How fault tolerant are SANs?
Reader Kyle asks a good question: SANs are advertised up the wazoo as having lots of internal redundancy such as redundant power, redundant controllers, etc. I've spent enough time with redundancy to know that having two pieces of hardware often doesn't cut it. I was...
Ask StorageMojo: 80,000 mailboxes need help
A StorageMojo reader has a problem. Can you help? Our mail hub (80,000+ mailboxes) is virtualized with vSphere 4.1 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 x64 and Dovecot 2.0 [an open source IMAP/POP3 email server for Linux/UNIX-like systems]. We are using HP LeftHand...
14 things to know about XIV
It was almost 4 years ago that IBM bought XIV (See 2008: cluster storage goes mainstream). StorageMojo couldn't understand IBM's product positioning - yeah, the world was clamoring for a block device for multi-media - but liked the architecture. Now XIV appears to be...
The network is choking our storage
Amazon Web Services architect James Hamilton has been posting on network issues for over a year and researching them much longer. As Ethernet becomes the de facto SAN technology, his views become more relevant to the larger storage market. Critique Part of Mr....
RAMCloud is the new flash
Sometimes in the midst of the endless tweaking needed to maximize storage performance one just wants to say "screw it! Put everything in RAM!" And that's just what RAMCloud does. Disk is the new tape, flash the new disk, DRAM the new flash. RAMCloud is a research...
NoSQL in the metadata engine room
One more datapoint and we'll have a trend: NoSQL databases managing metadata. It's obvious in retrospect: use a scalable big data tool to handle scale-out metadata. Maybe not a requirement today, but surely will be with even bigger data tomorrow. Metadata is a...
Storage @VMworld 2011
VMworld is the best storage show I've seen in years. VMware's severe storage problems leave users hungry for solutions - and your friendly neighborhood storage industry is happy to oblige. It's almost as if VMware were owned by a storage company. Flash everywhere...
Flash cheaper than disk? Really?
Pure Storage, a well-funded ($55M) valley startup, came out of hiding last week with a startling claim: enterprise flash that is cheaper1,2,3 than disk. 1Cheaper after compressing and deduping the data. 2Cheaper after using almost all the flash capacity, which you...
StorageMojo @ VMworld
A shout out to all 'worlders: the StorageMojo analyst team will be descending en masse on the lush Nevada desert (yes, in Phoenix real estate people often tout the "lush desert" - don't they know what desert means?) to take in our 1st VMworld. We're arriving the 29th...
Dear StorageMojo: cheap home bulk storage?
Several readers have written in lately with roughly the same question: what's the best way to build cheap home bulk storage? Here's how 1 writer put it: I was hoping you could provide me with some advice. I have so many external drives that I have to swap. I have...
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