I’ve just been reading through the press release from HDS on their new AMS enhancements. Hu Yoshida has blogged about the new features too (it makes a change to hear something different than another discussion on UVM). There’s now HDP support as well as dense storage trays capable of holding 48 drives in 4U. With all the new features, is there any need for enterprise arrays like the USP?
A new product from Emulex called E3S or Emulex Enterprise Elastic Storage appears to allow block-level data to be migrated into the cloud for later access. But is it a backup solution; is it a replication solution? Let’s think about this in more detail.
Thin Provisioning (Dynamic Provisioning, Virtual Provisioning, or whatever you prefer to call it) is being heavily touted as a method of reducing storage costs. Whilst at the outset it seems to provide some significant storage savings, it isn’t the answer for all our storage ills.
Traditional storage arrays permit the configuration of multiple disk types within a single array. This can range from solid state disks (SSDs), through to fast fibre channel drives and slower high capacity SATA drives. USS operates a slightly different model – all drives in the USS array are high capacity SATA. SSD drives are then used to ameliorate performance on read and write activity in combination with the ZFS file system, by using the SSDs for read caching and write logging.
OK, I think it was cars the UK government were offering the discount on, not storage arrays. It goes like this; the government has set aside £300m – you trade in a car over 10 years old and get £2000 off the cost of a new one, half funded by the government. Apart from the obvious options to abuse this kind of system (buy yourself a banger for less than £2000 and into the dealership showroom you go) it’s the implication that we should be artifically propping up an industry to consume more when what we have works perfectly well.
So, the announcements have started; EMC have unveiled their next-generation version of the Symmetrix high-end storage array family and it is called the V-Max. So I guess previous guesses about DMX-5 or DMX-V weren’t far off!
Enterprise arrays have been successful because they offer high reliability and availability. This was achieved through monolithic designs of high cost components and a focus on engineering quality. That was then – now we have much more reliable components – disk drives really don’t fail that often – SATA drives are much more reliable than they ever were.
Previous posts have discussed reasons for migration and the need to identify all of the servers accessing your storage resources. In this post, I will cover the need to perform a full inventory of connected hosts and the gap analysis work to be performed before migrations can start.
A quick discussion last night on Twitter got me thinking about the way technology is perceived in the industry at large. In particular, the discussion related to NetApp and in my usual facetious way I said I wouldn’t quote NetApp and efficiency in the same sentence (whoa, I just did!).
Over the last few weeks I’ve been using Zumodrive, another cloud storage offering. This week Zumodrive released their iPhone client, which enables storage to be synchronised to an iPhone or iPod Touch device.
