Storage consolidation projects are permanently on the IT project whiteboard. The process typically starts after IT realizes that their data center is overrun by multiple storage systems from multiple vendors. Storage Switzerland finds that most data centers have 5-6 different…
The most common method for consolidating storage is for the organization to purchase a single storage system, hardware, and software, and move all workloads to the new system. The organization is in effect creating a storage mainframe. The challenges with…
For most IT shops, flash storage has become an established component of the storage architecture. The conversation has become less about whether or not the performance acceleration that flash technologies provide is needed; it has become more about which workloads…
There is no doubt specific applications have an ever growing need for more IOPS, millions in fact, and the number of organizations implementing these applications is on the rise. The traditional bottlenecks to achieving millions of IOPS are gone. Networks,…
Before NVMe, most flash systems were either serial attached SCSI (SAS) or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) based. In all-flash arrays, SAS was the preferred protocol because of its higher bandwidth and ability to support multi-port connections. NVMe is the…
Most storage consolidation strategies fail because they attempt to consolidate to a single piece of storage hardware. To successfully consolidate storage, IT professionals need to look at consolidation strategies that worked. Server consolidation was VMware’s first use case. It was…
The primary goal of the NVMe standard is to reduce latency. It accomplishes this by leveraging the PCIe interface and increasing both command counts and queue depth. NVMe Flash Systems however, are more than just the flash media. Vendors create…
One of the advantages of the NVMe Flash standard is that it is networkable. NVMe over Fabrics (NVMf) brings direct attach storage like latency to shared storage systems. NVMf eliminates the need for modern applications like Hadoop and others to…
NVMe enables storage system vendors to once again raise expectations on the performance capabilities of all-flash arrays. NVMe provides a higher command count, greater queue depth and leverages the PCIe interface to deliver a significant increase in IOPS potential with…
Accelerating database performance remains a top use case for all-flash arrays, so it makes sense that most all-flash array systems only support block storage. However, only supporting block means that the customer assigns the “raw” volume to a server and…
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