vSphere 6.5 Core Storage White Paper Now Available

I’m delighted to announce the availability of a new vSphere 6.5 core storage white paper. The paper covers new features such as VMFS-6 enhancements, policy driven Storage I/O Control, policy driven VM Encryption, NFS and iSCSI improvements and of course new limit increases in vSphere 6.5. There are too many VMware folks to thank for putting this paper together, but you’ll find them all listed in the acknowledgements section. I do want to mention one person however; a very special thanks to Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage who spent a lot of time testing many of these new features, and…

What’s new in vSphere 6.5 Core Storage

Hello from VMworld EMEA in Barcelona. Well, we can finally talk about vSphere 6.5 today. In this post, I want to highlight a number of new and enhanced features that you will find in vSphere 6.5 related to core storage. I am not going to discuss Virtual SAN (VSAN), Virtual Volumes (VVols) or I/O Filter enhancements (VAIO) specifically in this post, although you will no doubt see some new features tie directly into the latter. Instead, I want to talk about those features that are specific to core storage.

Cohesity Data Platform 2.0 is out

Cohesity have released their next version (2.0) of the Cohesity Data Platform. I met Cohesity at VMworld 2015, and  I wrote about my first impressions of the solution in a blog post from back in August 2015. In a nutshell, Cohesity are positioning their Data Platform as hyper-converged secondary storage. They want to stop the silo’ing of different storage for backups, file shares and analytics in the data center, and offer you a single platform for all of your secondary storage needs. Now they are ready with the next version, so lets take a quick look at what is coming…

Datrium go GA

This week Datrium announced that their DVX system is now generally available. I met these guys at VMworld 2015, and wrote a closer look at Datrium here. If you want a deeper dive into their solution, please read that post. But in a nutshell, their solution uses a combination of host side flash devices to accelerate read I/O, while at the same time writing to the Datrium hardware storage appliance (called a NetShelf). The NetShelf provides “cheap, durable storage that is easy to manage”. The DVX architecture presents the combined local cache/flash devices and NetShelf as a single shared NFS…

A closer look at Primary Data

Primary Data were one of the storage vendors that I wanted to catch up with at VMworld 2015. I was fortunate enough to meet with Graham Smith who is their Director of Virtualization Product Management. Graham gave me a demonstration of the Primary Data product in the Solutions Exchange at VMworld, and I also had an opportunity to visit their offices in Los Altos during a recent trip to the bay area and catch up once again with Graham and Kaycee Lai, SVP of Product Management & Sales at Primary Data. Before we get into the product and solution details, I…

A closer look at Datrium

Datrium are a new storage company who only recently came out of stealth. They are one of the companies that I really wanted to catch up with at VMworld 2015. They have a lot of well-respected individuals on their team, including Boris Weissman, who was a principal engineer at VMware and Brian Biles of Data Domain fame. They also count of Diane Green, founder of VMware, among their investors. So there is a significant track record in both storage and virtualization at the company.

A first look at Cohesity

I mentioned in an earlier post that Cohesity were one of the vendors that I wanted to check out at VMworld 2015. These guys have only literally exited stealth. Just yesterday, I sat in on a webinar from Nick Howell, who I know extremely well from his days in technical marketing over at NetApp. Nick has now joined Cohesity as the role of an evangelist, which I think is a great move on Cohesity’s part. On Nick’s webinar, he introduced us to the vision behind Cohesity’s product, what they hope to fix in a customer’s environment and some teasers regarding…