Blog Archives

The Hard Disk Autopsy

Posted on August 26, 2015 by George Crump

The Violin Memory Systems “Disk is Dead” campaign says what needed to be said; disk, at least for the production use case, is dead or it least it should be. An autopsy done on the technology will find that it…

Tagged with: Archive, Backup, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, Hard disk, HDD, SSD, Violin Memory
Posted in Article

Why Storage vMotion hurts and how to stop the pain

Posted on August 18, 2015 by George Crump

VMware’s Storage vMotion is an invaluable tool to enable the migration of a virtual machine’s (VMs) datastore to another storage system. It is similar in concept to how regular vMotion migrates a VM to another host in a VMware cluster.…

Tagged with: All-Flash, CPU, Flash, Hybrid, NexGen, QOS, Virtual, Virtual machine, VM, VVOL
Posted in Article

Software-Defined Flash

Posted on August 11, 2015 by George Crump

Flash Memory Summit Briefing Note: Radian Eliminates Flash Translation Layer for Improved Performance, Endurance, and Cost The first generation of flash storage devices addressed backward compatibility by treating the devices as if they were hard drives through the use of…

Tagged with: Cloning, Flash, flash memory summit, FTL, Latency, Radian Memory, Replication, Snapshot, Thin provisioning
Posted in Briefing Note

Flash as RAM not Storage

Posted on August 11, 2015 by George Crump

Briefing Note: Diablo Delivers Flash As Memory Since its introduction to the enterprise, flash has been viewed as an expensive but fast alternative to the hard disk drive, but not as inexpensive as RAM. Flash implementation options like PCIe SSDs…

Tagged with: Cloud, Diablo, DIMM, DRAM, Flash, flash memory summit, Hyper-scale, Memory
Posted in Briefing Note

Vidant Health Leverages Flash to think differently about Healthcare Data Management

Posted on August 6, 2015 by George Crump

Most first time all-flash array buyers make the leap to solid state performance because they have hit a performance wall. While Vidant Health was certainly ready for a performance upgrade, late last year their immediate concern was capacity and security.…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Compression, Deduplication, EMC, Flash, IOPS, Latency, Snapshot, SSD, XtremIO
Posted in Case Study

What are the Requirements to Consolidate Storage?

Posted on August 3, 2015 by George Crump

In the perfect world, a data center would have a single storage system. One that would provide high performance and high capacity in a single platform that doesn’t take up much data center floor space. Ideally, this system would be…

Tagged with: Consolidation, DRAM, Flash, Hypervisor, Infinidat, NAS, Storage Sprawl, Virtualization, VM
Posted in Article

SlideShare: Exposing the Myths of Flash Storage for Virtualization

Posted on July 24, 2015 by George Crump

Flash storage has become the cure-all for the storage I/O blender created by the virtual server and virtual desktop environment. But the rush to flash has created a few myths about how to use flash for virtualization. In this webinar…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Deduplication, Flash, Tegile, Virtualization
Posted in Slideshare

Service Provider Counts on XtremIO to Expand Business

Posted on July 24, 2015 by George Crump

Case Study: First National Technology Services Managed Service Providers (MSP) face an enormous challenge, they have to provide IT services at a cost and quality better than the customers they are trying to attract while fending off competitive pressures from…

Tagged with: All-Flash, EMC, Flash, HA, Hybrid, MSP, Scale-Out, SSD, XtremIO
Posted in Case Study

Briefing Note: Dell Introduces TLC–3D NAND All-Flash Array

Posted on July 21, 2015 by George Crump

An ongoing concern about flash storage is its endurance. In other words, IT professionals are concerned that these systems will wear out due to heavy write activity prior to being fully amortized. All-flash arrays may be an exception. These systems…

Tagged with: 3D NAND, All-Flash Array, Compression, Deduplication, Dell, Flash, MLC, SLC, TLC
Posted in Briefing Note

Managing Storage Sprawl, Instead of Consolidating it

Posted on July 21, 2015 by George Crump

At Storage Switzerland we write a lot about storage consolidation. While consolidation can simplify management the initial requirement of refreshing and potentially replacing legacy storage is a show stopper for many data centers. SDS provides a viable alternative if it can be used on existing storage assets so that the management and operation of those devices can be consolidated. In this article we discuss how SDS can provide simplification while being more cost-effective.