NAS Robot Wars

The new Storwize V7000 Unified (Storwize V7000U) enhancements mean that IBM’s common NAS software stack (first seen in SONAS) for CIFS/NFS/FTP/HTTP/SCP is now deployed into the midrange. Translating that into simpler language: IBM is now doing its own mid-range NAS/Block Unified disk systems. Anyone who has followed the SONAS product (and my posts on said [...]

A Small Challenge with NAS Gateways

SAN Volume Controller Late in 2010, Netapp quietly announced they were not planning to support V Series (and by extension IBM N Series NAS Gateways) to be used with any recent version of IBM’s SAN Volume Controller. This was discussed more fully on the Netapp communities forum (you’ll need to create a login) and the reason given [...]

Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)

HSM is essentially a way to push disk files to lower tiers, mainly tape, while leaving behind a stub-file on disk, so that the file maintains it’s accessibility and its place in the directory tree. I say tape because there are other ways to do it between disk tiers that don’t involve stub files. e.g. [...]

The Joys of OEM Co-op-etition

I was recently mulling over some examples of OEM co-op-etition in our industry: During the early 00′s IBM and Compaq OEM’d each others disk systems, the MA8000 from Compaq (sold as the MSS by IBM) and the ESS from IBM (sold as the CSS by Compaq) to give each other coverage in midrange and high-end [...]

Nearline-SAS: Who Dares Wins

Maybe you think NL-SAS is old news and it’s already swept SATA aside? Well if you check out the specs on FAS, Isilon, 3PAR, or VMAX, or even the monolithic VSP, you will see that they all list SATA drives, not NL-SAS on their spec sheets. Of the serious contenders, it seems that only VNX, [...]

To Infiniband… and Beyond!

Not here this time… over there >>> This week I’m doing a guest blogging spot over at Barry Whyte’s storage virtualizatiom blog, so if you want to read this week’s post head over to:  https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/storagevirtualization/entry/infinity_and_beyond?lang=en p.s. Infiniband is the new interconnect being used in XIV Gen3    

You can’t always get what you want

There have been a raft of new storage efficiency elements brought to market in the last few years, but what has become obvious is that you can’t yet get it all in one product.

When Space, Time & Vendor Charges Collide…

Well the whole snapshot and replication thing got me thinking about vendor licensing. Licensing is a way to get a return on one’s R&D, it doesn’t really matter whether customers pay x for hardware and y for software, or x+y for the hardware ‘solution’ and zero for software functions etc, as long as the vendor [...]

How many fingers am I holding up?

The base2 Vs base10 nett capacity question is an interesting one. It remains a place of confusion for customers and that’s not surprising as it remains a place of confusion for vendors also.

SONAS Screenshots

One of the key figures in the open source world over the last decade or so has been Andrew Tridgell. An Australian famous as being the primary author of both Samba and rsync among other things. Andrew has been an IBM employee for the last 5 years and I’m told he was originally the architect [...]

SONAS Part 1 – Philosophy & Architecture

In 1997 IBM launched what it called the Seascape architecture, which essentially was about building storage systems out of snap-together technology rather than building individually hand-crafted monoliths. This architecture has been attributed to Michael Hartung, who was appointed an IBM Fellow in 2002.

A ramble through my personal NAS history

Think of this post as a pre-amble to my promised SONAS post… I guess most people have some experience with Microsoft file server technology, personally at home I use ftp for file centralization and backup, I find it simpler, but then I’m not a Windows server geek by any means. Others I know use OpenFiler, [...]

Poll results are in SONAS wins

The poll results are in and SONAS has come in as the product you most want to hear about. Not suprising seeing as it’s our newest storage product. I will be working on a SONAS post over the next week or so as time permits. Meanwhile check out the xkcd webcomic. Thanks for voting.