Almost any hybrid or all-flash storage array will accelerate performance for the applications it hosts. Yet many organizations need a storage array that scales beyond just accelerating the performance of a few hosts. They want a solution that both solves their immediate performance challenges and serves as a launch pad to using flash more broadly in their environment.
Everyone sings the praises of how great and wonderful private cloud infrastructures are and what a difference maker solid state disks (SSDs) are. However Virsto has found that its software provides some of the secret ingredients needed to make private cloud infrastructures easy to manage and what it really takes to make SSDs sing. Today I complete my interview series with Virsto’s CEO, Mark Davis, about what Virsto offers to bring out the best in private cloud infrastructures and SSDs.
Automated storage tiering (AST) seems to be getting ever more attention as more organizations move from physical to virtualized environments and look to use networked storage systems with AST to support them. But AST carries its own set of baggage and can potentially create as many problems as it solves, not the least of which is that it may not be as automated for all application workloads as some vendors may lead you to believe.
The bidding war for 3PAR between Dell and HP continued yesterday with 3PAR first announcing that it had reached an agreement to be purchased by Dell for $24.30 a share and then, before the end of the day, HP countered with a $27 per share price offering. This back and forth has captured the attention of many of those who follow storage and even those who do not. But what is puzzling to many is, “What is so interesting about 3PAR that it is prompting Dell and HP to fight over it?”
Organizations have a proclivity to look at storage arrays primarily in the context of how much storage capacity do they offer. But as storage arrays add features such as deduplication and thin provisioning, storage efficiency is taking on new importance as an evaluation criteria when selecting a storage array. This is raising questions as to what role, if any, that a storage array’s storage efficiency features should play in the final buying decision.
Not many individuals have ever had the opportunity to be worth $1 billion. Fewer still have had the opportunity to lose a billion dollars over the course of their lifetime. Then there are those privileged few that have both gained and lost that amount of money in just a few years. It was one of those individuals, Peter Bell, a general partner at Highland Capital, who spoke at the opening of this week’s BDevent in Boston to share what he learned from that experience and how others can benefit from it.
This week I am spending a couple of days at Compellent’s annual C-Drive conference in Minneapolis, MN where about 500 users, value added resellers (VARs) and Compellent sales reps are in attendance. Since a couple of years have passed since I attended the last one, I thought I would make the 6-hour drive from Omaha to Minneapolis to catch up on the latest going-ons with Compellent and gain some insight as to how they plan to recoup after their latest earnings stumble.
Have you ever been out hiking, minding your own business, when all of a sudden you see something moving in your peripheral vision? Because you’re not sure what you saw you stand real still so whatever it was doesn’t bite you. Well, that was my first impression after I finished listening to a briefing about Wasabi Systems’ VMX 2000 Series Storage Appliance given by Frank G. Logan, III, President and Chief Executive Officer of Wasabi Systems, Inc.
“You know things are tough when companies finally stop throwing capacity at their infrastructure problems and start thinking about how they provision and allocate storage.” Those are the sentiments that Craig Nunes, 3PAR’s VP of Marketing, expressed in a recent conversation I had with him in regards to how the economy is affecting 3PAR’s business. In short, the economy is not affecting 3PAR badly at all.
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