Here is my traditional post where I disclose all the schwag and corporate largesse that I have accepted as part of attending a conference event. I do this because I am well aware of the bias inducing aspects of accepting these gifts, and it seems to help me keep from… Read More
An update on my Buyer’s Guide to Primary Storage: I will be publishing an extract of the full report in partnership with iTNews.com.au, to be completed in late-September. The full report will be available for purchase soon thereafter. That gives me enough time to meet personally with storage vendors during… Read More
For the first time ever, I’ll be at VMworld US this year, covering the event for iTNews.com.au. Well, assuming the US government lets me have an official journalist style I-visa after my interview in a couple of weeks. Since I’ll be getting paid (freelance, so only for what I actually… Read More
The centralised command-and-control method doesn’t work at scale. Many people have discovered this independently, from the Romans to the Chinese. It’s just not humanly- (or even computerly-) possible to track that many interdependent variables and make smart decisions. To manage a vast array of components, a central apparatus needs to… Read More
To continue my tradition of attempting full disclosure of all the things that may influence my writing, here is a list of all the gifts, hospitality, and other things of value I received as a delegate at Storage Field Day 5. I encourage you to determine how (not if, how)… Read More
PernixData FVP, in its upcoming version (currently in private beta) has some intriguing possibilities as part of an ecosystem of products, and it adds one of the big features I asked for in my prep post. What I like most about FVP is its non-disruptive nature. Subject to a few… 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
