COHO Data – out of stealth today!

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…

VSAN Part 7 – Capabilities and VM Storage Policies

In this post, the VSAN capabilities are examined in detail. These capabilities, which are surfaced by the VASA storage provider when the cluster is configured successfully, are used to set the availability, capacity & performance policies on a per VM basis when that VM is deployed on the vsanDatastore. There are 5 capabilities in the initial release of VSAN, as shown below. I will also try to highlight where you should use a non-default value for these capabilities.

VSAN Part 5 – The role of VASA

VASA, originally introduced in vSphere 5.0, are an extension of the vSphere Storage APIs. VASA is shorthand for vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness. It initially allowed storage arrays to integrate with vCenter for management functionality via server-side plug-ins or Vendor Providers. The storage provider exists on either the storage array service processor or it may also be a standalone host – this is at the discretion of the vendor. In the case of VSAN, it also uses VASA, but interestingly the storage provider is now placed on the ESXi host. Read on to learn more.

An Introduction to Coraid

Another session that I attended during the UK National VMUG earlier this month was an overview of Coraid Technology from Max Brown, one of Coraid’s System Engineers based in the UK. My first introduction to Coraid was at VMworld 2011 & I did a short overview of their AoE (ATA over Ethernet) solution here. I wanted to get along to this session to see what had changed since then. In a nutshell, Coraid present SAN storage as local storage via AoE. How do they do that? Well, Coraid provide the HBA, the AoE initiator software  (which must be installed on…