Storage Field Day

45 posts

NVMe and NVMe-oF 101 with SNIA: queues everywhere!

SNIA dictionaryDr. J. Metz talked with us about NVMe at Storage Field Day 16 in Boston. NVMe is rapidly becoming one of the new hypes in the storage infrastructure market. A few years ago, everything was cloud. Vendors now go out of their way to mention their array contains NVMe storage, or is at the very least ready for it. So should you care? And if so, why?

SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement, and security of information. They do that in a number of ways: standards development and adoption for one, but also through interoperability testing (a.k.a. plugfest). They aim to help in technology acceleration and promotion: solving current problems with new technologies. So NVMe-oF fits this mission well: it’s a relatively new technology, and it can solve some of the queuing problems we’re seeing in storage nowadays. Let’s dive in!

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CloudIQ is looking out for your storage system’s health

A few week ago we visited Dell EMC in Boston for Storage Field Day 16. Susan Sharpe presented CloudIQ to us. If you’re unfamiliar with CloudIQ: it keeps track of your storage system performance, health, capacity and notifies you in case of any anomalies. If you’ve got a Dell EMC Unity storage system, you can already use it for free. And it’s also being actively developed, so expect many new features to come into production over time!

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I’m shipping up to Boston for Storage Field Day 16

Taking the train to AMS for Storage Field Day 16Yes, I’m sorry about the title too. But also glad to announce I’m shipping up to Boston for Storage Field Day 16 this week! Just ignore the fact I’m not on a ship but on a train for now, and all should be well… Next stop is AMS, then a direct flight to BOS. It’s going to be a slightly shorter, two-day Storage Field Day this time around. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to receive a lot less content!

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XtremIO X2: easier scaling, fewer cables and metadata aware replication

Storage Field Day 14 VMAX and XtremIO X2The Dell EMC High-End Systems Division talked about two systems. First about the VMAX All Flash, and later about the XtremIO X2. This post is about  the latter one. The XtremIO X2 builds upon the foundation of the original “old” XtremIO, but also does a couple of things differently. This post will explore those difference a bit, and will also talk about asynchronous and synchronous replication.

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VMAX All Flash: Enterprise reliability and SRDF at <1ms latency

Storage Field Day 14 VMAX and XtremIO X2Back in October we visited Dell EMC for a few Storage Field Day 14 presentations. Walking into the new EBC building we bumped into two racks. One with a VMAX all flash system and another with a XtremIO X2. Let’s kick off the Storage Field Day 14 report with VMAX All Flash. There’s still a lot of thought going into this enterprise class storage array…

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