Archive for July, 2006

HDS Virtualisation

I may have mentioned before that I’m working on deploying HDS virtualisation. I’m deploying a USP100 with no disk (well 4 drives, the bare minimum) virtualising 3x AMS1000 with 65TB of storage each. So now the tricky part; how to configure the storage and present it through the USP. The...
July 19th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

EMC Direction

EMC posted their latest figures. So they’re quoting double digit revenue growth again (although I couldn’t get the figures to show that). My question is; where is EMC going? The latest DMX and Clariion improvements are just that – performance improvements over the existing systems....
July 17th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Data Migration Strategies

Everyone loves the idea of a brand-new shiny SAN or NAS infrastructure. However over time this new infrastructure needs to be maintained. Not just at the driver level, but eventually arrays, fabrics and so on. So, data migration will become a continous BAU process we’ll all have to adopt. Whilst...
July 17th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

More on Virtual Tape

Last week I talked about virtual tape solutions. On Monday HDS released the news that they’re reselling Diligent’s VTL solution. From memory, when I last saw this about 12 months ago, it was a software only solution for emulating tape, sure enough that’s still the same. Probably the...
July 11th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Performance End to End

Performance Management is a recurring theme in the storage world. As fibre channel SANs grow and become more complex, the very nature of a shared infrastructure becomes prone to performance bottlenecks. Worse still, without sensible design (e.g. things like not mixing development data in with production)...
July 10th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Virtual tape libraries

I previously mentioned virtual tape libraries. Two examples of products I’ve been looking at are Netapp’s Nearstore Virtual Tape Library and ADIC’s Pathlight products. Both effectively simulate tape drives and allow a virtual tape to be exported to a physical tape. Here are some of...
July 5th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

The Incredible Shrinking Storage Arrays

For those who don’t relate to the title, check out IMDB…. You know how it is, you go to buy some more storage. You need, say 10TB. You get the vendor to quote – but how much to do you actually end up with? First of all, disk drives never have the capacity they purport to have even...
July 4th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Thin Provisioning and it's Monday and EMC are buying (again)

In the early 1990’s StorageTek released Iceberg, a virtualised storage subsystem. Not only was it virtualised but it implemented compression and thin provisioning. For those who don’t know, thin provisioning allows the overallocation of storage based on the fact that most disks don’t...
July 3rd, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More