Author Archives: Ray

Storage performance matters, even for smartphones

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Ray

  Read an interesting article from MIT’s Technical Review about a study presented at last weeks Usenix FAST (File and Storage Technology) conference on How Data Storage Cripples Mobile Apps.  It seems storage performance can seriously slow down smartphone functioning, not … Continue reading →

Posted in SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

SCI’s Latest ESRP (v3) Performance Analysis for Over 5K mailboxes – chart of the month

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Ray

This chart comes from our analysis of Microsoft Exchange Reviewed Solutions Program (ESRP) v3 (Exchange 2010) performance results for the over 5000 mailbox category, a report sent out to SCI Storage Intelligence Newsletter subscribers last month. The total database backup throughput … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Disk storage, Storage, Storage Backup, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Magnetic storage using lasers alone

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Ray

Read an article today on AAAS Science Now online magazine (See Hot Idea for a Faster Hard Drive) on using lasers alone to toggle magnetic moments in specially designed ferro-magnetic materials. The disk industry has been experimenting with bit patterned … Continue reading →

Posted in Disk storage, Energy efficiency, Storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Why EMC is doing Project Lightening and Thunder

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Ray

Although technically Project Lightening and Thunder represent some interesting offshoots of EMC software, hardware and system prowess,  I wonder why they would decide to go after this particular market space. There are plenty of alternative offerings in the PCIe NAND … Continue reading →

Posted in Data efficiency, Distributed computing, Market dynamics, Scenario planning, SSD storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Latest SPECsfs2008 results, over 1 million NFS ops/sec – chart-of-the-month

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Ray

[We are still catching up on our charts for the past quarter but this one brings us up to date through last month] There’s just something about a million SPECsfs2008(r) NFS throughput operations per second that kind of excites me (weird, … Continue reading →

Posted in Clustered storage, Ethernet, File Storage, SSD storage, Storage drive, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A day and a half with HP Storage

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Ray

[long post 945 wds] HP held their (annual?) HP Tech Days in Fort Collins, Colorado this last week. We had presentations from a number of HP product managers and got to meet a number of new and old bloggers there. … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Data reduction, Disk storage, File Storage, Storage architecture, Storage Backup, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Intel acquires InfiniBand fabric technology from Qlogic

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Ray

Intel announced today that they are going to acquire the InfiniBand (IB) fabric technology business from Qlogic. From many analyst’s perspective, IB is one of the only technologies out there that can efficiently interconnect a cluster of commodity servers into … Continue reading →

Posted in Clustered storage, Distributed computing, Ethernet, Infiniband, Information economy, Networking, RDMA, RoCE, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Latest SPC-1 results – IOPS vs drive counts – chart-of-the-month

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Ray

[As promised, I am trying to get up-to-date on my performance charts from our monthly newsletters. This one brings us current up through November.] The above chart plots Storage Performance Council SPC-1 IOPS against spindle count.  On this chart, we have … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Disk storage, FC, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments