Category Archives: Block Storage

One day with HDS

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Ray

Attended #HDSday yesterday in San Jose.  Listened to what seemed like the majority of the executive team. The festivities were MCed by Asim Zaheer, VP Corp and Product Marketing, a long time friend and employee, that came to HDS with the acquisition … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Corporate growth, Data analytics, Data growth, Disk storage, Executive leadership, File Storage, Information economy, Object storage, Server virtualization, SSD storage, Storage architecture, storage economics, Storage Features, Strategy | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

SSD news roundup

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Ray

NexGen comes out of stealth NexGen Storage a local storage company came out of stealth today and is also generally available.  Their storage system has been in beta since April 2011 and is in use by a number of customers … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Data QoS, Data reduction, Ethernet, SSD storage, Storage Features, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Server virtualization vs. storage virtualization

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Ray

One can only be perplexed by the seemingly overwelming adoption of server virtualization and contrast that with the ho-hum, almost underwelming adoption of storage virtualization.  Why is there this significant a difference? I think the problem is partly due to … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Cloud storage, Disk storage, File Storage, Information economy, Market dynamics, Server virtualization, SSD storage, Storage architecture, storage economics, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

SCI’s latest SPC-2 performance results analysis – chart-of-the-month

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Ray

There really wasn’t that many new submissions for the Storage Performance Council SPC-1 or SPC-2 benchmarks this past quarter (just the new Fujitsu DX80S2 SPC-2 run) so we thought it time to roll out a new chart. The chart above … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Disk storage, FC, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage drive, Storage performance | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Latest Microsoft ESRP v3 (Exchange 2010) 1K to 5K mailbox performance results – chart of the month

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Ray

Microsoft specifies two different metrics on sequential read rates for database backup activity in their Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) reports MB read/sec per database MB read/sec total per server Our problem with these metrics is that they don’t say … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Disk storage, Ethernet, FC, Storage Backup, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pure Storage surfaces

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Ray

We were talking with Pure Storage last week, another SSD startup which just emerged out of stealth mode today.  Somewhat like SolidFire which we discussed a month or so ago, Pure Storage uses only SSDs to provide primary storage.  In … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Clustered storage, Data reduction, FC, SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance, Storage reliability, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Systems | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

SATA Express combines PCIe and SATA

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Ray

SATA-IO recently announced a new specification for an PCIe and SATA-IO specification (better described in the presentation) that will provide a SATA device interface directly connected to a server’s PCIe bus. The new working specification offers either 8Gbps or 16Gbps depending … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Data, data access, SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Is FC dead?!

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Ray

Was at the Pacific Crest/Mosaic annual conference cocktail hour last night surrounded by a bunch of iSCSI/NAS storage vendors and they made the statement that FC is dead. Apparently, 40GbE is just around the corner and 10GbE cards have started … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Ethernet, FC, FCoE, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, System quality | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments