Category Archives: System effectiveness

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 , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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

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

ESRP v3 (Exchange 2010) log playback results, 1Kmbox&under – chart-of-the-month

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Ray

The above chart is from our last Exchange [2010] Solution Review Program (ESRP) performance dispatch released in our October newsletter (sign-up upper right).  The 1K mailbox and under category for ESRP represents Exchange storage solutions for SMB data centers. As … Continue reading →

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

Top 10 blog posts for 2011

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Ray

Happy Holidays. I ranked my blog posts using a ratio of hits to post age and have identified with the top 10 most popular posts for 2011 (so far): Vsphere 5 storage enhancements – We discuss some of the more … Continue reading →

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Cognitive computing, Data integrity, Ethernet, FC, FCoE, IBM SyNAPSE chip, MIT analog brain chip, SSD storage, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Making hardware-software systems design easier

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Ray

Recent research from MIT on a Streamlining Chip Design was in the news today.  The report described work was done  by Nyrav Dave PhD and Myron King to create a new programming language, BlueSpec that can convert specifications into hardware chip design (Verilog) or … Continue reading →

Posted in Decision making, Energy efficiency, R&D measures, Storage architecture, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment