A closer look at Portworx

Last month I had the opportunity to attend DockerCon17. One of the break-out sessions that I attended was from a company called Portworx. Portworx provide a solution for stateful docker container storage, which is what caught my interest. There are lots of companies who have already created docker volume plugins for their existing storage solutions, including VMware. However Portworx seem to be approaching this a bit differently, and are providing a layer of abstraction from the underlying host storage. So you might be using cloud (e.g. EBS from AWS), or SAN or NAS or indeed you might only have local…

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,…

Some upcoming speaking engagements

A short post to let you know about some upcoming speaking engagements that I am doing over the next couple of weeks. First up, I will be speaking at the TechUG, or Technology User Group event next week. This event will be held on Thursday, November 26th. It will be held in the Westin Hotel in the heart of Dublin city, Ireland. There is a really good agenda for this event (which is not a VMware centric event), that you can find at this link here. I personally will be speaking about Virtual SAN (VSAN), VMware’s hyper-converged compute and storage…

Do RDMs still rely on LUN ID?

I had an interesting question the other day about whether Raw Device Mappings (aka RDMs) still had a reliance on the LUN ID, especially when it comes to the vMotion of Virtual Machines which have RDMs attached. I remember some time back that we introduced a concept called Dynamic Name Resolution for RDMs, which meant that we no longer relied on a consistent HBA number or even the path to identify the RDM, but do we still use the LUN ID in vSphere 5.1?

Violin Memory & 1 Million IOPs from a single VM

Another Flash Array vendor that I wanted to meet with at this years VMworld in San Francisco was Violin Memory. For those of you who have been following the keynotes at VMworld 2012, one of the things which will have stood out will have been the 1 million IOPs from a single VM. Now 1 million IOPs  isn’t something new. Last year, VMware’s performance team published a paper on how they achieved 1 million IOPs from a single vSphere 5.0 host running six virtual machines. But this year, we achieved 1 million IOPs from a single Virtual Machine. And guess…

Nimble Storage 2.0 Architecture Updates

Regular readers of my VMware Storage Blog will be no stranger to Nimble Storage. I’ve blogged about them on a number of occasions. I first came across them at a user group meeting in the UK & I also wrote an article about them when they certified on VMware’s Rapid Desktop Program for VDI. Nimble Storage have been in touch with me again to share details about their new 2.0 storage architecture. After a very interesting and informative chat with Wen Yu of Nimble, I’m delighted to be able to share these new enhancements with you, in this first post…