Another storage vendor that I finally managed to catch up with at this year’s VMware Partner Exchange was Tegile. I was curious about the name, and I learnt that Tegile was a merging of the terms Technology and Agility. Tegile is another vendor that I have seen at various events, but have not had an opportunity to catch up with them in person and learn about their products. This time, I got an opportunity to catch up with Rob Commins (VP of Marketing) and Mike Recker of Tegile, and put a few questions to them.
Category Archives: hardware
A closer look at Dot Hill Systems
Last week, I was at our VMware Partner Exchange event in Las Vegas. Apart from my own break-out session on vSphere 5.1 storage features, I wanted to catch up with a number of our partner vendors who are doing cool things in the storage space. One of these vendors is Dot Hill, a company from Longmont, Colorado, who have been making storage arrays for a considerable amount of time now, but one which does not seem to get a huge amount of exposure. I caught up with Matt Alsip, the Technical Marketing Manager at Dot Hill, to put my customary set of questions to him about their products and how their arrays integrate with vSphere.
NetApp Flash Accel Launch
Last year, NetApp announced a new host side cache accelerator feature to compliment their Virtual Storage Tiering (VST) technology. Rather than keeping all your data in flash, VST places hot data in flash while moving cold data to cheaper and slower media. NetApp are offering this as an end-to-end technology, from server to array controller (Flash Cache) to disk pools (Flash Pools). One of the major parts of this is Flash Accel, which was also announced in the latter part of last year, and is the server-side flash component of VST. On the back of their recently announced All Flash Array, NetApp are also making Flash Accel available to the general public.
Heads Up! Nutanix NOS v2.6.4 now available
Nutanix have informed me that they have a new release available – Nutanix OS 2.6.4 (NOS is the new name for the previously named Nutanix Complete Cluster). They are looking for all their customers to proactively move to this new release. Although Nutanix also have NOS 3.0 release on the cards, existing customers will first need to move to version 2.6.4 in order to be in a position to migrate to 3.0. If that is not reason enough, the 2.6.4 release also includes the following new features:
QLogic Mt. Rainier Technology Preview
I was fortunate enough yesterday to get an introduction to QLogic’s new Mt. Rainier technology. Although Mt. Rainier allows for different configurations of SSD/Flash to be used, the one that caught my eye was the QLogic QLE10000 Series SSD HBAs. These have not started to ship as yet, but considering that the announcement was last September, one suspects that GA is not far off. As the name suggests, this is a PCIe Flash card, but QLogic have one added advantage – the flash is combined with the Host Bus Adapter, meaning that you get your storage connectivity and cache accelerator on a single PCIe card. This is a considerable advantage over many of the other PCI cache accelerators on the market at the moment, since these still require a HBA for SAN connectivity as well as a slot for the accelerator.