Good post by Chris Mellor (thank you) over at El Reg
We can tell you a few more juicy details about Pure’s coming high-end array, and we’re deducing that SolidFire has a product capacity refresh coming.
What we knew was that the new range-topper would boast up to 1.5PB usable capacity using 4 and 8TB 3D NAND modules (SSDs). It would have always-on QoS, support thousands of virtual machines and be priced at less than $1GB/usable capacity.
Read on here
Posted by rogerluethy on March 31, 2016
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/pure-storages-coming-high-end-array-we-have-the-details/
Good post by George Crump (thank you)
All-Flash Array Vendors are now releasing systems with 3D TLC SSDs. They claim that they have reached price parity, without data efficiency, to mainstream data center hard disk arrays. 3D TLC NAND does bring the price per GB of flash storage down considerably, but it does carry the risk of device failure and data loss. Understanding how a vendor mitigates that risk is critical to vendor selection.
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Posted by rogerluethy on January 26, 2016
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/making-all-flash-3d-tlc-ssd-arrays-enterprise-ready/
Good post by Chris Mellor (thank you) over at El Reg
Severely narrow view of AFA industry
Research house IDC has put out an all-flash array marketscape which deliberately excludes most of the available all-flash arrays. HPE tops its AFA list.
IDC identifies three leaders:
Can we put them in a 1-2-3 order?
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Posted by rogerluethy on January 18, 2016
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/hpe-tops-idcs-all-flash-array-list-but-look-whos-not-on-the-list/
Good post by George Crump (thank you)
One of the techniques that storage vendors use to reduce the cost of hard disk-based storage is deduplication. Deduplication is the elimination of redundant data across files. The technology is ideal for backup, since so much of a current copy of data is similar to the prior copy. The few extra seconds required to identify redundant data is worth the savings in disk capacity. Deduplication for primary storage is popular for all-flash arrays. While the level of redundancy is not as great, the premium price of flash makes any capacity savings important. In addition, given the excess performance of AFAs the deduplication feature can often be added without a noticeable performance impact. There is one process though where deduplication provides little value; archive. IT professionals need to measure costs differently when considering a storage destination for archive.
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Posted by rogerluethy on December 10, 2015
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/is-deduplication-useless-on-archive-data/
Post by Scott Dietzen (thank you)
Big news out of Round Rock, Texas and Hopkinton, Massachusetts yesterday: Dell and EMC have signed a definitive agreement under which Dell, together with Michael Dell, MSD Partners and Silver Lake, will acquire EMC. We want to share our insights on this news, and explain what it means for the storage market.
Pure Storage both cooperates and competes with both companies. Many of our customers also run Dell servers and VMware software, but we of course compete with both EMC and Dell storage. Our thoughts:
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Posted by rogerluethy on October 14, 2015
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2015/10/14/purely-observations-on-dell-emc-deal/
Good post by Brian Beeler (thank you)
Last week DCIG published their “2015-16 All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide.” We’ve grown accustomed to ignoring most “Magic” and “Best Of” quadrants and awards respectively because almost every time they’re garbage. Analysts or media members anoint some vendor or technology best, shiniest, most rectangle or whatever else they can come up with to promote their own brand. What’s worse are the awards that are paid for, an even more disturbing part of enterprise IT sales and marketing.
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Posted by rogerluethy on October 7, 2015
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/dcig-2015-afa-buyers-guide-is-fantastically-horrible/
Good post by Adam Armstrong (thank you)
According to both The Register and CRN, Cisco has confirmed that will cease its Invicta Storage Array line. Cisco first acquired the Invicta All-Flash array when it purchased Whiptail in 2013 for $415 million. Within a year Cisco halted shipments from apparent customer complaints. After two years of issues, Cisco will no longer develop the Invicta Appliance and its Scaling Systems products.
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Posted by rogerluethy on July 28, 2015
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/cisco-confirms-it-is-ending-its-invicta-storage-appliance/
Post by Justin Warren (thank you)
What I like most about the FlashArray//m is the combination of very dull things that combine to make this an interesting piece of infrastructure.
I tweeted out a cheeky picture of a 6509 with a Pure Storage logo on it, because that’s what the FlashArray//m reminds me of: a modular chassis with a backplane that was the workhorse core switch at multiple clients for over a decade. I quite liked them. We’ve had modular chassis like this for years in networking and server gear, so it’s somewhat astounding that storage doesn’t do this, at least, not in the same ubiquitous way (software based things on x86 servers notwithstanding).
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Posted by rogerluethy on June 8, 2015
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/pure-storage-flasharraym/
Good post by Jim Bahn (thank you)
Due to the unique characteristics of flash, performance validation testing is immensely challenging and critically important; follow these best practices.
All-flash storage arrays (AFAs) are receiving lots of attention these days and for good reason. Compared to spinning disks, AFAs provide dramatically better performance, take up less floor space, and even offer overall cost of ownership advantages. Nevertheless, the cost per gigabyte is still relatively expensive, which means that AFAs should not be deployed for every application workload. The obvious questions are which workloads are most cost-effectively deployed on flash storage and which vendor has the optimal flash storage product for your workloads.
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Posted by rogerluethy on June 4, 2015
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/everything-you-need-to-know-about-flash-storage-performance/
Post by Vaughn Stewart (thank you)
Like most in the storage industry, I’ve been paying close attention to EMC World 2015. In the absence of a genuine industry technical conference, EMC World provides the market with insight and perspective from the industry’s king-pin; an unveiling of the efforts of EMC engineering and a glimpse of where their sales and marketing efforts will be focused. While the EMC product portfolio spans a broad gamut, from cloud software to development platforms, enterprise storage remains EMC’s core competency.
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Posted by rogerluethy on May 11, 2015
https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/5-takeaways-on-xtremio-4-0-from-emc-world-2015/
Storage CH Blog 