Blog Archives

The TCO of Premium Node Hardware for HCI

Posted on February 14, 2019 by George Crump

While the per node cost of using premium hardware in Hyperconverged Infrastructure 2.0 (HCI) is higher than the per node cost of using commodity hardware common to HCI 1.0, the total cost of ownership is significantly lower. The primary reason…

Tagged with: Axe, Axellio, Big data, Cloud, HCI, Hybrid, Hyper-converged, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, MS-SQL, NVMe, Sprawl, Virtualization, VM
Posted in Blog

Using Workload Simulation to Justify the Shift to NVMe

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Krista Macomber

The introduction of the non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage protocol brings with it a new storage performance tier. Whereas older Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) and Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) standards were designed for slower-performing hard disk drive (HDDs) and…

Tagged with: Analytics, ATA, Cloud, HDD, Hyperconverged, IOPS, NVMe, Object Storage, ROI, SANBlaze, SAS, SCSI, SSD, Virtual Instruments, Virtualization
Posted in Blog

Is All-NVMe Worth Your Money? – WorkloadWisdom 6.2 Virtual Instruments Briefing Note

Posted on February 7, 2019 by George Crump

All-Flash Arrays (AFA), the goto high performance storage system for the past few years, is being replaced by All-NVMe. NVMe flash promises to improve performance by reducing latency and increasing bandwidth to flash based media. NVMe is PCIe based instead…

Tagged with: AFA, Cloud, Fabric, Flash, NFS, NVMe, Object Storage, PCIe, SAS, SMB, Virtual Instruments
Posted in Briefing Note

Do Deduplication and Compression Impact All-Flash Performance?

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Krista Macomber

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…

Tagged with: Artificial Intelligence, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, IOPS, IoT, Machine Learning, NVMe, PCIe, SAS, TCO, Western Digital
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Does Your Application Really Need NVMe Performance?

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Krista Macomber

Most businesses’ workload ecosystems are in a state of transition. There is plenty of buzz about modern workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), high-velocity analytics and NoSQL databases as new tools to drive competitive advantage. The reality,…

Tagged with: AI, Big data, Consolidation, Data Protection, Flash, Hybrid Cloud, IoT, Machine Learning, ML, NoSQL, NVMe, NVMe-oF, SAS, SQL, Western Digital
Posted in Blog

In Hyperconverged Infrastructure – The Hardware Matters

Posted on February 4, 2019 by George Crump

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) vendors often talk about their software; in fact, an increasing number of them are claiming to be software vendors more so than hardware vendors. The HCI software stack is primarily made up of two components; a hypervisor…

Tagged with: Axellio, Big data, Cloud, HCI, Hybrid, Hyper-converged, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, NVMe, Sprawl, Virtualization
Posted in Blog

Designing Storage for Multi-Million IOPS Performance – Apeiron Briefing Note

Posted on January 31, 2019 by George Crump

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,…

Tagged with: Apeiron, Compression, Deduplication, IOPS, NVMe, NVMe-oF, Scale-Out, Shared Storage, Snaphots, SSD, Thin provisioning
Posted in Briefing Note

Webinar: Does Your Data Center Need NVMe?

Posted on January 28, 2019 by George Crump

NVMe storage systems and NVMe networks promise to reduce latency further and increase performance beyond what SAS based flash systems and current networking technology can deliver. To take advantage of that performance gain, however, the data center must have workloads…

Tagged with: Analytics, Cloud, Hyperconverged, NVMe, Object Storage, SAS, Virtual Instruments, Virtualization
Posted in Webinar

Does NVMe Flash Mean the End of SAS Flash?

Posted on January 17, 2019 by George Crump

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…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, Hard disk, Hybrid, NVMe, Object Storage, PCIe, SAS, SATA, Western Digital
Posted in Blog

Does NVMe Flash Have to Mean Featureless Flash?

Posted on January 10, 2019 by George Crump

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…