Virtually Speaking Podcast Episode #12 – VAIO

Every week, the VMware Storage and Availability Tech Marketing team (John Nicholson and Pete Fletcha) run a podcast show called the Virtually Speaking Podcast. This week I am a guest on their show, alongside Rich Peterson of FlashSoft. We spoke about VAIO, the new vSphere APIs for I/O Filters. While I described some basic features on VAIO, Rich describing the Cache Acceleration VAIO implementation for FlashSoft 4.0, created by the FlashSoft team over at SanDisk. This is the first fully certified VAIO implementation and I  wrote an article about it last month that you can read here if you wish.…

FlashSoft I/O Filter VAIO Setup Steps

Last week I had the opportunity to drop down to San Jose and catch up with our friends on the FlashSoft team at SanDisk. In case you were not aware, this team has been developing a cache acceleration I/O filter as part of the VAIO program (VAIO is short for vSphere APIs for I/O Filters). SanDisk were also one of the design partners chosen by VMware for VAIO. This program allows for our partners to plug directly into the VM I/O path, and add third-party data services, such as replication, encryption, quality of service and so on. An interesting observation…

Where are they now? Recent changes in the storage space

The storage space has been a very exciting space over recent years. There have been so many new start-ups and new innovations, that it becomes difficult to keep track sometimes. More recently, there has been a lot of news around mergers, acquisitions, shutdowns and IPOs in the storage industry. It got me thinking about a lot of the changes we have seen over the past number of years in the storage market. Just for my own interest, I went back over many of my blogs, and the various conversations I had with people at various VMworld events and VMUG meetings,…

VMworld 2014 – Storage News Part 1

Yesterday was my first day at VMworld 2014. As usual with this event, there are simply so many interesting announcements that it is hard to keep track. However, for me, there were a few things which stood out in the storage space worth calling out. These are specifically VMware focused products and features. I know that many of our partners have also made announcements in the storage space, but for today I concentrated solely on VMware. There are the two that really caught my attention.

A first look at SanDisk & FlashSoft

As part of my storage vendors to check out at VMworld 2013 in San Francisco, one of the vendors I really wanted to catch up with was SanDisk and to learn more about their FlashSoft product. FlashSoft are run as the software division of SanDisk. In August 2012, they released version 3.0 of their I/O acceleration software, compatible with vSphere 5.0. In April 2013, they released version 3.1 which works with vSphere 5.0 & 5.1. I caught up with a number of folks from the FlashSoft team at VMworld 2013 to learn more about their product, and what their plans…