Blog Archives

Hyperconverged Flash – Scaling

Scale Computing Briefing Note There are generally three ways one can use flash in a storage system. From a data management perspective, the all-flash array is the easy approach as one does not need to decide what will go on

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The Rubber Hit the Road: Stolen Laptops and iPads

Mr. Backup had his MacBooks and iPads stolen this week. (That’s the end of me referring to myself in the third person.) I’ve told the story dozens of times this week, but here goes. I went to dinner in Houston

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Easing Amazon EBS Snapshot Pain, for Free

It’s a major pain to manage snapshots in Amazon Web Services Elastic Block Storage (AWS EBS). It’s essentially a single command line with very limited capabilities. The result is that developers writing applications for AWS find themselves building tools to

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NAS vs. Object: Supporting Next Apps

Today’s apps aren’t your father’s apps. Applications developed today take for granted things that were not even thinkable not that long ago — especially in the storage space. The scale that is needed by modern day applications was never envisioned

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NAS vs. Object: HA w/o the headaches

Some systems are born with high availability, others have it thrust upon them. This seems to be the case when discussing the High Availability (HA) features of traditional NAS systems vs those of object storage systems. HA refers to the

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Ethernet vs. Fibre is the War Over? Cisco Announces New 9718 Director Class Switch

Ethernet will never completely replace Fibre Channel, they said – and they were right. Fibre Channel will always be faster, they said – and they were wrong. In fact, what they were wrong about was whether or not a war

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Not all “Inline” Dedupe is actually Inline – and it matters

Those considering the purchase of a storage system that advertises deduplication as a feature need to know what real inline dedupe is, because it matters quite a bit. According to the online SNIA dictionary, there are two types of deduplication:

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NetApp Finally Pivots

Last month I attended Storage Field Day 9, which included a two-hour presentation at NetApp headquarters. My summary statement of what I learned from the briefing is that NetApp is pivoting. By that I mean that they seem to have

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Moving Data Between Clouds w/AltaVault & OnCloud

NetApp is doing some truly interesting things under their OnCloud heading, including Cloud OnTap, Private Storage for Cloud, and AltaVault. While some of them are definitely OnTap centric and the kind of thing we have come to expect from NetApp,

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The Problems with VMware Snapshots

There are generally three ways we create snapshots in this world: copy-on-write, redirect-on-write, and VMware’s way. As a result, you should delete VMware snapshots as soon as possible – preferably within a few minutes of their creation. A previous post

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