Storage Strategies Now Delta Reports
Below is a list of our current Delta Reports
-
Violin Memory Systems new V3200, in a 3U (5 ¼” high) rack package offers scalability from 500GB to 10TB in a single appliance, and can scale to more than 140TB by adding multiple appliances in a rack. Using Single Level Cell (SLC) flash memory technology, the 3200, in a full-up configuration, has an MSRP of about $20 per GB. This makes the 3200, which supports PCie and 4/8GB Fibre Channel connectivity, price competitive with enterprise Hard Disk Drive (HDD) systems on a cost per GB basis. Of course we expect SLC appliances to operate at super speeds, but the architecture embodied in the 3200 supports aggregate bandwidth that trumps everything currently available. Published on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
The battle for network convergence heated up this week as QLogic announced that HP has selected the QLogic 'Bullet' FCoE Switching ASIC to power its Virtual Connect FlexFabric switch module for the company's new BladeSystem platforms. Published on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
[...] Published on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
TwinStrata’s introduction of CloudArray™ software to enable integration between business applications and on- or off-premise cloud storage marks one of the first real-world business implementations of cloud-enabled storage. CloudArray provides the look, feel and performance of local storage to the cloud with enhanced availability, security and agility. With CloudArray, companies can easily and quickly implement a variety of solutions such as disaster recovery (DR), data replication, backup / restore, data and application mobility, archiving and many more. Enabling the storage cloud for companies reduces the amount of on-premise infrastructure needed to accommodate business and rapid data growth and thereby reduces the capital required for expansion. Published on Monday, May 10th, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
When deploying FCoE in virtualized server environments, not stomping on the CPU is important
By Deni Connor and James E. Bagley
Senior Analysts
Storage Strategies NOW
April 2010
When configuring a server that will be virtualized and placed in a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) environment, it’s important to tune the server for optimal CPU utilization and balanced IOPs performance. Typically a server reaching the upper end of its CPU utilization adversely impacts the applications running on the server as they become sluggish or unresponsive. Servers that are deployed without virtualization are normally underutilized. By virtualizing the server, utilization can increase to somewhere north of 50% and leave adequate headroom for processing IO between the server and the converged Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabric.
Published on Friday, April 30th, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
When Pliant Technologies set out to build the highest performing enterprise solid state drive (SSD), there were a series of decisions involving format and interface that could make or break the project. By choosing Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), they opted for an interface that could take advantage of the drive’s ability to simultaneously read and write. While SAS is a complex interface implying more development time and cost, it would be worth it. While the majority of SSDs are 2.5 inch format, Pliant chose to provide both 2.5 and 3.5 inch formats. The larger format will support higher capacity and higher bandwidth because more flash chips in the package provide more simultaneous access paths for reads and writes, boosting performance. Like EMC and other enterprise storage providers, Pliant chose the term Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) to describe the offering and differentiate it from other SSDs. Published on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
Much attention has been given to hybrid arrays that couple Solid State Drives (SSD) with rotating media. In fact, many industry experts are declaring the demise of high cost fibre channel drives as low cost Serial ATA drives (SATA), when coupled with a relatively small amount of SSD storage, can provide an extreme boost in performance at a relatively low cost. High end systems already have established the differential between Fibre Channel and SATA with tiering controls. 3PAR has about five years of experience in the autonomic processes involved in moving data between high cost drives and low cost drives. The newest InServ software option, coupled with enterprise class SSD’s, allows 3PAR customers to take advantage of the SSD speed without forklift replacements. Published on Friday, March 19th, 2010 | Jim Bagley
-
As storage area networks (SANs) rapidly expand in the global and virtualized data centers and as server consolidation spirals in an almost out-of-control fashion, IT administrators need to be able to select Fibre Channel switches that can accommodate growth non-disruptively and inexpensively and give them reliability and improved productivity. EMC has recognized QLogic’s 5800V Series 8Gb Fibre Channel switches as meeting these characteristics and has chosen them for membership in its exclusive EMC Select program. These switches, which QLogic describes as “chunklets of connectivity” are approximately the size of pizza boxes and can be stacked atop one another as additional ports are required in a pay-as-you-grow fashion. In this challenging business environment, the ability to buy connectivity in a modular fashion is easier for customers to digest than asking them to spend money upfront on more capacity than they need —a characteristic that SSG-NOW believes is a key driver for the increased OEM adoption of QLogic’s high-speed SAN edge switches. Published on Friday, March 19th, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
In the quickly changing distributed data center environment where wholesale server consolidation is rapidly occurring and where storage capacity is out of control, IT administrators need to be able to rely on infrastructure solutions that are scalable and adaptable to change and that save them money, improve reliability and increase their productivity. Published on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
Avere Systems has expanded its entries in the storage market with an all solid state drive (SSD) version of its tiered network attached storage (NAS) system -- the FXT 2700. Avere’s unique approach allows customers to preserve their investment in rotating hard disk drive-based (HDD) NAS file systems while dramatically improving performance. Rather than adding expensive high performance HDDs or SSDs to existing filers, the FXT 2700 can speed heavy random read applications by a factor of 10x for all of customers’ file systems. Published on Friday, January 15th, 2010 | Jim Bagley
-
StorageCraft’s announcement of software that recovers and migrates Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and message stores is significant in that it adds essential data protection capabilities for SMB’s business-critical Exchange environments. Published on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 | Deni Connor
-
QLogic’s announcement this month that Dell will OEM its 8100 Series Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) and embed them into its Dell PowerEdge rack, tower and rack-mounted servers is a victory for the company that was the first vendor to introduce and ship single-chip Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) adapters. Published on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 | Deni Connor
-
QLogic's announcements this month that its QDR InfiniBand adapters have been chosen by IBM, Dell and HP for high-performance computing (HPC) connectivity signals an important milestone – that all three of the largest systems manufactures will use QLogic InfiniBand products with their HPC deployments. Published on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 | Deni Connor
-
QLogic this month strengthened its converged networking position with the announcement that IBM will integrate the company’s single-chip QL8100 Series converged network adapters (CNAs) with IBM Power Systems’ POWER6-based tower, rack-mount and blade servers.
QLogic is the only vendor to experience multiple design wins for its native, single-chip Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) CNAs. Earlier this year, the company’s 8100 Series CNAs were integrated with IBM’s x86-based System x servers and BladeCenter blade servers and are the exclusive CNA integrated across NetApp’s portfolio of unified storage systems. Published on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 | Deni Connor
-
A recent article described a major social media site’s disappointing results with the latest generation of multi-core servers. Further analysis indicated that in virtualized environments such as VMware, Xen and Hyper-V, the CPU is usually not the bottleneck. Improvements in storage speed have not kept pace with the rapidly improving CPUs. Described as the storage performance gap, the inability of hard disk drives (HDDs) to keep up with the workload is a tough problem for organizations that have relied on server improvements to offset the growth demands. Published on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | Jim Bagley
-
Storspeed’s introduction of the SP5000 Application-Aware Caching appliance marks an important crossroad for IT managers – ‘Do I spend money for storage capacity when what I really want is to increase the performance of my storage or do I look for a solution that lets me scale performance independently of capacity by looking to the network and applications running on it.’ Published on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 | Deni Connor
-
Overland Storage in July bolstered its end-to-end data protection family with the introduction of a data replication appliance targeted at small and mid-sized businesses. The REO Business Continuity Appliance steps in to fill a much needed part of Overland’s storage portfolio – disaster recovery and business continuance. It complements Overland’s continuum of data protection products – tape, disk-based systems, snapshot, near-continuous data protection, and now, real-time business continuity. Published on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 | Deni Connor
-
Adaptec rolled out this month a family of RAID controllers – the Series 5Z RAID Controller with Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection -- which eliminate backup batteries and still provide superior performance and reliability. Why is this important? In three decades of designing portable computing products, my standard comeback to what I’ve learned is that ‘I hate batteries. I really hate batteries.’ Batteries are made out of nasty stuff, wear out, need recharging circuits, cost a lot of money and never work when you really need them. So any system that eliminates batteries, in my experience, is a Really Good Thing. Published on Monday, June 15th, 2009 | Jim Bagley
-
QLogic’s entry into the Ethernet adapter market this week is highly significant because it completes the company’s data center strategy – that of providing full data center connectivity with Fibre Channel host bus adapters, Fibre Channel over Ethernet Converged Network Adapters, InfiniBand host channel adapters and now, intelligent 10Gbit Ethernet adapters – something no other network adapter vendor has done to date. Published on Monday, June 1st, 2009 | Deni Connor
|
