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

  • News: Rackspace Goes Private with Apollo Global Management

    In a deal worth $4.3 billion, Rackspace is being acquired by investment company Apollo Global Management for $32 a share.  From what I’ve read so far, the press releases are putting a spin on it that implies the private route allows Rackspace to transform the company without the stress and attention of being a public… Read more »

  • Opinion: Is Enterprise Storage a Stagnant Market?

    Earlier this year I was at HPE Discover in Las Vegas and talking to Calvin Zito (HP Storage Guy) about the latest IDC Storage Tracker results.  Calvin posted on the Around The Storage Block blog, covering details on both servers and storage.  He highlighted the fact HPE was now ahead of EMC in terms of… Read more »

  • Seagate Ups The Ante with 60TB SSD

    Hot on the heels of Samsung’s 15TB SSD, Seagate has announced their own hyper-capacity drive, an (as yet) unnamed 60TB SAS solid state disk.  The new product was announced at the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, USA.  So is 60TB setting a new standard?  Is it a practical device for every day… Read more »

  • Hardware Still Delivering – New Products from Nimbus and E8

    Despite all the recent noise around software defined storage (SDS), vendors still keep coming to the market with new hardware solutions.  Over the past weeks we’ve seen new products from Nimbus Data and emerging startup E8. Nimbus Nimbus Data has had what can only be called a ‘chequered’ history.  My first introduction to the company was… Read more »

  • HPE Changes Storage Leadership – Goel out and Philbin in

    It was recently reported in the media that Manish Goel, HPE’s head of storage has left the company. This seems to be one of a number of changes, including the departure of Cloud head Bill Hilf.  Although I didn’t meet him directly, Manish presented to the bloggers/influencers at the latest HPE Discover event in Las… Read more »

  • PernixData and Nutanix – Where’s the Synergy?

    Although not officially announced, it looks like the acquisition of PernixData by Nutanix is a done deal.  Confirmation came from Frank Denneman, Dutch blogger and former tech evangelist for Pernix who has now left the company.  So what can we make of this?  What benefit is there in taking a caching technology and adding it… Read more »

  • RIP XtremIO?

    It’s a contentious title for a blog post, but I felt it worth writing a follow-up to both my Vulcan Cast with Marc Farley and Chris Mellor’s article in The Register.  A rumour circulating last week implied that EMC was considering shutting down the XtremIO product line.  The origin seemed to come from a number… Read more »

  • Windows Containers – Making Windows Server Relevant Again

    One of the most interesting presentations at DockerCon was on the implementation of containers (and Docker specifically) on the Microsoft Windows Server platform.  The Microsoft presentation was given by John Starks and Taylor Brown, although John did the majority of the presenting.  You can find the video online here.  Implementing containerisation for Windows has obviously… Read more »

  • Are DataCore’s SPC Benchmarks Unfair?

    DataCore has been active over recent months with benchmarks based on their new SANsymphony Parallel Server offering.  The most recent of these claims 5.1 million SPC-1 IOPS at $0.08/SPC-1 IOPS and 0.32 millisecond response time.  Other vendors are crying foul on these results, claiming they don’t represent a true test because all of the data… Read more »