Stories by: Mario Apicella

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BlueArc Titan 3200 a giant among NAS systems 19 August, 2008 03:18:00

We don't have Olympic Games for file server systems but the SPEC SFS (System File Server) benchmark serves as the next best thing, providing a comparable rank of file server performance. If you sifted through all of the SPEC SFS results published to the SPEC Web site, you'd find that the fastest NAS systems are from NetApp, BlueArc, and EMC, who take what in Beijing would have been a gold, a silver, and a bronze medal, in that order.
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VMotion and FCoE: A match made in admin heaven 14 August, 2008 10:54:00

In a recent review, I consolidated FC and Ethernet networks using FCoE (fibre channel over Ethernet) and Cisco's new Nexus 5000 switch. As the review showed, the combination merged the two transport protocols easily, allowing FC frames to channel through a 10G connection without giving up features or performance.
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Debating the merits of SSDs, part two 04 August, 2008 10:41:00

Healthy debate is often necessary to get a balanced view of an emerging technology. Somewhere between endorsements and detractions, a realistic understanding of the long-term outlook for a technology arrives. As such, I have decided to turn to a guest once again for the second installment in what I hope to be an ongoing debate over the merits of flash SSDs (solid-state drives).
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Debating the merits of SSDs 14 July, 2008 10:15:16

Would you pay several times more for a technology that yields only dubious performance advantage? How about if that technology is experiencing a high rate of product returns from early adopters?
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Price makes Imation SSDs a tough sell 19 June, 2008 07:43:38

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been around for many years. Their high cost, however, has limited their deployment to special environments, such as the military, where their rugged, shock-resilient design, coupled with extremely fast performance, justifies the expense.
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Solid-state upgrades: Risky business 12 May, 2008 11:27:41

Hardware upgrades can be a blast. Slide 2GB more RAM in your machine and everything just works faster and smoother. Updating a laptop or desktop with an SSD (solid-state drive), however, can be tricky and not so rewarding, as I am finding.
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Infortrend EonStor B12S delivers big with small-form-factor drives 06 May, 2008 11:08:34

For years now, 3.5 inches has been the reigning size of disk drives for enterprise storage arrays. Now, however, smaller, more efficient 2.5-inch SFF (small form factor) drives are proving viable challengers to their larger brethren.
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Storage that takes care of itself 05 May, 2008 10:17:20

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: SFF (small form factor) drives allow you to squeeze more spindles into the same rack space, giving you better performance in the same real estate. As an bonus, using 2.5-inch drives reduces the amount of electricity you use and creates less heat than using their larger cousins, essentially making your storage array less demanding on your wallet and on the electric grid.
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Time to bury big-drive "diskosaurs" 31 March, 2008 10:27:48

The EonStor B12 from Infortrend represents an intriguing proposition: an enterprise-class storage solution in miniature, built on 2.5-inch SAS drives. One look at this small-form-factor vision of the future, and you'll be reconsidering the long-term viability of behemoth arrays.
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Sun's StorageTek Honeycomb is sticky and sweet 28 March, 2008 11:19:58

Most storage solutions are optimized for fast access and frequent updates, a formula that fits the requirements of transactional applications to a tee but isn't necessarily well suited to archiving files that - whether by law, or policy, or practice - either must not or will not be changed.
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Upgrading to solid state 27 March, 2008 11:52:27

Now that loose SSDs (solid state drives) are available, you may be wondering how best to take advantage of the technology. Here's a breakdown of where retrofitting current machines with solid state could reap worthwhile rewards.