In a world that’s gone software-defined mad, X-IO Storage are a refreshingly honest company seemingly devoid of hype. They make storage hardware, and specialised hardware at that. For the software-defined cheer-squad, this might sound like madness, but it’s not. First of all, software has to run on something, and that… Read More
Storage Field Day 5 is over, and I’m safely ensconced back in my home office with only the slightest touch of convention plague. It was a packed week, as those who followed along on the hashtag and video will be well aware. It’s going to take some time for it… Read More
Veeam have a long history of presenting at various Field Days, as you can see here. I wrote about them for Tech Field Day 9, in a prep post here, and in a review here. Going on past performances, we can expect that Veeam will be presenting some sort of… Read More
Scale sell a converged platform: compute and storage in pizza boxes that glom together to make a cluster of 3 to 8 nodes, like Voltron. It’s based on KVM, with proprietary bits added into the mix. Scale make a big deal about “no licensing” or, as they call it, a… Read More
I had a lot of trouble figuring out what SolidFire’s architecture looks like conceptually. I had to read a bunch of different whitepapers and ‘reference architecture’ documents on their website that were pretty light on the conceptual detail, but had plenty of configuration file examples and other gritty detail that… Read More
X-IO confuse me. My overall impression of X-IO is that they had something interesting and special several years ago, but the changes to the industry have passed now them by. Their 700 series arrays are hybrid SSD/HDD arrays with auto-tiering software to make the flash a kind of persistent cache.… Read More
Diablo Technologies are a Canadian company who have developed flash that you can access like memory, called MCS: Memory Channel Storage. It’s like the inverse of a ramdisk, for those of us old enough to remember such things: put flash into your server, but access it over the memory channel.… Read More
PernixData sell storage cache software, essentially. Their Flash Virtualization Platform, or FVP, is a software shim that sits between the Hypervisor (VMware only, according to their datasheet [PDF]) and the SAN (block only, so FC, FCoE or iSCSI attached, no NFS or SMB). It uses server-side flash to hold the… Read More
Sandisk are the other public company presenting at Storage Field. Their financial statements tell a very different story from those of EMC that we discussed previously. Check this out: That’s a pretty bumpy ride through the GFC. Here’s what it did for investors, in terms of Return on Equity: Ouch.… Read More
Welcome to the first instalment of my now-traditional pre-Tech Field Day event prep work! First up is EMC. I’ve picked EMC first for two reasons: firstly, they’re one of only two publicly listed companies we’ll be talking to as part of SFD5, and secondly, because they’re huge and have many… Read More
