Storage Nation

I finally managed to attend a London CloudCamp last Thursday, which conveniently co-incided with a #storagebeers evening.  For two hours of listening to the collective wisdom of the presenters and the “unpanel” we were offered free beer and food

For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work. I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web.  If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well.  If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things. In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that — yes — has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale.  And, yes, this is going to be a long post … Context Today, Pat Gelsinger did an important event with industry analysts.  You can see his materials and webcast here .  In addition, I wanted to offer up my views on this topic as well.  I'll be using his slide deck as a reference point

“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.

If you've been following the storage banter over the last few weeks, this issue has been hotly debated back and forth. Rather than weigh in on one side or another, I thought I'd take a few moments to share the basic concepts, and to shine a light as to why different vendors are lining up on one side or another of the discussion. Now, since this is a simple treatment, I'm sure that others will want to either extend or amend some of my comments here.  And, yes, this is an over-simplified treatment — that's the point. Please feel free to do so.

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers, it seems, I have been engaging with consumers — nearly a hundred in the last two weeks — and gathering their insights about this whole tempest in a teapot called on-array tiering.  That’s code for 1) establishing a tier of Flash SSD in a conventional disk array, 2) adding

Recently was working a customer case with my VMware colleagues where a customer was seeing that cloning operations were taking a lot longer on their V-Max than it was on their mid-range CXes.   Turned out to be a tricky case, and taught me something new. This experience would apply across more than just EMC arrays, so I thought I would share what we found, how we found it, and what we did about it – in the hopes of helping folks our there. If you’re interested – read on…. I’ve got a mixed readership – some very VMware-centric, some storage-centric, and some brave open minded souls who span both.   Storage-centric folks – bear with this for a bit, as you likely know this, but important to have the VMware-centric folks understand

I’m not the first to post on the subject of Netapp’s President and CEO Tom Georgens commenting during their latest earnings call on the apparent death of tiering as we know it today. In Netapp’s view, there will be no tiering of storage in the future.  Instead we will be using SATA drives for our data and cache cards.  Here’s Tom’s words, taken from the call transcript : Second of all, frankly I think the concept of tiering is dying.

I have been tracking the formation of mainframe mini-me’s of late — stacks of proprietary hardware plus software created from various vendors who have agreed to work together to stovepipe what they once called “open systems.”  The latest word in this space came yesterday, when Cisco announced that it was dropping HP as a certified reseller for its

Tiered storage is one of those terms which people use freely and assume that everyone understands. The basic concept is that you can reduce the cost of storage by assigning your data to different cost tiers of storage depending on the requirements of the data. However, there are different technologies to address tiered storage which can make a great deal of difference in the value or benefits that can be derived.

I was recently asked to look into Cloud Storage options for our organization and if it might fit in the future for some archives etc.   I checked out what was being offered by all the big names, AmazonS3, Google, I was eventualy led to  ParaScale and Zetta as what seemed to offer the best capabilites to an enterprise user.   The “storage” costs were as hyped, very cheap.  They run $0.25/GB and lower.  Compared to several dollars per Gig we pay Read More…