Spending the week in Silicon Valley catching up on storage progress. Short takes:

  • Hyper-V storage virtualization. Software now in beta that dramatically increases the Microsoft virtualization layer’s storage chops: cheap snapshots; high-performance I/O with multiple VMs; and an almost invisible UI. Snaps into the management bus as a standard VHD with a map magic smart driver behind it.
  • A NAS test appliance that replaces a lab full of equipment with a single server box that can generate millions of NFS connections and drive GB of traffic. CIFS too. Swifttest.
  • Update from Parascale: some vlarge customers seeing compelling economic benefit from an internal scale-out file storage utility. Time is ripe.
  • Quick intro to FOSS NAS – NFS, CIFS, HTTP, WebDAV & more – company Gluster. Metadata server is an architectural problem – so lose it! Want/need a deep dive on this.
  • Rapid growth at Nexenta with their ZFS-based storage server.
  • An informed observer posits that ZFS on Mac may not be dead – if Oracle’s acquisition of Sun goes through in the not-too-distant-future. See = believe.

And there’s more
Today the event I came to town for starts with briefings from several firms and a reception at one of my favorite places, the Computer Museum. Looking forward to visiting PARC and briefings from VMware, Xsigo, MDS Micro, 3PAR, Symantec (Veritas), Ocarina, Nirvanix and Data Robotics.

The StorageMojo take
Storage is not, historically, a fast moving market. But I’m seeing more action today than in years.

And that’s good for customers and the industry.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.