EMC is set to release a new version of the FLARE operating system for CLARiiON CX4 arrays in the next couple weeks. This version, FLARE 30, includes a number of highly anticipated features and I have a lot of customers anxiously awaiting its availability. Two major new features are FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and [...]
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I blogged earlier about designing with storage pools vs traditional raid groups. I’m sure you were all overly excited to read about that – both of you. Well one of the biggest benefits of using storage pools is now finally available from EMC. I’m talking about the latest release of the FAST from EMC. This [...] This week I was asked to come and help do a small pilot project of the Nexus 5000 and 4000 at East Carolina University. I was very happy to do it for two reason: 1. I love working with the Nexus gear and especially FCoE and 2. I just finished my Masters from ECU via [...] Traditionally with EMC SAN and NAS arrays the design was based on raid groups (RG) and LUNs. Overall the process was pretty straight forward. First you create a raid group such as a raid 5 raid group that may have 5 drives. I/O is usually one of the big concerns. The I/O generated by an [...] Following some twitter banter, an added PSP to 4.1 was made known to me. PSP’s, as you know, are Path Selection Plug-in’s, which under the umbrella of NMP and ultimately PSA, provide physical path selection for I/O requests. As of 4.0, the following VMware NMP PSPs were supported… MRU-Most Recently Used (VMW_PSP_MRU), common among Active/Passive arrays Fixed-(VMW_PSP_FIXED), common among Active/Active arrays Round Robin-(VMW_PSP_RR), common among Active/Active arrays or ALUA based… [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] With vSphere 4.1 right around the corner for general release there are a lot of efficiencies and capabilities that are EXPECTED (but not guaranteed) to be presented. One of those is a subset of the vStorage API suite more appropriately known as VAAI. The main take away from this integration point between vendor storage arrays and VMware vSphere is storage offload functionality. This is effectively the equivalent of the CPU offload capabilities that AMD-V and Intel VT offers within the compute… [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] Storage Tiering today is all the rage. The ability to migrate LUNs or chunks of data from one Tier to another, FC to SATA to Flash and back again is enough to tickle anyone’s fancy. Typically tiering consists of block for block movement of a LUN in its entirety, which as you can imagine, could be a lengthy process. A consistent view of the LUN is still maintained regardless of the tier it is moving to. But this is really nothing new, minus the automation, seamless LUN migration has long… [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] RAID-DP, Dual Parity, Double Parity, N+2, are all parallelisms for RAID6. RAID6 as you know ensures you’re protected within a RAID group in the unlikely event that you lose two disks. Does it happen? Sure. Although, in 10 years of traveling the Storage landscape across many a datacenter, I have never experienced such a situation (albeit mostly EMC shops). But low and behold as drive densities increase, ie. 1TB, 2TB, plus. drives, MTBF’s decrease, and so on, the ability to protect against seemly… [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] First off, the “Skin a cat” thing is just a figure of speech so if you’re a cat lover don’t report me to PETA. I would never do something like that…….well…….unless the damn thing bit me or really pissed me off, then all bets are off! Actually I’m sure this will make good FUD for [...] As I’m flying back to North Carolina from my one whole day at EMC World I was thinking a bit about the announcements that EMC has made this week. VPLEX is a very interesting product and I was going over possible use cases in my head. If money was no object, or if you needed [...] If you have or are looking at an EMC Clariion you may have heard about the relatively recent release of F.A.S.T for the Clariion line. F.A.S.T stands for Fully Automated Storage Tiering which basically means the ability to move data between different tiers of disks (FC, SATA and FLASH). EMC F.A.S.T is currently in stage [...] Yesterday after Tech Field Day there was a very good debate on Twitter and here about what a Vblock is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. Lately I’ve been so busy I haven’t blogged but this exact topic was on my short list to do when time became available. It’s a discussion I’ve had with [...] No not really (bite your tongue) take for instance Cisco’s latest offering. The entry level MDS 9148 8-Gbps tried and true, no oversubscription here (lines rates from 1/2/4/8 –Gbps). Core-Edge or top of rack deployments make no difference..either can take advantage of this slick speedster. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] NetApp performance test engineers rock! Yes, I said it and meant it. You see, I am the CEO and Co-Founder of an EMC partner and EMC is the only storage platform we work with. I believe in proving out a solution from an engineering perspective to ensure that what we are selling will deliver the [...] Recently we’ve had some clients interested in the ability to geographically separate some of their Microsoft clusters. Honestly I wasn’t aware that EMC even had a product to enable this until one of my colleagues mentioned RecoverPoint/CE. So I did a little reading and thought I give a brief summary of what it is and [...] |
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