Blog

VMworld Briefing Note - Avere

Thu, 2 Sep 2010 09:17:29 -0500

As we wrote about in a recent entry on our blog on Network Computing, IOPS are becoming critical for increasing virtual machine density and many vendors are trying to figure out how to add additional IOPS power to their existing system by leveraging solid state technology and faster mechanical hard drives. But as we wrote in our article “Architecting Storage Networks for Data Delivery vs. Data Services” faster mechanics will only take you so far.

VMworld Briefing Note - Gluster

Wed, 1 Sep 2010 16:33:52 -0500

The Gluster Storage Platform is open source software that runs on DAS or SAN-attached commodity hardware to create a clustered, file-based storage solution. Gluster has no central metadata node, instead uses a hashing algorithm and token system that enables each storage node to resolve mapping to any file, eliminating the need to poll every node. This architecture can be optimized for capacity or performance profiles and it scales into the petabytes. In sports there’s a saying “you can’t teach speed”. Similarly, “you can’t hide high product costs”, says Gluster’s VP of Marketing, Jack O’Brien, referring to the price points proprietary storage systems are forced to charge. Gluster’s open source, software-only format and support licensing by the node, not capacity, allows configurations to maintain economical price points as they grow.

VMworld Briefing Note - Diskeeper V-locity

Wed, 1 Sep 2010 10:02:09 -0500

Diskeeper has been a staple in the disk performance optimization market for almost as long as I can remember. At VMworld they are talking about V-locity which is a disk optimization tool for virtual environments. Yes, its true virtual environments and fancy storage systems suffer from the same fragmentation issues that they always have. This can cause I/O bottlenecks quickly, impact VM share I/O prioritization and virtual disks that are set to dynamically grow but do not resize when data is deleted.

VMworld Briefing Note - Zetta

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:01:51 -0500

CEO and co-Founder, Jeff Treuhaft characterizes Zetta’s solution as “a filer-class experience in a multi-tenant environment”. What they’re striving to do is make cloud storage really look and feel like enterprise file storage. Zetta’s Storage Service is a pay-as-you-go subscription that appears as a drive letter or mount point to a POSIX-compliant file system, accessed via NFS, CIFS, FTP or WebDAV. The storage service includes snapshots, replication, a number of data integrity features and a performance SLA.

VMworld Briefing Note - VirtenSys

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:20:06 -0500

Our first briefing and later our first demo at VMworld was with VirtenSys. They are one of three players in the I/O Virtualization (IOV) space that we follow closely at Storage Switzerland. What makes IOV unique is how each of the three primary competitors approach this potential market. As we discussed in “What is I/O Virtualization” the value of IOV is to abstract I/O from the physical server. This can either be to allow multiple virtual machines or even physical servers to share the same Ethernet, Fibre Channel or other interface card or to be able to dynamically allocate more cards to a server that is becoming I/O constrained.