In this second blog entry from our interview with Nimbus Data CEO and Founder Thomas Isakovich, we discuss microsecond latencies and how the recently announced Gemini X-series scale-out all-flash platform performs against the competition.
In 2014, high-density flash memory storage such as the 4TB Viking Technology αlpha SSD will accelerate the flash-based disruption of the storage industry and of the data center. Technology providers that engage in a fresh high-density flash-storage-enabled rethinking of their products will empower savvy data center architects to substantially improve the performance, capacity and efficiency of their data centers. Businesses will benefit by reducing the cost of running their IT infrastructures while increasing their capacity to serve customers and generate profits.
Recognized as an innovator in storage system technology, Thomas Isakovich sat down with DCIG to discuss the development, capabilities, and innovation in Nimbus Data’s latest release: the Gemini X. In this first blog entry, he guides us through the development of the X-series, and where he sees it fitting into the current market.
Some claim that all-flash memory and/or solid state drive (SSD) storage arrays will become the silver bullets that solve all of today’s challenges with enterprise storage arrays. Those closer to the manufacturing of storage arrays have a much different viewpoint as they see a long and healthy life ahead for traditional spinning media. In this third installment in DCIG’s interview series with iXsystem’s CTO Jordan Hubbard, he discusses how hybrid storage arrays hit the sweet spot for the storage needs of most organizations.
One of the most common requests that DCIG gets from its readers is to include the actual cost of storage systems in its Buyer’s Guides. The reason DCIG continues to decline that request and only includes starting list prices is that most storage systems may be configured in multiple different ways. This makes it impossible to arrive at a definitive price point. The second part in DCIG’s interview series with iXsystem’s Jordan Hubbard illustrates this point as he discusses how the availability of multiple different storage configurations and services trumps a cookie cutter approach to buying storage every time.
Anyone who managed IT infrastructures in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s probably still remembers how external storage arrays were largely a novelty reserved for high end enterprises with big data centers and deep pockets. Fast forward to today and a plethora of storage arrays exist in a variety of shapes and sizes at increasingly low price points. As such it can be difficult to distinguish between them. To help organizations sort them out, my blog entry today provides a primer on the types of storage arrays currently available on the market.
The time for the release of the refreshed DCIG 2014 Enterprise Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide is rapidly approaching. As that date approached, we have been evaluating and reviewing the data on the current crop of midrange arrays that will be included in the published Buyer’s Guide (information on over 50 models) as well as the models that will be included in DCIG’s online, cloud-based Interactive Buyer’s Guide (over 100 models.) Here is a peak into some of what we are finding out about these models in regards to their ability to deliver on data center automation, VMware integration and flash memory support.
Earlier this week Cisco officially became a storage provider when it announced its intention to acquire privately held WHIPTAIL Technologies. While this may have come as a surprise to some, rumors that Cisco was looking to acquire a storage company were already circulating in 2012 at Storage Networking World (SNW) as I discussed in a blog entry last year. So now that Cisco is in the process of becoming a storage company, what are the ramifications of this change in its product offerings?
As we were researching arrays for inclusion in the DCIG 2013 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide we kept encountering an intriguing group of companies that had designed–or were developing–storage arrays from the ground up to realize the performance benefits of an all flash array, but with storage capacities and price points that would bring the benefits of flash memory storage to a broader range of businesses. The resulting hybrid storage arrays achieve this balance of performance, capacity, and cost by intelligently combining flash memory with large capacity disk drives in a single storage system.
As we have been working on the development of a DCIG Buyer’s Guide for Hybrid Storage Arrays, it has been interesting to see the different approaches that the vendors are taking as they seek to leverage flash memory plus traditional hard drives to deliver previously unheard of IOPS and ultra-low latencies at a cost per GB that makes sense to a broad range of businesses. The “secret sauce” varies from vendor to vendor, but in every case it involves sophisticated caching and/or automated storage tiering software.
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