAX, XtremIO – the Agony of Choice

Last week Dell EMC announced the next generation of the long-running Symmetrix platform with the release of PowerMax.  This all-NVMe array apparently isn’t a replacement for VMAX (or XtremIO).  However it is yet another decision point in customer choice for all-flash from Dell EMC.  Does the company need another all-flash array or is this just… Read more »

Are We Suffering Logo Addiction Syndrome?

Remember when converged infrastructure came in?  We were told that packaging was the next best thing and doing things in separate towers of skills was bad.  Now it appears we’ve developed Logo Addiction and should be looking to build things from scratch again. The basis of this thesis is a presentation at Interop ITX by… Read more »

Validating HYCU Deployment By The Numbers

Vendors like to claim that their software is “1-click” or installable within 30 seconds.  In general these claims are pretty fatuous unless you’re either frequently deploying or looking to automate.  I’ve been spending a bit of time looking at a range of storage solutions that are fully software-defined and seeing how easy that deployment process… Read more »

Dell EMC to Offer Isilon on Google Cloud Platform

It’s Dell Technologies World this week in Las Vegas and the first announcement of interest is the future offering of the Isilon NAS platform on Google Cloud Platform.  The details of Isilon Cloud on GCP are scant, to say the least.  All I’ve found so far is this community post (link).  With little to go… Read more »

What are TBW and DWPD?

TBW is an acronym for  Terabytes Written and DWPD is an acronym for Device Writes Per Day.  Both are measures of the endurance of flash storage. Conflating Reliability and Endurance in SSDs What is the Technology Behind Samsung Z-NAND? Flash storage has a limit on the number of write (or specifically program/erase) cycles that can… Read more »

The Burden of Technical Debt

As the issues at TSB continue to unfold, I look on at an IT problem that will likely never be fully explained and eventually disappear into the archives as yet another “computer glitch”.  Why does it keep happening, what’s wrong with the industry and how can we do better next time? Experience Who am I… Read more »

NetApp embraces cloud for future business growth

Technology is a fickle business and surviving more than a few short years is hard to achieve.  The industry changes very quickly, as the next greatest thing consigns solutions and products to being legacy, even if they are still running many organisations’ core business.  Storage has evolved to be a major part of any IT… Read more »

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 »

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Latest

  • Nine Critical Features for Object Stores

    Object storage is a relatively new market segment that has continued to grow steadily and is starting to find more reasons for adoption.  For the uninitiated, object stores are used to hold large volumes of unstructured data, where each “object” is essentially a file with no specific format (also called a binary file).  Object stores… Read more »

  • Building Data Storage With Containers

    Note: Updated on 18 January 2017 to include OpenEBS. There’s an almost religious divide between those who see containers as entirely stateless objects and others taking a more pragmatic approach that says state and containers is an inevitable thing.  In the stateless model, data is assumed to be replicated and protected by many container instances. … Read more »

  • HPE Demos 3PAR with Intel Optane (3D-XPoint)

    There’s been a lot of coverage and potential hype around the impending release of Intel and Micron’s 3D-XPoint persistent storage technology.  Now it seems we have a good example of how Optane (as Intel are branding it) could be deployed into existing storage platforms.  During HPE Discover London (December 2016), the 3PAR team ran a demo… Read more »

  • AWS Getting Serious About Enterprise On-Prem with Dockerised Linux AMI

    AWS just announced the availability of an on-premises version of their Linux AMI, delivered as a Docker image (link).  This may seem an innocent and rather subdued announcement, but don’t forget that we also recently had the release of the AWS Server Migration Service (link) at the end of October.  AWS and VMware just became… Read more »

  • Focus on High Performance NAS

    Block-based storage (and particularly that based on Fibre Channel) has always been the favoured child when it comes to vendors talking about their products and solutions.  All of the high-end performing devices tend (but not exclusively) to be block-based.  However we’re seeing an increased focus on high performance NAS platforms, especially those with scale-out capabilities…. Read more »

  • Peak VMware

    Updated: AWS is pushing on with getting workload into the cloud directly too – see the new AWS Server Migration Service (link) Last week, VMware announced a new service called VMware Cloud on AWS (abbreviated  by some people to VMC).  I’ve been taking a little time to digest the news and views of others before… Read more »

  • SNIA has high hopes for Swordfish

    Probably the most annoying and frustrating part of being a storage manager in the 1990s was the lack of decent management and automation tools.  Each storage vendor had some good and some bad software for managing their arrays.  EMC’s Symmetrix/DMX/VMAX range, for example, had a great and well thought out CLI management tool; Solutions Enabler…. Read more »

  • Cloud Will Not Consume IT – Apparently

    Public cloud will not consume all of IT, at least that’s what Michael Dell is claiming.  In his opinion, cloud will become just another form of computing and a choice will be made by users to do cloud on-premises or rent from a cloud provider.  Bearing in mind Dell is in the hardware business, we… Read more »

  • Cache or Tier – Does it Matter?

    Who would have thought such an innocent comment would have created a stream of conversation?  Well, that’s what happened after I called out the Avere folks on the use of the term “tiered file system” during their presentation at Storage Field Day 11.  We even followed the discussion with a podcast, in an attempt to flesh… Read more »