A closer look at Kaminario

As many of you are aware, I was at VMworld in San Francisco last week. I wrote a number of articles about some VMware storage announcements, such as EVO:RAIL, VAIO and VVols. However there were, as usual, quite a number of storage vendors at this years conference. One of the vendors that I really want to learn more about was Kaminario, an all flash array vendor that I’d heard a lot of things about. I had the pleasure of spending some time at the Kaminario booth with Shai Maskit who is a senior Product Manager with Kaminario. I posed my…

Storage Vendors to check out at #VMworld 2014 (SFO)

Last year I published a list of storage vendors and partners that I was planning to check out at VMworld 2013. This year is no different, with a number of new arrivals on the storage scene, as well as some super new cool products from many of VMware’s partners. Whilst this is no means a definitive list of what’s on show, these are the ones that I am particularly interested in checking out this year.

Does Storage DRS work with Adaptive Queuing?

Many of you will be aware that Storage DRS uses Storage I/O Control (SIOC) for load balancing based on I/O metrics. However a statement in one of our white papers has raised a few questions recently with both our customers and partners. The statement is as follows: “Queue depth throttling is not compatible with Storage DRS”. (pg.34) from  http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.5.pdf. This assertion led many to believe that Storage DRS would not work well with Adaptive Queuing (AQ), another of VMware’s queue depth throttling mechanisms. However internally, many felt that this wasn’t a true statement, but some work was needed to verify…

Pure Storage revisited – a chat with Vaughn Stewart

Pure Storage are all over the news at the moment. They just secured another round of funding (225 million to be precise), and are now valued at over 3 billion. You can read more about that here. However, even before this announcement, I had already arranged to have a catch up chat with Pure’s primary evangelist (and a good pal of mine), Vaughn Stewart. I was surprised to see that it had been 18 months since I last did a piece on Pure so I really did want to see what changes they had made in the meantime as there…

A list of ESXCLI storage commands you can’t live without

There are many occasions where the information displayed in the vSphere client is not sufficient to display all relevant information about a particular storage device, or indeed to troubleshoot problems related to a storage device. The purpose of this post is to explain some of the most often used ESXCLI commands that I use when trying to determine storage device information, and to troubleshoot a particular device.

QLogic – Execution Throttle Feature Concerns

I had a customer reach out to me recently to discuss VMware’s Storage I/O Control behavior and Adaptive Queuing behavior and how it works with QLogic’s Execution Throttle feature. To be honest, I didn’t have a good understanding of the Execution Throttle mechanism from QLogic so I did a little research to see  if this feature inter-operates with VMware’s own I/O congestion management features.

A closer look at SolidFire

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…