Pure Accelerate: FlashArray Gets Synchronous Replication

Synchronous replication is a key feature that many enterprises depend on for data protection as it offers the ability to ensure data is 100% copied to a remote site in the event of a disaster.  On flash storage, sync replication may seem a little at odds with the idea of providing high performance, but the… Read more »

HPE 3PAR and Nimble – Finding that Differentiating Niche

Update: I initially wrote this post and had it in draft for publication, however my views were changed by an announcement made today (see later in the post) I had some interesting feedback from one of my recent previous posts, in which I suggested that HPE might be planning to retire the 3PAR platform in… Read more »

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 »

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Latest

  • Cache or Tier – Does it Matter?

    Who would have thought such an innocent comment would have created a stream of conversation?  Well, that’s what happened after I called out the Avere folks on the use of the term “tiered file system” during their presentation at Storage Field Day 11.  We even followed the discussion with a podcast, in an attempt to flesh… Read more »

  • Storage Field Day 11 Previews: Intel, HGST

    This is the second of two posts previewing the presenters at Storage Field Day 11, due to take place in San Jose 5-7 October 2016. In my previous post I discussed how the three companies in question (Avere, Primary Data and Scality) were focused on software-based data management.  In this post I cover the two… Read more »

  • Storage Field Day 11 Previews: Avere, Primary Data, Scality

    In the past I’ve attempted to write a single post for each vendor as a preview to Tech Field Day.  This time at Storage Field Day 11, for brevity, I’ve decided to divide the presenters into two groups.  Trying to find some connection between the vendors isn’t easy, but there is some bizarre logic here…. Read more »

  • M.2 SSD Drive Format is Under-rated by Enterprise Storage

    Last week I was reading this article on Ars Technica discussing the latest Samsung M.2 format drives to hit the market.  In something similar to a DIMM format, you get up to 2TB of capacity and read/write speeds of 3.5GB/s and 2.1GB/s respectively.  M.2 comes in a range of sizes and was originally developed for… Read more »

  • NetApp, Storage Class Memory and Hyperconvergence

    Chris Mellor at The Register has an interesting article following up on rumours of NetApp moving into the hyper-convergence market.  This intention shouldn’t be a surprise in some respects.  As the storage market fragments, the incumbents have to adapt to the needs of customers and hyper-converged systems are – by any measure – popular. Storage… Read more »

  • Unreliable Disks for Better Scale-out Storage

    Recently I was asked to review a document that used as a reference a piece of work from Google which talked about the need to relax the resiliency levels of hard drives and SSDs.  The premise is interesting; hyper-scalers claim they could do a better job in managing performance and availability if the HDDs they… Read more »

  • HPE Sells off “Non-Core” Software Assets

    On the day the Dell/EMC acquisition/merger completed, HPE announced it was selling off a load of non-core software assets in a “spin-off” merger with UK’s Micro Focus.  HPE gets $2.5 billion in cash and HPE shareholders get a 50.1% ownership of the new entity, which will continue to be called Micro Focus.  In addition SUSE… Read more »

  • Object Storage Leading the Advancement of Software Defined Storage

    Software Defined Storage (SDS) is one of those terms that has been readily hijacked by vendors over the past few years.  The term developed from the adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN), used to define the separation of control and data traffic in the networking world that provides the abstraction needed to deliver more efficient… Read more »

  • Nutanix Acquires PernixData and Calm.io

    So it appears the rumours were true as Nutanix finally announces the acquisition of both PernixData and calm.io, a start-up focused on DevOps automation.  Naturally the blog post and press release from Nutanix puts a positive spin on things, with talks of shared vision, shared ambition and a “like-spirited” approach to IT operations. As I discussed in… Read more »