If you’ve been experimenting with ZFS, as we have, you’ve been struck by some of its limitations in terms of flexibility, but there is one way to expand a zpool, as demonstrated by Harry D in a two-part blog post.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) just bought Fabrik (SimpleTech and G-Technology). So is Hitachi’s combination with SimpleTech a response or challenge to EMC’s acquisition of Iomega? In a word, no.

VMware has just announced the first round of vExpert Awardees, including Gestalt IT’s own Rich Brambley, as well as Scott Lowe, a behind-the-scenes friend to Gestalt IT! Congratulations, guys!

We in the storage and server fields (not to mention Apple fans) have been watching ZFS with keen interest for a while. It holds great promise as the next-generation UNIX filesystem foundation, and Joerg Moellenkamp over at c0t0d0s0.com has been covering Sun’s open-source ZFS super-filesystem for quite a while.

The mainstream media is still digesting the Oscar awards, but we in storage had our own announcement this week: TechTarget’s (now non-PDF?) Storage magazine announced their Storage Products of the Year award for 2008. Without further ado, the awards and my reaction!

The third rail of enterprise IT is the shockingly opaque and flexible pricing schemes applied to hardware, software, and services. How much does a high-end switch or storage array cost? Are you getting ripped off on your maintenance contracts? Which bundled software modules are required and which are pure profit? You’ll get no help in answering these questions from mainstream sources like technical media, trade shows, or corporate blogs.

Mike DiPetrillo from VMware just blogged about a new VMware knowledge base article fosuced on how VMware writes I/O to disk. This is essential reading for any VMware admin, as it deals with each OS’s I/O idiosyncracies.

The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990’s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets trying to get my storage layout just right, balancing the workload across every available disk.

When is a solution integrated and when is it a Frankenstein-like mashup of tangled tech? Apparently, that line is crossed when it’s your competitor’s offering… In my time in the storage industry, I’ve seen enough franken-storage come and go to make me skeptical whenever a new “integrated” solution is announced. But a lot of this stuff works just fine, so I also know that integrated solutions aren’t always bad!

If you use or are interested in VMware ESX 3.x and iSCSI, you simply must go read Chad Sakac’s post on the topic. Co-written with just about everyone in the industry (including EMC, VMware, NetApp, Dell/EqualLogic, and HP/Lefthand), Chad has put together a “cheat sheet” on the ins and outs of iSCSI connectivity and performance in ESX 3.x.