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 »

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 »

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Latest

  • Rumours of Cisco Acquiring Nutanix – Hyper-Converged Consolidation?

    According to Jared Rinderer, via an article that appears in Storage Newsletter, Cisco is on the verge of making a bid to acquire Nutanix, a vendor of hyper-converged systems.  The rumour has been quashed by none other than Nutanix CEO Deeraj Pandey, via an article on The Var Guy website.  In fact, Pandey intimated that… Read more »

  • Why VSAN and VVOLs are Not Software Defined

    Every so often another attempt is made by the vendor community to put a definition to what we call “software defined storage” or SDS.  The current discussion is on VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) and VVOLs, software features focused on storage within the vSphere hypervisor ecosystem. This seems like a good opportunity for me to review what… Read more »

  • vSphere vDS SPAN port with Wireshark in 2 minutes

    I often find myself searching for facts to dispel “hearsay” and guesswork in troubleshooting discussions between the Network and Windows VM teams.  This article is intended to show just how straightforward it is to use the VMware distributed switch SPAN port capability, to put a virtual sniffer on a virtual port on a virtual distributed… Read more »

  • EMC, ScaleIO and The VMkernel

    There’s been a bit of conversation recently on the intention of EMC to put drivers for their ScaleIO platform into the VMware ESXi hypervisor kernel.  The discussion was triggered by an article published in LeMagIT on 25 November 2014 by Christophe Bardy and subsequently picked up by The Register.  It implied that VMware and EMC were… Read more »

  • What Next for Storage in 2015?

    Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there’s anything more to achieve in data storage.  Surely things are pretty much complete; we have the ability to store vast quantities of data reliably and each year the per unit cost of storage continues to decline.  So as 2015 rolls in, is there anything left to achieve?  What… Read more »

  • NetApp Integrated EVO: RAIL – A Triumph of Marketing Over Common Sense

    I suspect I wasn’t the only one last week who was scratching his head at the latest idea from NetApp which sees them offering a VMware EVO: RAIL solution that incorporates Data ONTAP filer technology.  In case that last statement is unclear to you, yes, NetApp are suggesting that EVO: RAIL, the solution that uses… Read more »

  • VSAN, VSA or Dedicated Array?

    I don’t normally write blog posts that follow up on other people’s discussions however having seen some of the tweets relating to Nigel’s blog post on VSA versus VSAN, I realised my comments on the subject would stretch to an entire post of their own.  So here it is. The discussion (although I haven’t listened… Read more »

  • Gartner Reveals Increasingly Irrelevant All Flash Array MQ

    Chris Mellor has posted a new ‘Register article that covers the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State (or all-flash) Arrays.  It’s an interesting read, with EMC and Pure Storage topping the polls and IBM not far behind.  However as the use of flash within the enterprise has increased, the idea of a magic quadrant… Read more »

  • EMC Focuses on Services with VMAX3

    Last week EMC announced an upgrade to their flagship Symmetrix high-end enterprise storage platform and the release of VMAX3.  With a maximum capacity of 384 cores and 5760 drives, the new platform scales to capacities never before seen in a single storage array.  What’s possibly more interesting though, is EMC’s intentions with what’s being called… Read more »