Dear StorageMojo: migrating from Centera to Isilon

A reader asks: Do you have any tool to move External Files (nearly 70 TB) from Celerra & Centera to Isilon faster? The StorageMojo take I know EMC made it difficult to leave their Centera system for competitive systems, but making it difficult to leave for another EMC...

Are SSD-based arrays a bad idea?

Think: if NAND flash storage arrays were being developed today, what is the chance that we'd put the flash into little bricks and then plug a bunch of them into a backplane? So why do it now? It is a truism of design that when a new technology is developed, we use it...

NAND’s dimming future

Another StorageMojo Best paper, The Bleak Future of NAND Flash Memory, presented at this year's FAST '12 conference, quantifies flash's declining reliability, endurance, and performance as density increases. Researchers Laura M. Grupp and Steven Swanson from the UCSD...

SSDs and the TPC-C top 10

If SSDs are so great, shouldn't we see the results in TPC-C benchmarks? They are, and we do. But there are some surprises. Cost Looking at the TPC-C top 10 performance results showed the dramatic impact SSDs have had on the cost per thousand transactions (tpmC). There...

Gridstore snags Geoff Barrall

BlueArc and Drobo founder Geoff Barrall has a new perch: Gridstore, one of the companies I've been following for almost 3 years. Geoff is the new executive chairman. Formal announcement is expected this week. Gridstore's concept is a low-cost scale-out NAS appliance...

Learning from customers

EMC's Chuck Hollis blogged about The Vendor Beating a couple of months ago. The unspoken question in the post is "how do we understand what customers are telling us?" He writes As an employee of a large IT vendor, I've been at the receiving end of a reasonable number...