It wasn’t that long ago that Violin Memory pioneered the high-performance flash market.  They created the market for speed but were lacking a rich data services offering.  It wasn’t long before many other all-flash storage arrays came to market which may not have been as fast but were good enough with a rich feature set. The lack of data services and competition ultimately causes a lot of pain for Violin Memory.  It was so bad that many people thought the company was doomed, but after our SFD8 presentation I’m not convinced. The meeting had started before the cameras were actually rolling, which I think was really unfortunate for Violin.  We were doing two things: eating breakfast and talking financials with the CEO.  As we listened to him talk one thing became apparent – Violin financials say they have a chance.  CEO Kevin DeNuccio said they had a quarterly burn rate of $12mm with a break-even point beingRead More →

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In: Storage

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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In: Cloud, Storage

At VMworld this year I attended Tech Field Day Extra event as a delegate. Once of the more interesting presentations came from DataGravity. One of the reasons I found them so interesting is they are attempting to add a new dimension to the storage array market. Since the storage array market was created people have cared about three things: data resiliency, speed, and capacity. These three metrics should not come as a surprise since the intent was to leverage a larger pool of capacity for reduced cost and improved performance. Fast forward to now and these three things have not fundamentally changed much. We still care about protection our data, making it perform well, and how much data we can store. DataGravity is trying to change this by building new Data Analytics capabilities into their storage array. If you’ve every worked in a large enterprise, you have most likely dealt with legal and security teams. They alwaysRead More →

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In: Storage, Tech Field Day

In just a few weeks Tech Field Day will be hosting it’s 7th Storage Field Day with a nice list of sponsors and presenters including a new secret company.  I’m excited to be a TFD delegate and join with some friends to listen, learn, and share my experience.   If you don’t already know the folks over at Tech Field Day host a bunch of events like this focusing on different areas. Brining innovative vendors together with free thinkers in the field to discuss technology and the industry leads to some top notch content.   I look forward to sharing and learning at SFD7 and beyond with the community!Read More →

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In: Tech Field Day

In 2012, at VMworld, we first saw the “technology preview” for Virtual Volumes or VVOLs for short.  Here we are, nearly three years later, and VVOLs are part of vSphere 6.0 release!  So, what the heck is a Virtual Volume anyways? To answer that question we really need to understand how the storage and virtualization areas interact in today’s IT organization.   Today we have a pretty clear delineation between the roles of storage and VMware admin.  The storage administrator creates a LUN on a tradition storage array and presents it to the VMware environment for consumption.  The storage administrator is tasked with ensuring the array is working and the storage assigned meets the requirements given. Once the LUN has been assigned to the VMware environment, the allocation portion of the storage administrator’s job is done.  Now the VMware admin will create the datastore, assign virtual machines to reside on it, and managed its capacity. When theRead More →

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In: Storage

My passion, like many of you, has always been technology. It all started when my dad bought me my commodore VIC-20 when I was just 5 or 6 years old. I remember the using the external storage at the time, a Datasette. It was the first, of many, technological advances I’d see with magnetic tape and data storage in general. I guess I’ve come full circle now working in the world of Enterprise Storage and Backup for the past 15 years. We’ve seen a huge amount of change and advancement. From DASD to FICON to FAST the landscape is an ever involving one. Passion. It’s what drives us to explore new things, rise to challenges, and advance and support our environments. That passion is what excites us to share knowledge and absorb knowledge shared by other. That passion is what makes part of being EMC Elect special. To be grouped together with so many engaging export whoRead More →

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