Last week I sat through a presentation by Samsung on the evolution of their DRAM and flash business. One question raised by a journalist in the room related to the reliability of flash drives. The presenter proceeded to talk about the industry and how endurance means flash has a finite lifetime, one which now varies… Read more »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »