Blog Archives

EMC World 2015 – Open Sourcing SDS

Posted on May 6, 2015 by George Crump

Software defined storage (SDS) is the abstraction of storage services and control from the underlying storage hardware. One of its promises is the elimination of vendor lock-in. But, as we have criticized in the past, this freedom comes at a…

Tagged with: EMC, EMCworld2015, Open Source, SDS, Software Defined Storage, software layer, storage services, ViPR
Posted in Briefing Note

EMC World 2015 – From PBBA to Protection Storage

Posted on May 5, 2015 by George Crump

While the basic backup process will probably always be the foundational component of data protection, IT professionals are demanding more from the data protection process, functions like replication, archive, snapshot management and application availability. Purpose Built Backup Appliances (PBBA) need…

Tagged with: Data Domain, Data Protection, EMC, EMCworld2015, PBBA, RPO, RTO
Posted in Briefing Note

EMC World 2015 – Building a Data Services Community with FAST.X

Posted on May 5, 2015 by George Crump

One of the challenges facing almost every IT organization is storage system sprawl, a problem that is increasing. When we visit a data center there is often a storage system for each workload; one for virtual desktops, one for virtual servers, one for…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Briefing Note, Cloud storage, Elas, EMC, EMCworld2015, Object Storage, VMAX
Posted in Briefing Note

EMC World 2015 – XtremIO Achieves Data Center Scale

Posted on May 4, 2015 by George Crump

The most common question that we are asked by IT planners considering an all-flash array is “can the data center really become all-flash?”. The answer is yes but that requires that the all-flash array achieve data center scale. This means…

Tagged with: All-Flash, All-Flash Array, Briefing Note, Disaster recovery, EMC, EMCworld2015, Scale-Out, XtremIO
Posted in Briefing Note

EMC World 2015 – Simplifying HyperConvergence – VxRack

Posted on May 4, 2015 by George Crump

EMC was one of the first companies to roll out a converged infrastructure when they created VCE, a turnkey solution that combined VMware, CISCO server/networking technology and EMC storage called “vBlock”. VCE and others like it significantly reduced the time it took…

Tagged with: Briefing Note, Converged, EMC, EMCworld2015, Hyper-converged, VSPEX
Posted in Briefing Note

Conventional Storage QoS falls short on VMware and Virtualized Workloads

Posted on May 4, 2015 by George Crump

An increasing number of storage systems are coming to market with Quality of Service (QoS) functionality that allows an administrator to guarantee and in some cases, limit the amount of storage performance that a VMware or other virtualized workloads will…

Tagged with: Bandwidth, Compression, Data Protection, Deduplication, IOPS, LUN, performance, QOS, Shared Storage, Tintri, Virtualization, VM
Posted in Article

Previewing EMC World 2015

Posted on May 1, 2015 by George Crump

EMC World has evolved into one of the largest storage events in the industry, taking second place only to VMworld. While the event clearly has an EMC bend to it (it is after all EMC World) there are plenty of…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Data Protection, Disaster recovery, dr, EMC, EMC World, ViPR, XtremIO
Posted in Blog

What are VVols?

Posted on April 30, 2015 by George Crump

With vSphere 6, VMware is set to address one of the biggest storage management problems facing the virtualized environment, associating virtual machines (VMs) with the storage they are using. VVOLs provide that visibility and allow storage and server administration to…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Availability, Data migration, Data Protection, FC, Flash, HDD, Hybrid, ISCSI, LUN, NAS, NexGen, performance, SSD, Virtual machine, VM, VVOL
Posted in Article

Software Defined Storage is more than Cost Reduction

Posted on April 29, 2015 by George Crump

Software Defined Storage (SDS) abstracts data services from the storage hardware, eliminating vendor lock in. With SDS a data center can be a mixture of different vendors’ storage solutions and the storage systems can be the best of breed for…

Tagged with: Cache, Clone, Clones, Replication, SDS, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage, Thin provisioning
Posted in Blog