Storage Nation

ESJ.com is running another of our C-4 Project video segments, this time with CEO and Chairman of FalconStor, ReiJane Huai.  Check it out. Mr. Huai reflected on his role in bringing tape backup to the distributed world, then offered commentary on several topics of interest including the formation of mini-me mainframes (“if you are going to

The tickler I received in email this AM filled me with interest in what Mr. Foskett, lately of Nirvanix, was going to write about this question in his multi-part blog.  My fingers tingled with expectation as I keyed in the URL for his postings

Over the last week there have been a few stories catching my eye.  Here’s a brief paragraph on them. SGI Acquires COPAN Systems In fact to be more precise, SGI have acquired some of the assets of COPAN and left the liabilities behind for a mere $2 million in cash ( press release ).  The demise of COPAN raises two potential questions; is spin-down a dead technology or were COPAN in a market that wasn’t able to understand their technology

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

“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

This week we shared with our partners that Oracle and HDS will not renew the current distribution agreement for our Enterprise Storage platform that we had with Sun Microsystems prior to the Oracle acquisition. That agreement expires on March 31. We have enjoyed a very good relationship with Sun over the past nine years and have many joint customers whom we consider as our own. Oracle has ongoing capability to service their installations beyond the end of the Sun contract and we will continue to work with them to ensure that these customers receive the same high level service and support.