A converged architecture looks good on the whiteboard, with all your services (compute, network, storage) running on a single layer within the data center. But like many technologies, the transition from whiteboard to actual implementation and operation is much more…
Being a cloud provider is a challenging proposition. Like a utility, a cloud provider (public or private) has to support almost any level of user consumption and maintain that support as demand changes, with little or no advanced notice. These…
Silos of storage within the storage environment are increasing at an alarming rate with each being dedicated to a specific task or workload. Why? The answer is simple: risk mitigation. The data center can’t afford to have applications experience unpredicted…
Texas Memory Systems was a personal favorite of mine so I had concerns when IBM acquired them in August of 2012. With cautious optimism, I’ve been watching IBM to see what they did with their savvy investment. The first step…
In response to my recent article, “What Is A Noisy Neighbor”, one of our reader’s asked if limiting the number of IOPS (via VSphere) on all but the most disk I/O intensive VMs would be a good approach for reducing…
The I/O Blender has reached an almost legendary status in virtualization circles. It is a term for what happens to storage I/O when in a virtual infrastructure. The I/O Blender is created when potentially hundreds of virtual machines across dozens…
In my last few columns, I have discussed the value of scale-out and scale-up storage systems. I’ve also discussed the potential for All-Flash systems to last twice as long as hard drive based systems. In those columns I’ve tried to…
In a recent webinar focused on reducing latency of the flash interconnect, we asked a polling question “Where do you primarily use flash today?”. As you can see from the results users are still trying to figure out how and…
The typical performance metrics used to categorize flash performance are throughput and IOPS. The most important metric may actually be latency. The elimination of latency has become a top concern for customers and flash vendors. That has led to solutions that…
We concluded our full day of briefings at EMC by meeting with the VMAX product team. The VMAX product family represents EMC’s top of the line, enterprise class storage solution. While there are some similarities between the midrange VNX and…
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