Over the last decade, storage arrays have been evolving to becomes faster and protect data better.  They have become smarter with where and how data is stored and how to predict when data will be accessed.  However one thing has not, by and large, changed.  Storage arrays haven’t learned much about what data is actually stored on them.  In the last year, this has begun to, in part, change.  A few companies now have products which provide some type of data awareness, but they aren’t created equal. Content awareness is nothing new. However, it has mostly existed for legal and compliance separate from the storage array. Today I attended Storage Field Day 8 and had a chance to meet with Andy Warfield of Coho Data and I saw a different take on this.  A few months ago I saw Coho Data start talking about running containers directly on their storage array.  I dismissed this mostly edge casesRead More →

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It wasn’t that long ago when the mainstream technology world was all abuzz with this whole virtualization thing. It didn’t take long before every enterprise was developing a virtualization strategy. In fact virtualization is a requirement for most enterprise IT shops seeking to enable automation and standardization of infrastructure. Containers are quickly becoming mainstream due, in part, to Docker. What is a container? It’s another form of virtualization, but rather than emulating hardware like a virtual machine, it’s provided an isolated software environment on top of an existing operating system. Certain system resources, such as operating system binaries, are shared amongst the containers on an operation system. Other resources can be dedicates to ensure performance of a container. This containerization allows for the standardization of application deployment and delivery. This is a change in how we build and delivery software services. As more and more businesses move to cloud infrastructures services they are faces with the challengeRead More →

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