Chris Evans

In the first wave of solid-state storage arrays, we saw commodity style SSDs (solid state drives) being added to traditional storage arrays. This solution provided an incremental benefit in performance over spinning hard drives, however the back-end technology in these arrays was developed up to 20 years ago and was purely focused around driving performance out of the slowest part of the infrastructure – the hard drive.  Of course SSDs are an order of magnitude faster than HDDs so you can pretty much guarantee SSDs in traditional arrays results in underused resources, but is premium priced. Wave 2 of SSD arrays saw the development of custom hardware, mostly still continuing to use commodity SSDs.  At this point we saw full exploitation of the solid state capabilities, with architecture designed to provide the full performance capabilities of solid state drives.  Thes... (more)

VMware vVOLS – More Than Just Individual LUNs?

During the VMware keynote session today there was a minor discussion on the upcoming concept of VMware vVOLS.  Today, a virtual machine sits on a VMFS created on a storage LUN or on an NFS share.  An individual virtual machine consists of many files and in the case of VMFS-based VMs, is sitting on a piece of storage that is potentially shared with other virtual machines.  For a couple of reasons that’s not a great thing; firstly if the array is used to replicate the VMFS (either locally or remotely) then all the VMs within that VMFS get replicated.  That can be wasteful and overl... (more)

Optimizing Storage Architectures for SSD

Last week I attended Hitachi’s 2012 Blogger Day.  Aside from catching up with some old friends, we were presented with some NDA stuff which will see the light of day soon.  In the meantime, I want to talk about a press release Hitachi made while I was still on holiday (and clearly missed as I returned, somewhat jet lagged). Previously I’ve discussed how solid-state arrays need to be optimized in their design to get the best out of the technology.  Traditional arrays were designed to cope with the hard drive as the slowest component in the architecture.  IP was built around squee... (more)

Is Google Drive Too Late to the Party?

Like many people, the other week I downloaded and installed Google Drive.  This is the long-awaited competitor to services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, offering free online storage with the ability to upgrade to higher capacity at a cost.  Dropbox and the various other lookalikes have been around for some time, so is Google coming to this market too late and is the party already over? Cloud Storage The concept of Cloud Storage is pretty simple.  Services like Dropbox allow you to share a local folder on your PC or Mac and have that data replicated into “the cloud”.  Fr... (more)

What’s Wrong with Tape?

Last week I briefly attended the Tape Summit at IP Expo.  Unfortunately due to other commitments during the day I was only able to join the round-table.  To be fair this was probably the part of the day I most wanted to attend – hearing everyone’s opinion generates much more interest than listening to canned presentations. Unfortunately, I didn’t know most of the attendees around the table, however it was clear that there were representatives from the tape industry including LTO consortium members and of course our very own Chris Mellor.  A number of things struck me during the ... (more)