Archive for September, 2007

Storage Standards – Arrays

Storage Standards – Arrays After a recent posting by Stephen I thought it would be good to discuss standards and the sort of standards I’d look to implement when designing an infrastructure from scratch. Obviously it isn’t always possible to start from a clean slate and consequently...
September 28th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Storage Futures or is it Options?

One of the trickiest problems in the storage industry is managing demand. Internal customers seem to think that storage isn’t physical and we just have tons of the virtual stuff we can pick out of the air as required. I don’t think they expect to talk to the server teams and find they have...
September 25th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

PSSST….Green Storage

HDS announced today a few amendments to the AMS/WMS range. The most interesting is the apparent ability to power down drives which are not in use a-la-Copan. According to the press release above, the drives can be powered down by the user as necessary, which presents some interesting questions. Firstly,...
September 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

NTFS Update

I did some more work on my NTFS issue on Friday. As previously mentioned, I was seeing NTFS filesystems with large levels of fragmentation even after drives were compressed. The answer turns out to be quite simple; Windows doesn’t consolidate the free space blocks which accumulate as files are...
September 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Problems Problems

This week I’ve been working on two interesting (ish) problems. Well, one more interesting than the other, one a case of the vendor needing to think about requirements more. Firstly, Tuning Manager (my old software nemesis) strikes again. Within Tuning Manager it is possible to track performance...
September 21st, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Pause for Thoughtput

I’ve just read a couple of Gary O’s postings over at Thoughtput, the blog from Gear6. In his article “Feeding the Virtual Machines”, he discussed NAS and SAN deployment for a virtual environment and makes the bold claim: “Most people tend to agree that NAS is easier and...
September 15th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

SAN Virtual Appliances

LeftHand, FalconStor, Arkeia and Datacore all now offer VMware appliance versions of their products. I’m in the process of downloading them now and I’m hoping to install over the next few days and do some testing. I’ve previously mentioned some VM NAS products which I’ve installed...
September 14th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Green Poll

Here are the results from the green poll (13 votes only ) Q: Is the discussion of green storage just hype? 54% – Yes it is hype, vendors are riding the bandwagon 15% – No, it is an important issue and vendors are solving it 15% – I’m not sure still deciding 15% – No,...
September 12th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

USP-VM

Hitachi has announced (10th September) the availability of a new storage array, the USP-VM. At first glance this appears to be the USP-V equivalent of the NSC55 as it has very similar characteristics in terms of cache cards, FEPs etc. Unfortunately HDS have provided links to specification pages not...
September 11th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Virtualisation Update

Thanks to everyone who commented on the previous post relating to using virtualisation for DR. I’m looking forward to Barry’s more contemporaneous explanation of the way SVC works. I guess I should have said I understand Invista is stateless – but I didn’t – so thank’s...
September 7th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More
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