Western Digital Redefines DRAM Caching

In a recent press release, Western Digital announced the release of an interesting if not curious solution for extending DRAM with fast storage.  The Ultrastar DC ME200 extends server DRAM using proprietary caching software in an attempt to fully exploit the capabilities of modern multi-core processors.  In an age where in-memory computing is increasing in… Read more »

ESXi on ARM – Why?

This is certainly a question I’ve been pondering for a few weeks since the announcements at VMworld 2018 and where Ray O’Farrell presented ESXi running on an ARM Cortex A72 device.  Since my last post covering some VMware news, I’ve been asking – is there any logic in running a hypervisor on an IoT platform… Read more »

Technology First? Requirements First!

As more an observer of the technology industry these days, something struck a chord with me as I listened to a recent podcast recording.  Paul Stringfellow hosts a weekly podcast called Tech Interviews.  In Episode 77, he spoke to Matt Watts from NetApp on “cloud first” as a strategy.  The TL;DR of the discussion is… Read more »

HDD Capacity Threshold Reaches 15TB

Western Digital has announced what is currently the largest capacity hard drive available on the market today.  The Ultrastar DC HC620 has 15TB of capacity in a helium-filled 3.5″ form-factor.  This is a 7% increase (or obviously 1TB) over the 14TB drive announced in October 2017. Incremental The new capacity drive looks more like an… Read more »

IBM Buys Red Hat

Probably the biggest talking point this week is the announcement that IBM intends to buy Red Hat Inc, purveyor of the open source Red Hat operating system and an entire ecosystem of products around it.  The acquisition is interesting, firstly because of the attention it has garnered, but also for the implications to public cloud,… Read more »

Database Replication is Hard

I can only feel sympathy for the team at GitHub, after they suffered an outage recently, due to issues with database replication.  The problem was caused by a mere 43-second break in network connectivity.  We’ve all been there – keeping replicated data in sync is a thankless task and one that can be a nightmare… Read more »

Evolving Enterprise Storage Buying Models

One of the most tedious of tasks I’ve had to undertake over the years has been the planning and deployment of new storage technology.  In that respect, I’m not referring to the physical installation, but rather the process of capacity planning, sourcing and agreeing terms on new storage capacity.  Increasingly, internal businesses consume storage on-demand… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – exploiting the cloud

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – exploiting the cloud” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. No modern data platform would be complete if we didn’t talk about the use of public cloud. Public cloud can play a very… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Out on the edge

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Out on the edge” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In this series so far we have concentrated on the data under our control in our datacentres and managed clouds and protected… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Prevention (Office365)

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Prevention (Office365)” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In this series so far, we have looked at getting our initial foundations right and ensuring we have insight and control of our data… Read more »

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Latest

  • 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 »

  • Are We Suffering Logo Addiction Syndrome?

    Remember when converged infrastructure came in?  We were told that packaging was the next best thing and doing things in separate towers of skills was bad.  Now it appears we’ve developed Logo Addiction and should be looking to build things from scratch again. The basis of this thesis is a presentation at Interop ITX by… Read more »

  • Validating HYCU Deployment By The Numbers

    Vendors like to claim that their software is “1-click” or installable within 30 seconds.  In general these claims are pretty fatuous unless you’re either frequently deploying or looking to automate.  I’ve been spending a bit of time looking at a range of storage solutions that are fully software-defined and seeing how easy that deployment process… Read more »

  • Dell EMC to Offer Isilon on Google Cloud Platform

    It’s Dell Technologies World this week in Las Vegas and the first announcement of interest is the future offering of the Isilon NAS platform on Google Cloud Platform.  The details of Isilon Cloud on GCP are scant, to say the least.  All I’ve found so far is this community post (link).  With little to go… Read more »

  • What are TBW (Terabytes Written) and DWPD (Device Writes Per Day)?

    TBW is an acronym for  Terabytes Written and DWPD is an acronym for Device Writes Per Day.  Both are measures of the endurance of flash storage. Conflating Reliability and Endurance in SSDs What is the Technology Behind Samsung Z-NAND? Flash storage has a limit on the number of write (or specifically program/erase) cycles that can… Read more »

  • The Burden of Technical Debt

    As the issues at TSB continue to unfold, I look on at an IT problem that will likely never be fully explained and eventually disappear into the archives as yet another “computer glitch”.  Why does it keep happening, what’s wrong with the industry and how can we do better next time? Experience Who am I… Read more »

  • NetApp embraces cloud for future business growth

    Technology is a fickle business and surviving more than a few short years is hard to achieve.  The industry changes very quickly, as the next greatest thing consigns solutions and products to being legacy, even if they are still running many organisations’ core business.  Storage has evolved to be a major part of any IT… Read more »

  • Why HCI Data Protection is Different

    When so many businesses are totally dependent on their digital information, data protection becomes a key requirement for every IT organisation.  The way in which we implement technology changes almost daily and this affects the choices on how we protect it.  Where 20 years ago the standard model for deployment was based on physical servers,… Read more »