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…
On a recent trip to VMware in Palo Alto, I found some time to visit with a good pal of mine, Vinay Gaonkar, who is now the Product Manager for XtremIO over at EMC. Vinay used to be a storage PM at VMware (he worked on the initial phases of VVols), and we worked together on a number of storage items in various vSphere releases. It’s been almost 2 years since I last spoke to the XtremIO folks (VMworld 2012 in fact, when the product still had not become generally available), so I thought that this would be a good…
As many of you are aware, VMware made a number of announcements at VMworld 2012. There were three technical previews in the storage space. The first of these was on Virtual Volumes (VVols), which is aimed at making storage objects in virtual infrastructures more granular. The second was Virtual SAN (VSAN), previously known as Distributed Storage, a new distributed datastore using local ESXi storage. The final one was Virtual Flash (vFlash). However, rather than diving into vFlash, I thought it might be more useful to take a step back and have a look at flash technologies in general.
Last week, I presented at the UK National VMUG. I took the opportunity to catch up with Darren Williams (Technical Director, EMEA & APAC) of WHIPTAIL who was also presenting at the event. My first introduction to WHIPTAIL came last year when I first met Darren at another user group meeting, and I posted about their XLR8R array on the vSphere storage blog. Darren & I discussed the changes which WHIPTAIL has undergone in the past 12 months since we last spoke, including the launch of a new range of scale out storage arrays, as well as the new features…
One of the new features of vSphere 5.1 was the SSD monitoring and I/O Device Management features which I discussed in this post. I was doing some further testing on this recently and noticed that a number of fields from my SSD were reported as N/A. For example, I ran the following command against a local SSD drive on my host and these were the statistics returned.
At VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of catching up with Scott Kline, Karthik Pinnamaneni & the rest of the team from Nimbus Data. In the weeks leading up to VMworld I read quite a bit about Nimbus Data’s new Gemini Flash Array, but my primary interest was to figure out what integration points existed with vSphere.
To build on 5.0 enhancements to make the life of a vSphere administrator easier from a storage perspective, vSphere 5.1 includes additional command for the diagnosis of various storage protocol issues from the ESXi host. This new functionality is called I/O Device Management (IODM).