We have been discussing NAND technology for quite awhile now but this month I ran across an article in IEEE Spectrum titled “a SPIN to REMEMBER – Spintronic memories to revolutionize data storage“. The article discussed a form of magneto-resistive random access memory or MRAM that uses quantum mechanical spin effects or spintronics to record [...]
The chart is from SCI’s October newsletter/performance dispatch on Exchange 2010 Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP v3.0) and shows the mailbox database access latencies for read, write and log write. For this report we are covering solutions supporting from 1001 up to 5000 mailboxes (1K-to-5Kmbx), larger and (a few) smaller configurations have been covered in previous performance [...]
Last week NetApp announced the availability of data compression on many of their unified storage platforms, which includes block and file storage. Earlier this year EMC announced data compression for LUNs on CLARiion and Celerra. I must commend both of them for re-integrating data compression back into primary storage systems, missing since IBM and Sun [...]
I understand the rationale behind EMC’s purchase of Isilon scale out NAS technology for big data applications. More and more data is being created every day and most of that unstructured. How can one begin to support multiple PBs of file data that’s coming online in the next couple of years without scale out NAS. [...]
Yesterday, EMC announced the purchase of Bus-Tech, their partner in mainframe or System z attachment for the Disk Library Mainframe (DLm) product line. The success of open systems mainframe attach products based on Bus-Tech or competitive technology is subject to some debate but it’s the only inexpensive way to bring such functionality into mainframes. The other, more [...]
Fall 2010 news letter containing links to podcasts, articles, tips, interviews, industry trends and perspectives as well as other content pertaining to servers, storage, I/O networking, virtualization and cloud.
A recent post by Stephen Foskett has revisted a blog discussion that Chuck Hollis and I had on commodity vs. special purpose hardware. It’s clear to me that commodity hardware is a losing proposition for the storage industry and for storage users as a whole. Not sure why everybody else disagrees with me about this. [...]