Podcast #3 – Chris & Matt review the SFD18 presenters

Here’s a little extra podcast Matt Leib and I recorded this afternoon in preparation for Storage Field Day 18.  You can tell this wasn’t recorded in a studio, but actually Matt’s hotel room!  Matt preps coffee in his mini-Nespresso device while we discuss each of the presenting vendors. The discussion is ad-hoc, off the cuff… Read more »

Thoughts from Hitachi NEXT 2018

Earlier this year I was invited to Hitachi NEXT in lovely San Diego.  As part of my trip, I took the time to learn a little more about some of the technology Hitachi has been working on and bringing to market either directly through Hitachi Ltd or Hitachi Vantara.  You may remember that Hitachi Vantara… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – exploiting the cloud

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – exploiting the cloud” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. No modern data platform would be complete if we didn’t talk about the use of public cloud. Public cloud can play a very… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Out on the edge

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Out on the edge” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In this series so far we have concentrated on the data under our control in our datacentres and managed clouds and protected… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Prevention (Office365)

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Prevention (Office365)” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In this series so far, we have looked at getting our initial foundations right and ensuring we have insight and control of our data… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Control

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Control” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In the first parts (here and here) of this series we have looked at ensuring the building blocks of our platform are right… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Availability

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Availability” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In part one we discussed the importance of getting our storage platform right, in part two we look at availability. The idea that availability is a crucial… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – The Storage

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – The Storage” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. It probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who has read my blogs previously to find out that when it comes to the… Read more »

Automating HCI Data Protection

I recently wrote a number of posts covering HYCU, a data protection software solution from HYCU Inc.  During the testing I was curious to understand how easy it would be to automate the build of a dedicated backup environment.  Here’s what I found. HYCU Recap HYCU is a software product that was written specifically for… Read more »

The Shifting Storage Investment Paradigm

The standard evolution for startup vendors in the storage market has been to create a product, build a customer base and wait to be acquired or float the company in an IPO.  Some companies have been more successful than others.  XtremIO for example was acquired very early – great for the VCs that put up… Read more »

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Latest

  • Violin Memory acquires Gridiron Systems

    Yesterday, Violin announced that they have acquired Gridiron Systems, a vendor of cache acceleration hardware and software.  At the outset it may seem odd that an all-flash vendor would want to acquire a company offering acceleration for traditional arrays, however this could be a very smart deal indeed in a number of ways. Software is… Read more »

  • Vendor Lock-in with Cloud Storage – Good or Bad?

    There have been two interesting and contrasting announcements covering cloud storage in the last couple of weeks.  The first was NetApp, who have announced “NetApp Private Storage for AWS”.  which seems to a proprietary way of replicating data into the AWS cloud.  The second comes from Nirvanix and Violin Memory; Violin have deployed their all-SSD… Read more »

  • The Evolution of Solid State Arrays

    In the first wave of solid-state storage arrays, we saw commodity style SSDs (solid state drives) being added to traditional storage appliances.  This solution provided an incremental benefit in performance over spinning hard drives, however the back-end technology in these arrays was developed up to 20 years ago and was purely focused around driving performance… Read more »

  • VMware vVOLS – More Than Just Individual LUNs?

    During the VMware keynote session today there was a minor discussion on the upcoming concept of VMware vVOLS.  Today, a virtual machine sits on a VMFS created on a storage LUN or on an NFS share.  An individual virtual machine consists of many files and in the case of VMFS-based VMs, is sitting on a… Read more »

  • Optimising Storage Architectures for SSD

    Last week I attended Hitachi’s 2012 Blogger Day.  Aside from catching up with some old friends, we were presented with some NDA stuff which will see the light of day soon.  In the meantime, I want to talk about a press release Hitachi made while I was still on holiday (and clearly missed as I… Read more »

  • August Storage Announcements – Pure Storage

    August seems to have been the month for a huge raft of storage-related announcements and I’m still getting to grips with the detail, after being away on holiday for the whole month.  As I start to pick out the news and make sense of how it fits into the storage landscape, I thought I’d start… Read more »

  • APIs Are Essential for Delivering Storage in Enterprise Cloud Infrastructures

    It’s pretty easy to pick holes in the current legacy storage products, especially when it comes to integration within both public and private cloud deployments.  However it’s worth discussing exactly what is required when implementing cloud frameworks, as the way in which storage is deployed is radically different from the traditional model of storage operations…. Read more »

  • Is Google Drive Too Late to the Party?

    Like many people, the other week I downloaded and installed Google Drive.  This is the long-awaited competitor to services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.  It offers free online storage with the ability to upgrade to higher capacity at a cost.  Dropbox and the various other lookalikes have been around for some time, so is Google… Read more »

  • Primary Storage De-duplication: Only for SSD Arrays?

    I recently wrote an article for TechTarget that looked at the implementations of data de-duplication in primary storage arrays.  One of the things that stood out for me was the lack of de-duplication support in traditional (and some might say legacy) storage arrays. The cynical amongst us would say that the big 5 storage vendors… Read more »