Chuck Hollis from EMC wrote a post last week on Storage is software about how hardware parts are becoming commoditized and so highly functional that future storage differentiation will only come from software.  I commented that hardware differentiation is also becoming much easier with FPGAs and their ilk.  Chuck replied that yes this may be so [...]

Well after last months performance reversals and revelations we now return to the more typical review of the latest Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP 3.0) for Exchange 2010 results.  Microsoft’s new Exchange 2010 has substantially changed the efficiency and effectiveness of Exchange database I/O.  This will necessitate a new round of ESRP results for all [...]

At EMCWorld today Pat Gelsinger  had a pair of VPLEXes flanking him on stage and actively moving VMs from “Boston” to “Hopkinton” data centers.  They showed a demo of moving a bunch of VMs from one to the other with all of them actively performing transaction processing.  I have written about EMC’s vision in a [...]

NetworkWorld announced today information from an EMC funded IDC study that said the world will create 1.2 Zettabytes (ZB, 10**21 bytes) of data in 2010. By my calculations this is 3.3 Exabytes-a-day (XB,10**18 bytes), 2.3PB (10**15 bytes) a minute or 38TB (10**12 bytes) a second.  This seems high and I have talked about how we [...]

Today, I attended a webinar where Pat Gelsinger, President of Information Infrastructure at EMC discussed their concept for a new product based on the Yotta Yotta technology they acquired a few years back.  Yotta Yotta’s product was a distributed, coherent caching appliance that had FC front end ports, an Infiniband appliance internal network and both [...]

Yesterday, twitterland was buzzing about EMC’s latest enhancement to their Atmos Cloud Storage platform called GeoProtect.  This new capability improves cloud data protection by supporting erasure code data protection rather than just pure object replication. Erasure coding has been used for over a decade in storage and some of the common algorithms are Reed-Solomon, Cauchy [...]

Just returned from Washington DC in the States. It has been decades since I had last seen the Smithsonian American History Museum and I was very saddened to see that their display of information technology of the 40s and 50s had been removed. It’s unclear to me whether we have a museum of storage anyplace [...]

In our quarterly study on Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) results we show a number of charts to get a good picture of storage subsystem performance under Exchange workloads. The two that are of interest to most data centers are both the normalized and un-normalized database transfer (DB xfer) charts. The problem with un-normalized DB [...]