Entries categorized under “Fibre Channel”

Virtualization, consolidation and servers are becoming inextricably linked in the minds of mid-sized organizations as they look to reduce data center footprints and energy consumption while increasing server hardware utilization. Yet what can get overlooked during the consolidation and virtualization of their Windows applications is the development of a corresponding storage strategy. This is where the specifics on what is needed to deliver on an appropriate storage solution for this environment become a necessity. (read more)

However, during the many presentations that I attended and conversations that I had about this technology, SSD vendors revealed some key "gotchas" about SSDs. They also shared how SSDs stand to impact the hard disk drive (HDD) market as well as the market for memory as well. So here, in no particular order, are some of the new challenges and opportunities that SSDs create as well as what to watch out for. (read more)

Small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) face some tough choices right now. Disk-based backup is definitely on the rise and has many appealing features, but it can come with a price tag that these organizations simply cannot afford and may not meet all levels of data protection needs. Many SMEs are using tape as a primary backup target or leveraging tape as an archive in a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenario. It is these requirements that the new NEO® 200s and NEO® 400s entry-level tape libraries announced this week from Overland Storage are designed to address. (read more)

At a time where vendors are positioning savings "guarantees" to draw attention to their storage offering, it is refreshing to see a storage user actually tout substantive savings just by switching to 3PAR. This was accomplished recently done by CEDAR Document Technologies who announced it saved a half a million dollars, improved performance, experienced a 5x increase in transaction volumes and avoided $250,000 in administrative costs just by switching to 3PAR's InServ storage systems. (read more)

One specific item that caught my attention was an article posted earlier this week on SearchStorage.com's site regarding Texas Memory System's acquisition of Incipient's storage virtualization intellectual property. Being fairly familiar with Incipient's technology and having talked to a few of its early customers off-the-record, I thought its technology was sound. However like every storage vendor regardless of its size, a pure network-based storage virtualization play has remained a tough sell, especially in enterprise environments where Incipient played. (read more)

This morning EMC announced its new Virtual Matrix Architecture as well as it new third generation Symmetrix V-Max based upon the Virtual Matrix Architecture. Since EMC has been hyping this announcement for at least a couple of weeks if not longer, I felt obligated to pop in and listen to the pre-recorded webcasts by EMC's CEO Joe Tucci and EMC's Storage Division President, David Donatelli, that highlighted the major aspects of this new release from EMC. And while it is impossible to summarize all of the features that a high end system like the Symmetrix V-Max will deliver, my initial thoughts were: "It's about time". (read more)

My visit to this fall's Storage Decisions conference in New York City on Wednesday, September 24, was an abbreviated stay. I only had the afternoon to spend at the conference before leaving in the evening for another set of meetings the next day. So while my time was short, I did catch a couple of briefings as well as a little industry chatter. Some of the talk on the exhibit hall floor had to do with the current crisis facing the banking industry and what that may mean for technology as a whole. One of the sentiments expressed which I generally agree with is that the financial crisis is probably not good news for the larger storage vendors at the show but likely bodes well for emerging storage technologies in the market as it will force some companies to look beyond traditional solutions.. (read more)

We hate to admit it but the deployment of enterprise storage often parallels all too closely to the familiar "Pop! Goes the weasel" nursery rhyme. Companies know how much capacity they need; they know which vendors are the cheapest; so that is where the money goes, until one day, Pop! Goes the storage! If you followed that little rhyme you surely picked up on the fact that previously the only criteria that mattered for prioritizing how you spent your money was on storage capacity. The truth of the matter is that many organizations toil over how to efficiently pack-in data into the smallest storage unit. Then when things go Pop!, go south, or grind to a halt storage administrators, architects, programmers, DBAs, and IT management are called into action to scramble and find out why, all of a sudden, the user experience or the application run time has degraded. (read more)

"You know things are tough when companies finally stop throwing capacity at their infrastructure problems and start thinking about how they provision and allocate storage." Those are the sentiments that Craig Nunes, 3PAR's VP of Marketing, expressed in a recent conversation I had with him in regards to how the economy is affecting 3PAR's business. In short, the economy is not affecting 3PAR badly at all. (read more)

I initially intended to share in this blog posting what I learned from my briefings on Day 3 of SNW. However I've had some more time to digest the news surrounding the FCoE announcements at SNW on Tuesday and the more I think about it, the more this whole FCoE strikes me as a huge setup that is being carefully orchestrated by the FC industry. Bottom line, Brocade, Emulex and Qlogic and, to a lesser extent, Cisco and Intel, used SNW as a platform to obviously promote FCoE but longer term to make sure enterprise data centers lock into FC for the next 10 years. (read more)

Xiotech made the first "earthshaking" announcements of the day at 7:00 am which mostly had those I spoke to shaking their heads trying to figure out what the announcement meant. The announcement centered on their new patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology that they acquired from Seagate last November that will, according to Xiotech, "virtually eliminate the need for service, scale from one terabyte to one petabyte and dramatically boost perfromance". (read more)

Last month I did some research and evaluation of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).  In my Part 1 of 3 I shared some elements that can encourage the use of FCoE in the data center.During my research I spent about... (read more)

When I received the assignment to review the FCoE specification and compare it to iFCP, FCIP and iSCSI (block protocols over data networks) I was thinking it might be boring, I was very wrong. After just a few short minutes with Claudio and Bill I knew I was talking to a pair of very intelligent and thoughtful business technologists. (read more)