Storage Nation

No, this is not another shameless pitch to attend yet-another-vendor show.

Separated at birth? There have been some interesting discussions lately about storage tiering   And just because 3PAR beat most everybody else to the punch this week with our AO announcement , I think it's important to keep things in perspective – storage tiering does not solve everybody's problems

Hitachi Data Systems has been very successful selling the benefits of Storage Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning.

Here’s my roundup of all the posts, pictures, video and comments from the HP Blades Tech Day Tweets The official hashtag for the event was #hpbladesday with hundreds of tweets being generated from the start of the Tech Day until now. Bloggers’ Posts By name order, here are the relevant posts from each blogger

The other news item I alluded to in the previous post is a little company called Nasuni.  I chatted with them at the urging of the smartest PR person in the business, Judy Smith at JPR Communications, a couple of days ago and I thought I would share my views here. Here is a pretty picture

We learned as kids.  Here is an article I wrote about it in Mainframe Executive, which has been cross-posted to MainframeZone. I am also pleased that an article by moi — the REAL storage blogger wannabe — has just hit the wire at ESJ.com.  It covers file proliferation and the lame efforts of the industry to scale

Yesterday, 3PAR announced Adaptive Optimization (AO), our solution for storage tiering and support for SSD flash drives. Here are the elements of this technology that I believe will have the most impact on customers and the rest of the industry. 1) Tiering works by making copies of data on lower cost, low-IOPS storage to high-IOPS storage – and back again.  Storage tiering has been associated with ILM, which assumed data is initially located on more expensive, high-IOPS storage and, as it ages and is accessed less frequently, is moved to lower-cost, low-IOPS storage. The perception that tiering implies fast to slow data migration was reinforced by Compellent with it's early entrant storage tiering technology, Data Progression .

“What will it take to make you scream?” asks Milo, the bad guy in The Last Boyscout. “Play some rap music,” responds Bruce Willis in the lead role of private investigator Joseph Hallenbeck.

Home lab storage I’ve just about got my home lab fully organised; here’s a quick summary of what I have in place. Storage I’ve four main storage devices, DroboPro, Iomega ix4-200D (two) and an EMC CLARiiON CX-700.  This gives me NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity options on any testing I’m performing.  The storage is broken down as follows: DroboPro – 8.4TB of raw storage across 7 disks (nearly fully populated) – iSCSI Iomega ix4 – 2x 4TB of raw storage across 4 disks – iSCSI & NAS CLARiiON – 2.2TB of raw storage across 15 disks – Fibre Channel This gives me 18.6TB of raw capacity.  One of the ix4 devices is production, running my VMs on ESX, the other is for testing performance and configurations but will ultimately form my remote backup solution.  Servers Server Rack My main server is an Intel Based, 2 CPU, 8 core custom-build machine with 16GB of RAM.  It runs ESXi 4.0 and has access to all storage resources as well as another 1.6TB of internal storage.  This machine runs all my production and test virtual machines.  A second server runs Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V (upgraded this week).  This is my Hyper-V test server.  It has a single 500GB drive and access to all storage resources, including fibre channel via an Emulex LP12000 HBA card. I also have two other smaller servers that act as test machines in various scenarios, one of which is currently acting as an OPEN-E server (the subject of a future post). Fabric The fabric in my test lab is provided by a number of McDATA 3232 switches.  Although they are servicable, they are looking old now, so I’m looking to acquire a Cisco MDS switch to add to these for some time in the future

The news is here ,  and    here ,     and here . 3PAR announced its storage tiering technology today with the introduction of our Adaptive Optimization (AO) software and with support for flash SSDs.  There's probably going to be a lot of discussion about storage tiering and AO in the weeks to come, so stay tuned.