This is an interesting announcement for those of you following emerging storage technologies. We’ve been talking about flash technologies for some time now, but for the most part flash has been either an SSD or PCIe device. Well, we now have another format – DIMM-based flash storage device. And VMware now supports it.
Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with Mike Koponen and Dean Steadman of Fusion-io. I had met with Mike and Dean at VMworld 2013, and spoke to them about the Fusion-io acquisition of NexGen storage earlier last year, and what plans Fusion-io had for this acquisition. Well, the result is ioControl Hybrid Storage, and we discussed some of the architecture of ioControl as well as a number of vSphere integration points.
All Flash Arrays continue to make the news. Whether it is EMC’s XtremIO launch or Violin Memory’s current market woes, there is no doubt that AFAs continue to generate a lot of interest. Those of you interested in flash storage will not need an introduction to SolidFire. These guys were founded by Dave Wright (ex-RackSpace) and have been around since 2009. I have been trying to catch up with SolidFire for sometime as I’d heard their pitch around Quality of Service on a per volume basis and wanted to learn more, especially how it integrated with vSphere features. Recently I…
There is a new storage vendor on the block – COHO DATA – who just exited stealth and launched their new product with the tag ‘Storage for the Cloud Generation’. I had the opportunity recently to catch up with Andy Warfield, co-founder and CTO of COHO DATA. Andy has a long history of involvement with storage and virtualization. A graduate of Cambridge University in the UK, he was involved in XenSource where he developed much of the low-level storage integration mechanisms for external storage arrays like NetApp and DELL EqualLogic. Andy gave me an in-depth interview related to their new…
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…
Hey all, its been a while since I put out anything that was non-VMware related. Actually, looking back, it was during the run up to VMworld. Well, this time of year is usually busy for us at VMware, especially with the vSphere 2013 (5.5) announcement and subsequent release and Virtual SAN going into beta. There have been a few things happening in the flash world over recent weeks so lets recap on some of those.
Before I left for PTO, I wrote an article on a number of different storage vendors you should be checking out at this year’s VMworld 2013. One of these was a new start-up called PernixData. With tongue firmly in cheek, I suggested that PernixData might use VMworld as a launchpad of their FVP (Flash Virtual Platform) product. Well, needless to say, my good friend Satyam Vaghani, CTO at PernixData, reached out to me to say that they were in fact announcing FVP before VMworld. He shared some details with me, which I can now share with you if you haven’t…