If your mental image of a high-end storage array is rack after rack full of blinking lights, you would be right only 30% of the time. Today, nearly half of all high-end storage array models support configurations that fit into less than 8RU—that is just fourteen inches of rack space. How can this be?
IBM announced a new family of FlashSystem storage systems on February 12. The announcement has several implications for the enterprise storage marketplace.
Over the last five years, what mid-sized enterprises expect from their technology infrastructures has changed significantly. Data and the continuous availability of the systems that provide that data are critical to virtually all business operations. Beyond operations, we have entered a period of digital transformation where data has become a tactical and even strategic resource. Data is the foundation for value creation. Enterprise storage systems are changing in a variety of ways to address enterprise expectations for continuous availability, greater capacity, and the performance required to support critical workloads.
Every year at the Flash Memory Summit held in Santa Clara, CA, attendees get a firsthand look at the technologies that will impact the next generation of storage. This year many of the innovations centered on forthcoming interconnects that will better deliver on the performance that flash offers today. Here are DCIG’s main takeaways from this year’s event.
The current generation of all-flash arrays offers enough performance to saturate the network connections between the arrays and application servers in the data center. In many scenarios, the key limiter to all-flash array performance is storage network bandwidth. Therefore, all-flash array vendors have been quick to adopt the latest advances in storage network connectivity.
Simplicity is one of those terms that I love to hate. On one hand, people generally want the products that they buy to be “simple” to deploy and manage so they can “set them and forget them.” The problem that emerges when doing product evaluations, especially when evaluating all-flash arrays(AFAs), is determining what features contribute to making AFAs simple to deploy and manage. The good news is that over the last few years five key features have emerged that organizations can use to measure the simplicity of an AFA to select the right one for their environment.
DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of the DCIG 2016-17 High End Storage Array Buyer’s Guide developed from the enterprise storage array body of research. The DCIG 2016-17 High End Storage Array Buyer’s Guide weights, scores and ranks more than 100 features of fifteen (15) products from seven (7) different storage vendors. Using ranking categories of Best-in-Class, Recommended and Excellent, this Buyer’s Guide offers much of the information an organization should need to make a highly informed decision as to which high end storage array will suit their needs.
Ethernet adapters began migrating to LAN on motherboard solutions in the late 1990s. Yet this practice never took hold for other technologies like Fibre Channel. The Fibre Channel (FC) market even today, as Gen 6 (32Gb) is being introduced, is dominated by host bus adapters (HBAs). In this second installment in my interview with QLogic’s Vice President of Products, Marketing and Planning, Vikram Karvat, he explains why 32Gb FC HBAs are still installed separately in servers, as well provides insight into what new features may be released in the Gen 7 FC protocol
All-flash arrays, cloud computing, cloud storage, and converged and hyper-converged infrastructures may grab many of today’s headlines. But the decades old Fibre Channel protocol is still a foundational technology present in many data centers with it holding steady in the U.S. and even gaining increased traction in countries such as China. In this first installment, QLogic’s Vice President of Products, Marketing and Planning, Vikram Karvat, provides some background as to why fibre channel (FC) remains relevant and how all-flash arrays are one of the forces driving the need for 32Gb FC.
DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of its 2016-17 FC SAN Utility Storage Array Buyer’s Guide and 2016-17 Utility SAN Storage Array Buyer’s Guide that each weight more than 100 features and rank 62 arrays from thirteen (13) different storage providers. These Buyer’s Guide Editions are products of DCIG’s updated research methodology where DCIG creates specific Buyer’s Guide Editions based upon a larger, general body of research on a topic. As past Buyer’s Guides have done, it continues to rank products as Recommended, Excellent, Good and Basic as well as offer the product information that organizations need to make informed buying decisions on FC SAN Utility and multiprotocol Utility SAN storage arrays.
The information, product recommendations, and opinions made by DCIG, LLC., are based upon public information and from sources that DCIG, LLC., believes to be accurate and reliable. However since market conditions change, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
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