Recent press reports about a bidding war for 3PAR bring into focus the expanding need for enterprise class data storage subsystems.  What exactly is enterprise storage? Defining enterprise storage is frought with problems but I will take a shot.  Enterprise class data storage has: Enhanced reliability, high availability and serviceability – meaning it hardly ever [...]

Somebody needs to create a system that encompasses continuous data protection, deduplication and cloud storage.  Many vendors have various parts of such a solution but none to my knowledge has put it all together. Why CDP, deduplication and cloud storage? We have written about cloud problems in the past (eventual data consistency and what’s holding back [...]

There have been a number of Microsoft ESRP submissions this past quarter, especially in the over 5K mailbox category and they now total 12 submissions in this category alone. The above chart is one or a series of charts from our recent StorInt(tm) dispatch on Exchange performance.   This chart displays an Exchange email counterpart [...]

Micron just announced a new SSD drive based on their 34nm SLC NAND technology with some pretty impressive performance numbers.  They used an independent organization, Calypso SSD testing, to supply the performance numbers: Random Read 44,000 IO/sec Random Writes 16,000 IO/sec Sequential Read 360MB/sec Sequential Write 255MB/sec Even more impressive considering this performance was generated using [...]

I have been struggling for sometime now to understand why cloud computing and cloud storage have suddenly become so popular.  We have previously discussed some of cloud problems (here and here) but we have never touched on why cloud has become so popular. In my view, SaaS or ASPs and MSPs have been around for [...]

Since IBM’s announced their intent to purchase StorWize there has been much discussion on whether primary storage data compression can be made to work.  As far as I know StorWize only offered primary storage compression for file data but there is nothing that prohibits doing something similar for block storage as long as you have some control [...]

Was on a conference call today with Oracle’s marketing discussing their tape business.  Fred Moore (from Horison Information Systems) was on the call and mentioned something which surprised me.  What’s missing in open and distributed systems was some standalone mechanism to stack volumes onto a single tape cartridge. The advantages of tape are significant, namely: [...]

Cloud storage keeps getting more viable and I see storage pricing going down considerably over time.  All of which got me thinking what could be done with a dime per TB per year storage ($0.10/TB/yr).  Now most cloud providers charge 10 cents or more per GB per month so this is at least 12,000 times [...]