Avoiding the Storage Performance Bathtub Curve

We’re probably all familiar with the concept of the HDD or SSD reliability bathtub curve (figure 1).  This shows how over the lifetime of a drive, failures typically follow a pattern where failure rate increases over time to a steady state, then increases again as the device wears out.  But have you considered the idea… Read more »

The Britpop Battle of Rubrik and Cohesity

Were you a Blur or Oasis fan?  Perhaps you were on the side of Jarvis Cocker and preferred Pulp.  Whatever your choice, the Britpop wars of the 1990s were memorable for building hype around the UK music industry and the idea of Cool Britannia. In lots of ways, the evolution of the data protection industry… Read more »

NVMe over Fabrics – Caveat Emptor?

For the past 20 years, Fibre Channel has been the dominant enterprise data centre storage networking technology.  By this, I mean traditional Fibre Channel, not variants that work over IP or use Converged Ethernet (more on that in a moment).  It’s true that other protocols exist.  Smaller organisations have typically used iSCSI, because of the… Read more »

IDC 1Q2018 Data Shows a Rebound for Storage Hardware Sales

The latest IDC Storage Tracker numbers are out and in the spirit of recent analysis, I’ve put the numbers into my tracking spreadsheet.  The figures represent data for Q1, which now has 12 years’ worth of coverage.  With around 42% growth in the general storage hardware figures and 20% in external storage sales, the numbers… Read more »

Avoiding All-Flash Missing IOPS

We are living in a golden age of storage media, where new products come to market offering ever greater performance with lower latency than previous generations.  Today the hard drive and even early flash drives look positively archaic compared to modern NVMe drives built from 3D-XPoint, capable of delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS and… Read more »

The Race towards End-to-End NVMe in the Data Centre

The next greatest thing in storage hardware is the move to NVMe.  This is occurring in two ways – conversion of internal designs within shared storage platforms to use NVMe at the “back-end”, and front-end (or host connectivity) using NVMe over Fabrics in some form.  Vendors are starting to use the term “end-to-end” NVMe as… Read more »

Micron ushers in the era of QLC SSDs

To date we’ve only seen QLC NAND storage in the consumer SD card format, however, that’s set to change as Micron announces the first QLC SATA SSD for the data centre.  The Micron 5210 ION SSD will deliver up to 7.68TB of capacity in a standard 2.5″, 7mm form factor.  But there’s a catch –… Read more »

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 »

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Latest

  • A Quick Comment on IBM FlashSystem

    It’s been pointed out to me from time to time that I don’t give IBM a fair mention when talking about all-flash systems.  According to Gartner, IBM are in the top right quadrant of the AFA MQ and therefore classed as leaders and visionaries.  So, let’s spend a few moments to discuss their strategy and products. TMS IBM… Read more »

  • Revisiting Seagate Kinetic Drives

    Around 2.5 years ago, I blogged about the release of new object-based hard disk drives from Seagate called Kinetic.  The idea is that the drives don’t use traditional storage protocols like SAS and SATA, but instead store objects written and retrieved over Ethernet.  Effectively each drive is a large key-value store that manages it’s own content.  You PUT… Read more »

  • Hybrid Cloud and Data Mobility

    Update: check out cloud migration posts: Cloud Data Migration – Database Import Tools Cloud Data Migration – Shipping Virtual Machines Cloud Data Migration – Data Transfer Using Physical Shipping & Appliances I remember going to an HP(E) event back in 2011 (Discover Vegas I think) when the idea of hybrid cloud and converged infrastructure was… Read more »

  • Pure //Accelerate 2016 – FlashBlade

    As already discussed in this recent post, Pure Storage announced new products and services at their first user conference, Pure //Accelerate 2o16.  The announcements included; FlashBlade, a scale-out all-flash NAS & object platform; FlashArray //m10, a new entry-level block-storage device and upgrades to FlashStack, Pure’s converged infrastructure solutions.  This post will discuss FlashBlade. FlashBlade There… Read more »

  • Build or Buy – A Tale of Two All-Flash Strategies

    Update: Andy Warfield of Coho Data has written a post on the FlashBlade architecture and decision choices to build/buy.  Find it here (link). Ever since flash was first added to traditional storage arrays back in 2008, there has been vigorous debate on the right approach to storage architectures for all-flash systems.  There are a number… Read more »

  • Storage Performance: Why I/O Profiling Matters

    With a significant amount of annual IT budgets being spent on storage (25% by some estimates), the focus on making storage deliver to the needs of the business has never been greater.  However, despite the advances in flash technology, larger disk drives, the move to commodity and software defined storage, the problems faced by customers… Read more »

  • Storage Field Day 9 Preview: VMware

    This is one of a series of posts discussing the presenters at Storage Field Day 9, occurring 16th-18th March 2016 in Silicon Valley, at which I am an attending delegate.  See links at the end of this post to other presenting vendors.  Details of the event can be found on the Storage Field Day 9… Read more »

  • Object Storage: S3 API Advanced Features

    This post is the third of a series of independently written technical briefings on the AWS S3 API and how it has become the de-facto standard for object stores.  The series is commissioned by Cloudian Inc.  For more information on Cloudian and the company’s HyperStore object storage technology, please visit their site at: http://www.cloudian.com/ Webinar: Join me… Read more »

  • Storage Field Day 9 Preview: Intel

    This is one of a series of posts discussing the presenters at Storage Field Day 9, occurring 16th-18th March 2016 in Silicon Valley, at which I am an attending delegate.  See links at the end of this post to other presenting vendors.  Details of the event can be found on the Storage Field Day 9… Read more »