-
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 »