Tech Companies With An OPiuM Problem, Part 3

If you haven’t read them already, check out Part 1 and Part 2 in this series. We discussed the rule of thumb for investor returns of 10-20x money raised in the first post in this series. Let’s have a look at some numbers that we actually know to see if… Read More

EMC XtremIO

This is my review of XtremIO based on EMC’s presentation at Storage Field Day 5. Getting a clear picture of what XtremIO was about from EMC’s presentation was a significant challenge. It’s taken me a few re-watches of the video, and triangulation from other sources (including Solidfire’s presentation, ironically) to… Read More

XtremIO Offers Xtrem Tradeoffs

Getting a clear picture of what XtremeIO was about from EMC’s presentation was a significant challenge. It’s taken me a few rewatches of the video, and triangulation from other sources (including Solidfire’s presentation, ironically) to figure out how it works. XtremeIO ‘X-bricks’ are dual-active controllers connected to 25 eMLC flash… Read More

SFD5 Prep Work: SolidFire

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