NVMe: Four Key Trends Set to Drive Its Adoption in 2019 and Beyond

November 8, 2018

Storage vendors hype NVMe for good reason. It enables all-flash arrays (AFAs) to fully deliver on flash’s performance characteristics. Already NVMe serves as an interconnect between AFA controllers and their back end solid state drives (SSDs) to help these AFAs unlock more of the performance that flash offers. However, the real performance benefits that NVMe can deliver will be unlocked as a result of four key trends set to converge in the 2019/2020 time period. Combined, these will open the doors for many more companies to experience the full breadth of performance benefits that NVMe provides for a much wider swath of applications running in their environment.

Six Best Practices for Implementing All-flash Arrays

April 26, 2018

Almost any article published today related to enterprise data storage will talk about the benefits of flash memory. However, while many organizations now use flash in their enterprise, most are only now starting to use it at a scale where they use it to host more than a handful of their applications. As organizations look to deploy flash more broadly in their enterprises, here are six best practices to keep in mind as they do so.

Two Most Disruptive Storage Technologies at the NAB 2018 Show

April 12, 2018

The exhibit halls at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas always contain eye-popping displays highlighting recent technological advances as well as what is coming down the path in the world of media and entertainment. But behind NAB’s glitz and glamour lurks a hard, cold reality; every word recorded, every picture taken, and every scene filmed must be stored somewhere, usually multiple times, and available at a moment’s notice. It is these halls at the NAB show that DCIG visited where it identified two start-ups with storage technologies poised to disrupt business as usual.

NVMe: Setting Realistic Expectations for 2018

March 15, 2018

Non-volatile Memory Express (NVMe) has captured the fancy of the enterprise storage world. Implementing NVMe on all-flash arrays or hyper-converged infrastructure appliances carries with it the promise that companies can leverage these solutions to achieve sub-millisecond response times, drive millions of IOPS, and deliver real-time application analytics and transaction processing. But differences persist between what NVMe promises for these solutions and what it can deliver. Here is a practical look at NVMe delivers on these solutions in early 2018.

Software-defined Data Centers Have Arrived – Sort of

July 31, 2017

Today organizations more so than ever are looking to move to software-defined data centers. Whether they adopt software-defined storage, networking, computing, servers, security, or all of them as part of this initiative, they are starting to conclude that a software-defined world trumps the existing hardware defined one. While I agree with this philosophy in principle, organizations need to carefully dip their toe into the software-defined waters and not dive head-first.

Nimbus Data Reset Puts its ExaFlash D-Series at Forefront of All-flash Array Cost/Performance Curve

March 29, 2017

A few years ago when all-flash arrays (AFAs) were still gaining momentum, newcomers like Nimbus Data appeared poised to take the storage world by storm. But as the big boys of storage (Dell, HDS, and HPE, among others,) entered the AFA market, Nimbus opted to retrench and rethink the value proposition of its all-flash arrays. Its latest AFA models, the ExaFlash D-Series, is one of the outcomes of that repositioning as these arrays answer the call of todayâ€™s hosting providers. These arrays deliver the high levels of availability, flexibility, performance, and storage density that they seek backed by one of the lowest cost per GB price points in the market.

Server-based Storage Makes Accelerating Application Performance Insanely Easy

May 24, 2016

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.

X-IO Refers to iglu as “Intelligent Storage”; I Say It is “Thoughtful”

March 8, 2016

In the last couple of weeks X-IO announced a number of improvements to its iglu line of storage arrays – namely flash optimized controllers and stretch clustering. But what struck me in listening to X-IO present the new features of this array was in how it kept referring to the iglu as “intelligent.” While that term may be accurate, when I look iglu’s architecture and data management features and consider them in light of what small and midsize enterprises need today, I see the iglu’s architecture as “thoughtful.”

It was All About the Petabytes at the NAB Show

April 21, 2015

A little over a decade ago when I told people that I was managing three (3) storage arrays with eleven (11) TBs of storage under management, people looked at me with a mixture of shock and awe. Fast forward to 2015 and last week’s NAB conference in Las Vegas, NV, and it was hard to find many storage vendors who even wanted to have a conversation with a customer unless it had at least a petabyte of data under management.

The Performance of a $500K Hybrid Storage Array Goes Toe-to-Toe with Million Dollar All-Flash and High End Storage Arrays

April 2, 2015

On March 17, 2015, the Storage Performance Council (SPC) updated its “Top Ten” list of SPC-2 results that includes performance metrics going back almost three (3) years to May 2012. Noteworthy in these updated results is that the three storage arrays ranked at the top are, in order, a high end mainframe-centric, monolithic storage array (the HP XP7, OEMed from Hitachi), an all-flash storage array (from startup Kaminario, the K2 box) and a hybrid storage array (Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 Appliance). Making these performance results particularly interesting is that the hybrid storage array, the Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 Appliance, can essentially go toe-to-toe from a performance perspective with both the million dollar HP XP7 and Kaminario K2 arrays and do so at approximately half of their cost.

Category: SSD Storage Systems

NVMe: Four Key Trends Set to Drive Its Adoption in 2019 and Beyond

Six Best Practices for Implementing All-flash Arrays

NVMe: Setting Realistic Expectations for 2018

Software-defined Data Centers Have Arrived – Sort of

Nimbus Data Reset Puts its ExaFlash D-Series at Forefront of All-flash Array Cost/Performance Curve

Server-based Storage Makes Accelerating Application Performance Insanely Easy

X-IO Refers to iglu as “Intelligent Storage”; I Say It is “Thoughtful”

It was All About the Petabytes at the NAB Show

The Performance of a $500K Hybrid Storage Array Goes Toe-to-Toe with Million Dollar All-Flash and High End Storage Arrays

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