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Riverbed's Granite Virtualizes Branch Office Storage
February 10, 2012 9:00 AM
When Riverbed and others brought WAN acceleration to the market around the turn of the century, many of us hoped that with WAN acceleration we could pull the servers, and the headaches they cause, from branch offices. Unfortunately many organizations found reasons to keep servers in the branches. Riverbed's new Granite appliance allows organizations to keep servers in their branch offices while eliminating many of the headaches through what Riverbed's calling Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure.
EMC's Lightning Strikes
February 07, 2012 9:00 AM
The storage cognoscenti have been all a twitter this morning as EMC announces the details of "Project Lightning", the flash-based server cache solution they previewed last May at EMCworld. The first version of the renamed VFCache is now available and it's clearly a version 1.0 product. Hopefully EMC will get some of the roadmap items out the door, and the just announced Thunder, soon.
HP Storage Tech Day
January 31, 2012 9:45 AM
Last week I joined a dozen or so fellow bloggers and storage industry gadflies for a storage field day at HP's Fort Collins, Colo., facility. Much like the more ecumenical Gestalt IT Tech Field Days run by our own Stephen Foskett, HP Tech Days let vendors show off their shiny new products while the street-wise delegates asked tough questions and took no marketing speak for an answer.
Alas, Poor Virtensys, I Knew Virtual I/O Horatio
January 25, 2012 10:00 AM
I must admit I was one of those folks who was intrigued by the idea of I/O virtualization. I led sessions at conferences exploring the various ways one could connect servers and peripherals to each other. The very idea that I could share expensive resources like RAID controllers and network connections from a shared pool seemed like a path to the flexibility I always wanted. Apparently, most of you disagreed, as at least one I/O virtualization pioneer, Virtensys, bit the dust this week.
Are There No Fans For The FAN?
January 19, 2012 9:00 AM
A few years ago, Brad O'Neill, then an analyst with the Taneja Group, coined the term FAN (file area network) to describe a virtualized file storage system. Organizations that build FANs that integrate multiple heterogeneous file stores presenting a single unified, optimized name space should be able to save a significant amount of time, effort and money. The collapse this month of AutoVirt is just another example of how this promising technology has never gained any traction with paying customers.
Thai Flooding Drives Disk Prices Up, Warranties Down
January 17, 2012 11:00 AM
The effects of fall's record-setting flooding in Thailand continue to reverberate throughout the storage industry. The flooding put several factories that made both completed disk drives for Seagate and Western Digital and components like platters, spindle motors and heads under several feet of water for weeks. The estimated production shortfall of 20 to 50 million drives in the fourth quarter has had a significant impact on the storage industry.
All I Want For Christmas Is 10Gbase-T
December 23, 2011 10:20 AM
Dear Santa: The best present you, and the networking industry, could give me is general availability of 10GBase-T across switches and NIC/CNAs. Once I can just order my 10gig network gear with 10Gbase-T, I can stop worrying about how to pay for optical transceivers at $350 to $1,200 a pop, as well as about the never-ending compatibility problems with both optics and twin-ax direct connect cables.
Most Of Our Benchmarks Are Broken
December 20, 2011 8:42 AM
For years, we in the storage industry have relied on a fairly small set of benchmarks to measure the relative performance of storage systems under different conditions. As storage systems have included new technologies-- including data reduction, flash memory as cache or automated tiering--our existing portfolio of synthetic benchmarks are starting to report results that aren't directly comparable to the performance that this new generation of storage systems will deliver in the real world.
The Cable Conundrum Continues--Vendors Respond
December 15, 2011 10:57 AM
After my initial adventures with 10 Gigabit Ethernet cabling, as recounted in "The 10 Gigabit Ethernet Cable Conundrum," I realized I needed to research this matter further. I put together a few simple questions about 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection technologies and sent them to some leading vendors to see what challenges a system administrator building a multivendor network would face in the real world.
Is A Hybrid Disk Drive In Your Future?
December 05, 2011 9:49 AM
Seagate this week announced an updated version of its Momentus XT hybrid disk drive. By combining flash and a spinning disk, hybrids promise most of the performance of an SSD at the cost per gigabyte of a hard drive. The new version comes pretty close to delivering on that promise.
The 10 Gigabit Ethernet Cable Conundrum
December 01, 2011 10:59 AM
As we enter the 10 Gigabit Ethernet era in the data center, we're facing some difficulties regarding cables and optics. While I'm happy all the vendors have settled on SFP+, eliminating the nightmare of figuring out if a given device uses XFP, Xenpack or X2 optics to make 10 Gigabit Ethernet affordable, we're going to have to use copper cables for the 10-Mbps or shorter connections within the data center. I just wish that was as easy as grabbing a cable that meets industry standard specs and plugging it in.
The Tape Format Rot Fear Factor
November 22, 2011 8:25 AM
As I speak with users at the backup seminars I teach around the country, I often hear them say that they avoid using tape for long-term data retention, expressing their concern with something like, "They come out with a new format every few years, and then you can't read your tapes." While it is technically true that, eventually you'll have to migrate data from old tapes to new media, and you should probably be able to go longer between migrations with tape than with disk archives.
Restore The VMTN Subscription
November 18, 2011 8:39 AM
I was pleased to see that blogger Mike Laverick, of RTFM-ed.co.uk, has inspired a grass-roots movement to convince VMware management to restart the VMTN subscription. Like Microsoft’s TechNet, Action Pack and MSDN subscriptions, VMTN subscriptions would get non-production licenses into the hands of geeks with home labs, independent developers and the like. VMware should restart VMTN tout de suite, not as a gesture to the power of social media, but because it will be good for business in the long run.
Ethernet Fabric As Core--A Modest Proposal
November 11, 2011 7:00 AM
As a reformed network geek who has turned to the dark side to follow the storage market, I've been especially intrigued by the evolution of data center Ethernet as fundamentally different not only from the 10-Mbps shared media Ethernet of old but, more significantly, from the direction of campus Ethernet. As we bring DCB, TRIIL-like Layer 2 multipathing and the like into the data center network, I would like to propose that many of us can eliminate the expensive modular switch that's typically served as the network core.
The Data Rich Are Different--They Use Tape
November 08, 2011 1:58 PM
I recently had the pleasure of attending a press and analyst day with the good folks from Spectra Logic, where the state of the market for tape storage finally sunk in. While most corporate users have evolved their backup processes to reduce, or eliminate, their reliance on tape, users with lots of data still find tape to be the best solution. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The rich are different," and that's true for those who are rich in data, as well.
Hard Disk Shortage Driving Up Prices
November 03, 2011 8:26 AM
Ever since Uncle Al Shugart presented the world with the ST-506, we could count on the fact that tomorrow's disk drives would be cheaper, on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis, than the ones we can buy today. I've regularly advised clients to plan to buy disk capacity later, as it will be cheaper and the disk drives will probably hold more. However, for at least the next few months, we're going to be facing a shortage of disk drives, and prices are already headed upward.
Data Deduplication And SSDs: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together
November 01, 2011 9:12 AM
It should come as no surprise to even the most casual observer that data deduplication and SSDs have been the most significant technologies in storage during the past few years. Until recently, however, they have been applied to very different problems. The solid state storage story has been about performance, but data deduplication, while it has begun to sneak into primary storage, was about efficiency and was mostly relegated to secondary storage systems.
Do Calendar Developers Travel?
October 25, 2011 11:45 AM
As a consultant, speaker and all-too-frequent conference attendee, I, like many of you, spend a good part of my life on the road, which frequently means I'm making appointments for meetings in cities and time zones across the country. Unfortunately, none of the tools I've tried really understands the life of a road warrior.
Vendors Turn Flash To Cache, Saving Cash
October 20, 2011 11:35 AM
Ever since EMC announced that it was putting SSDs--or, as it calls them, Enterprise Flash Drives--into its disk arrays, we as an industry have been straining our little brains to figure out the best way to use flash memory to improve our storage. We've used flash as a storage tier inside disk arrays, as a cache in those arrays and as dedicated storage systems. More recently, we've started seeing a variety of server- or system-side caching solutions. Is server-side caching the answer?
Google Voice Saves The Day
October 12, 2011 12:40 PM
This week I'm on the road at SNW in Orlando and then to speak at Dell's Tech Summit internal event leading into Dell World in Austin. During all the chaos of interplanetary travel, I rely heavily on Google Voice and its ability to track me down like a dog. When I discovered yesterday that my cell phone had gone among the missing, Google Voice once again came through for me.
Best of the Web
VXLAN termination on physical devices
VXLAN is an Experimental IETF draft of protocols to enable the creation of a large overlay, multi-tenant network.
ONF Deadly Serious About OpenFlow-Based SDNs
: OpenFlow is poised to reach over-hyped status, yet there are practical, useful reasons for keeping an eye on Openflow. The biggest cloud players are involved and driving the feature creation.
Practical Introduction to Applied OpenFlow
Get a primer on the Openflow protocol and what it can do for networking.
On Resilience of Spit-Architecture Networks
This research papers investigates the practical issues in split-architecture networks and the placement of the controllers, such as Openflow controllers, in the network.
