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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

There’s been a lot of coverage and potential hype around the impending release of Intel and Micron’s 3D-XPoint persistent storage technology.  Now it seems we have a good example of how Optane (as Intel are branding it) could be deployed into existing storage platforms.  During HPE Discover London (December 2016), the 3PAR team ran a demo… Read more »

AWS just announced the availability of an on-premises version of their Linux AMI, delivered as a Docker image (link).  This may seem an innocent and rather subdued announcement, but don’t forget that we also recently had the release of the AWS Server Migration Service (link) at the end of October.  AWS and VMware just became… Read more »

Block-based storage (and particularly that based on Fibre Channel) has always been the favoured child when it comes to vendors talking about their products and solutions.  All of the high-end performing devices tend (but not exclusively) to be block-based.  However we’re seeing an increased focus on high performance NAS platforms, especially those with scale-out capabilities…. Read more »

Updated: AWS is pushing on with getting workload into the cloud directly too – see the new AWS Server Migration Service (link) Last week, VMware announced a new service called VMware Cloud on AWS (abbreviated  by some people to VMC).  I’ve been taking a little time to digest the news and views of others before… Read more »

Probably the most annoying and frustrating part of being a storage manager in the 1990s was the lack of decent management and automation tools.  Each storage vendor had some good and some bad software for managing their arrays.  EMC’s Symmetrix/DMX/VMAX range, for example, had a great and well thought out CLI management tool; Solutions Enabler…. Read more »