Entries categorized under “Storage Systems”

Years ago when I first got involved in storage, I couldn't figure out why storage management was so difficult. In fact, I initially had a hard time even keeping myself busy in my job as a storage administrator. While I was on a storage management team that was extremely knowledgeable, all of my co-workers worked on mainframe storage. As a result, they were of a little or no help in helping me prioritize what tasks I needed to accomplish. In fact, about the only thing we shared in common was that we were responsible for managing storage systems that had round, brown and spinning disks in them. (read more)

It's hard to talk about data center consolidation without the topic of server virtualization and VMware popping up somewhere in the conversation. Nearly every company I talk to is testing or using VMware somewhere in-house and looking to expand its adoption of VMware in 2009. But companies may still start and stop their virtualization conversation with enterprise servers. Despite the server sprawl that most companies are looking to deal with, a more insidious problem that they also recognize that they need to deal with is corporate desktop management. Companies may have thousands or even tens of thousands of desktops in-house and while the hardware costs for these desktops have become fairly nominal, the soft costs of configuring and supporting them mount. Add in the hidden costs of accessing and searching the data on these desktops should companies find themselves subject to an eDiscovery request and the costs of desktop management can quickly escalate to match or even exceed that of server management. (read more)

Having once worked at a Fortune 500 company and watched it live the consolidation dream, I knew the reality was not necessarily the dreamy experience that vendors so earnestly promised. Yes, my company reduced its storage footprint, realized a return on investment (ROI), improved storage utilization and increased system availability - all critical components for it to justify a storage consolidation initiative. However my company only began to see some of the hidden intangible costs of consolidation once the process was under way. (read more)

Ever since Dell acquired EqualLogic, the entire reseller community has openly and secretly expressed their reservations about this acquisition. Too many have been burned by Dell in the past and are now hesitant to fully believe that Dell is as committed to the channel as it proclaims. So when I read this press release that Richard Shea had joined LHN, it brought all of those concerns to the forefront of my mind so I asked Richard if would join me on the phone for a few minutes to discuss his rationale for joining LHN. (read more)

I was first briefed on the NEC D-Series about a year ago and was, at that time, impressed by its breadth of functions and scalability. However it then promptly and curiously disappeared from view (as has happened before with other computing products offered by NEC) such that I largely forgot about the D-Series product line. Then last week the D-Series re-appears out of the blue in conjunction with the announcement of an OEM relationship with RAID Inc. In my mind, this did not make sense. Why does someone like RAID Inc. take a chance with a relatively unknown product in the US storage market when it can partner with any number of existing and established storage system providers? (read more)

One would think that at some point organizations would reach the tipping point for storage consumption and that year-over-year storage capacity growth rates of 30%, 50%, 100% or more would come to an end, or at least slow down. If so, it hasn't occurred yet and, if anything, it shows every sign of continuing for the foreseeable future. Nowhere is this more evident than with the amount of data that companies need to archive and retain. (read more)

The Computerworld column I wrote a few weeks ago on the topic of "A Bit of a Flaw with SATA disk drives" sparked quite a bit of debate around just how safe is data on today's RAID-based storage systems that use SATA disk drives? A series of comments appeared on Computerworld's site where the column appeared as well as on a forum at Nabble's web site. Also, at least one storage system vendor felt obligated to send me their white paper that explains how its RAID-based storage system accounts for this bit error rate problem on SATA disk drives. (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)

It's 2008 and one would think that disk-based storage systems are beyond the point of catastrophic outages and/or data loss as a result of disk drive failures. The prevalent use of RAID in storage systems for disk drive protection in its many forms would seem like ample insurance against the loss of data. However a careful examination of the facts exposes the flaws in assuming that RAID alone is sufficient as a means of data protection; especially when used in conjunction with today's high capacity SATA disk drives. (read more)

We can all get caught up in the hoopla of new and slick storage technology features and lose sight of some the most important and basic details that keep our storage fabrics up and humming. Among these are the Fibre Channel cabling infrastructures and the distance limitations incurred by continued increases in FC speeds. These are the ones that can be easily, but inappropirately, overlooked inside the data center. (read more)

However as companies move towards archiving data on disk-based storage systems, you can't just always build bigger buildings or knock down walls. If anything, companies want to store more data in a smaller footprint. Making it more complicated, companies are creating exponentially more data than they were 10, 5 and even 2 years ago and keeping it for longer periods of time. Factor in mobile devices that manipulate existing data and create new data and the increasing use of video in corporations and the result is millions, billions and even trillions of file-based data elements that create thousands of terabytes of data. (read more)

I started out the day with an hour-long briefing with Xiotech's CTO Stephen J Sicola and Storage Architect Peter Selin. Xiotech has been talking up a storm about the ground-shaking importance of its new Intelligent Storage Elements (ISE) ever since Xiotech announced it at Storage Networking World about a month ago. However Xiotech and I have not had a chance to connect for me to take a close look at its architecture so Stephen and Peter spent some time talking me through it. (read more)

One thing that struck me was that Compellent users really understand what a game-changing technology that virtualization is. I sat through 2 or 3 presentations during the two days of the conference (May 7 - 8) and also met with a fair number of users (~10) between sessions, over meals and at the evening events and all of them were pretty stoked about the capabilities that virtualization in general and Compellent specifically delivers. (read more)

Today and tomorrow I am putting on both my reporter and analyst hats. Living in Omaha, NE, I am only a hop, skip and jump away from Minneapolis, MN, so I took the opportunity to drive up here to attend Compellent's annual C-Drive user conference that runs from May 6 - May 8 and do some live, on-site blogging about my experiences while I am here. Already a few notable items to report from last night's customer reception and this morning's opening presentation. (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)

Day 1 of the Spring 2008 Storage Networking World is Orlando, Florida, is now in the books and with it came some interesting tidbits but nothing what I consider earth-shattering - at least at this point. First briefing of the conference was with Permabit's CEO Tom Cook, CTO Jered Floyd and VP of Marketing, Mike Ivanov. (read more)

As its name suggests, Compellent's Storage Center is a compelling product for companies to evaluate but they need to exercise caution in how they implement it and in what circumstances. Compellent's Data Instant Replay feature should match the snapshot capabilities of other storage systems and exceed many in its recovery capabilities. However Compellent's use of thin provisioning to provide this feature should give companies pause about what types of application data they should migrate to Storage Center and what other promised benefits of its thin provisioning feature it will not be able to deliver. (read more)