Why it’s hard to meet SLAs with SSDs
From their earliest days, people have reported that SSDs were not providing the performance they expected. As SSDs age, for instance, they get slower. But how much slower? And why? A common use of SSDs is for servers hosting virtual machines. The aggregated VMs create...
Make Hadoop the world’s largest iSCSI target
Scale out storage and Hadoop are a great duo for working with masses of data. Wouldn't it be nice if it could also be used for more mundane storage tasks, like block storage? Well, it can. Some Silicon Valley engineers have produced a software front end for Hadoop...
Hospital ship Haven in Nagasaki, Japan, 1945
StorageMojo is republishing this post to mark this Memorial Day, 2015. In a few months we will be marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War two as well. My father was a career Navy officer and this is a small part of his legacy. See the original post for...
No-budget marketing for small companies
You are a small tech company. You have a marketing guy but it's largely engineers solving problems that most people don't even know exist. How do you get attention and respect at a low cost? Content marketing. When most people think about marketing, they think...
Hike blogging: Sunday May 10 on Brins Mesa
The Soldiers Pass, Brins Mesa, Mormon Canyon loop is my favorite hike. It has about 1500 feet of vertical up to over 5000 ft and the combination of two canyons and the mesa means the scenery is ever changing. This shot is taken looking north from the mesa to Wilson...
FAST ’15: StorageMojo’s Best Paper
The crack StorageMojo analyst team has finally named a StorageMojo FAST 15 Best Paper. It was tough to get agreement this year because of the many excellent contenders. Here's a rundown of the most interesting before a more detailed explication of the winner....
EMC II’s ragged last quarter
As reported in a Seeking Alpha quarterly call transcript, EMC's storage unit had a $75 million shortfall in Q1. CEO Joe Tucci said . . . we were disappointed that we fell a bit short of our Q1 revenue plan, approximately $75 million short. This $75 million revenue...
How doomed is NetApp?
The current turmoil caused by plummeting cloud storage costs, new entrants sporting modern architectures and the forced re-architecting due to flash and upcoming NV memories is a perfect storm for legacy vendors. Some are handling it better than others, but some, like...
EMC’s DSSD hiring is exploding
DSSD, the Valley startup acquired by EMC last year (see EMC goes all in with DSSD) is continuing to hire at an accelerating rate. Informed sources put the current DSSD team at 160 heads with plans to grow it to 800 over the next year. This is a program in a hurry....
Latency in all-flash arrays
StorageMojo has been writing about latency and flash arrays for years (see The SSD write cliff in real life), with a focus on data from the TPC-C and SPC-1 benchmarks. The folks at Violin Memory asked me to create a Video White Paper to discuss the problem in a...
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