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.
On July 25, 2019, iXsystems® announced two new storage systems. The FreeNAS® Mini XL+ provides a new top-end model in the FreeNAS Mini product line, and the FreeNAS Mini E provides a new entry-level model. These servers are mini-sized yet provide professional-grade network-attached storage.
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.
The ratification in November 2018 of the NVMe/TCP standard officially opened the doors for NVMe/TCP to begin to find its way into corporate IT environments. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to listen in on a webinar that SNIA hosted which provided an update on NVMe/TCP’s latest developments and its implications for enterprise IT. Here are four key takeaways from that presentation and how these changes will impact corporate data center Ethernet network designs.
For many of us, commuting in rush hour with its traffic jams is an unpleasant fact of life. But I once had a job on the outer edge of a metropolitan area. I was westbound when most were eastbound. I often felt a little sorry for the mass of people stuck in traffic as I zoomed–with a smile on my face–in the opposite direction. Today there is a massive flow of workloads and their associated storage to the public cloud. But there are also a lot of companies moving workloads off the public cloud, and their reason is cloud economics.
DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of the DCIG 2016-17 Midmarket Enterprise Storage Array Buyer’s Guide as the first Buyer’s Guide Edition developed from this body of research. Other Buyer’s Guides based on this body of research will be published in the coming weeks and months, including the 2016-17 Midrange Unified Storage Array Buyer’s Guide and the 2016-17 High End Storage Array Buyer’s Guide.
In today’s enterprise data centers, when one thinks performance, one thinks flash. That’s great. But that thought process can lead organizations to think that “all-flash arrays” are the only option they have to get high levels of performance for their applications. That thinking is now so outdated. The latest server-based storage solution from Datrium illustrates how accelerating application performance just became insanely easy by simply clicking a button versus resorting to upgrading some hardware in their environment.
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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