Storage Nation

Here is a list of links to posts that I thought were interesting regarding the announcement today of Dell's intentions to acquire 3PAR. Chuck Hollis, blogger from EMC Stephen Foskett, Leader of independent storage bloggers consortium Steve Duplessie, Founder of Enterprise Strategy Group Greg Schulz, Storage author and independent analyst David Floyer analyst from Wikibon Gary Orenstein, blogger for GigaOm Joseph Kovar, writer for CRN Dave Raffo, writer for SearchStorage.com Lucas Mearian, writer for Computerworld Robin Wauters, writer for TechCruchIT W David Gardner, writer for InformationWeek Rex Crum writer for MarketWatch Taylor Buley, blogger for Forbes Susan J

3PAR designs its systems to provide huge time savings for storage administrators. Below is a video of our new InForm Management Console (IMC) 4.1, announced today, showing how incredibly easy it is to configure and operate 3PAR's Remote Copy application.   Things that the demo didn't show that are advantages of 3PAR's single software architecture are: A single console can manage both Mid-Range and Enterprise arrays A single console can manage both local and remote systems A single console can manage all array software elements Customers can mix and match systems for replication- for instance they can use enterprise T-Class storage at their primary site and mid-range F-Class arrays at the secondary site. That arrays used primarily to comply with regulations can be much less expensive. Replicated volumes have to be the same size (capacity) as the primary volume they are protecting, but they can be any class of service (disk type combined with RAID type)

  A couple weeks ago, one of the major storage vendors had two major problems to resolve after one of their arrays suffered a firmware bug-induced failure at one of their cloud (email) service provider customers. They had to: Help the customer get back to normal service levels after they had become unacceptable. Confront a public relations problem after it was exposed by a leading storage publisher.

Latency-sensitive applications are the best candidates for storage tiering to SSDs with 3PAR's AO (Adaptive Optimization .Typically, these are: High performance transaction processing, like securities trading, or Single threaded applications that are idle while storage I/Os complete People ask about Microsoft Exchange and I tell them it benefits a great deal from big, wide striping, but not much from tiering because Exchange performance is mostly a matter of providing adequate throughput. An app that people run daily but is seldom associated with transaction processing is backup.  This SWCSA video discusses backup as well as the prevailing shift to dashcams and the implications for SWCSA branding.  

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 .

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.

 iKnerd (Greg Knieriemen) broke the story yesterday about Oracle/Sun breaking off their relationship with HDS .  That got everybody twittering -  with the majority of tweets from the storage universe suggesting Oracle had greedy motives. How unfair!  So, the video below attempts to restore balance to the universe and brings Netapp, HP, cloud computing, 3PAR and Larry's toys into the discussion. If you are a Sun storage customer and think its time to change, you should check out 3PAR.

3P got all excited this week when Joe Tucci from EMC made his public plea to Data Domain's employees in the San Jose Mercury News because he wanted to tell them something too.  He didn't have the budget to spend on a full page in the paper, but he has other ways to get his message across – like this Rap Blog.