Storagezilla

Rainfinity FMA/VE for non-production workloads at no charge

The IP storage team along with Chad have made the Rainfinity File Management Appliance/Virtual Edition available for non-production workloads at no charge.

If you plan on running it in a production environment want support and access to software updates that’ll require you purchasing FMA/VE from EMC, but right now you can take this and with no functional limitations or time restrictions investigate the product thoroughly for yourself in non-production scenarios.

Get it from here.

Simply Continuous

A tip of the hat to Robin Harris for pointing towards managed service start up Simply Continuous, who for all intents and purposes appear to use Data Domain’s all powerful Replicator software to transmit not only customer data to their managed DR facility but entire virtualised applications.

The economic reset has had few positive effects on all of us but I’m rather pleased to come across a startup where the first thing into my mind isn’t “So how much money did you blow on developing in house technology trying to answer a question no one asked?”

Gen 4 Centera: "Near perfect scalability"

Randomly coming across stuff on Twitter I didn't know was going on it appears UK based infrastructure software company Clearpace brought in a Gen4 Centera and attached their NParchive data pump.

From their blog post on the topic here's the money shot..

The headline is that across the board, NParchive on Centera proved to be as efficient as NParchive on DAS/NAS/SAN, importing up to 13B records/day on a single 8 core server while providing excellent query performance.  In terms of scale up, NParchve on EMC Centera also really shines — near perfect scalability for both query and import across multiple servers, with no sign of slowing down.  When comparing query performance against a well known OLTP database using local storage, the results were broadly similar, ranging from a 2X slowdown to a 10X speedup.

Dead End.

In my previous post I mentioned how the Intel Architecture was the enabler for the virtualised data center and then today IBM release their latest DS8000 series zombie array.

Like an automobile from Eastern Europe during the cold war, here comes the DS8700. With one gammy wheel, bad suspension and worse brakes this Yugo of enterprise storage arrays is just another iteration of something allegedly designed for everyone but desired by no one in particular. Though it's never boring to administer as there's always the sharp anticipation you're only seconds away from it going all split brain on you and will power itself off in a moment of confusion.

You'd have thought they'd have learned from their own success that the Intel powered SVC is the way to build systems, but no, someone has to use those polar bear drowning, penguin killing POWER processors as IBM need every distribution channel available to increase it's volume so they can drive fabrication costs down. God forbid the trust busters succeed in breaking the IBM mainframe monopoly because if they do the POWER architecture becomes economically unjustifiable. 

Though it could be worse. They could be using MIPS. Most commonly found in the Nintendo 64. 

And the USP-V.

Data Domain surfs the Intel Architecture wave

In Paris last week Ken Steinhardt went into detail as to why the Intel Architecture is such a powerful force in the Virtualised Data Centre. Much more than the incredibly niche low volume high cost processing architectures of some systems companies or the high volume simplistic embedded processors found in competitors enterprise storage systems...and consumer appliances.

This week we see another example of the rising Intel Architecture tide with the release of new Data Domain deduplication storage systems. It's not about the speed of disk drives, how many of them you have behind the controller, how short stroked they are or the interconnect involved.

It's just pure screaming Intel Architecture performance.

NetWorker Online Community

We had a big corporate hootenanny in Paris this week and one of the interesting things I noticed, when not tricking co-workers into going on roller coasters they'd never in their right mind get on, was just how full the Backup Recovery Systems (BRS) sessions were.

Running out of seats and having people sitting on the floor? That's never happened before.

A lot of what was discussed involves futures but for a more public insight as to where where BRS is going might come from the new NetWorker Online Community.

If you're not already registered on the EMC Community Network go sign up.

Get Precise?

I've been looking at Precise for Storage Tiering which is quite interesting if you want to leverage Enterprise Flash Drives for specific workloads or want to model your workload performance during and after a proposed data migration.

There are two aspects to the product, performance management which collects performance metrics at the application layer then maps the data layout across disk devices and the storage tiering optimiser which contains detailed performance models for Symmetrix & Clariion with EFDs and SATA drives.

By applying the data collected you can then model array performance before you perform a migration and chart the effects of the migration on your workload(s).

Storage has become Cache, Flash and SATA. It's been shipping since 2008 and now you can model how it'll work for you.

Compute.

Instead of talking a good game you learn a hell of a lot more by building it yourself.

Compute.

Nick Glasgow passes on.

Nick Glasgow passed away earlier.

In these situations one imagines not much matters beyond the fact that you go knowing that you are loved. It was clear from his family's correspondence that he is loved and in a world full of distractions where our wants can masquerade as our needs what could be of greater value?

Nothing.

Kill your VCR

My VCR died the moment they started putting movies onto DVDs but for my parents the VCR and VHS tapes lingered. Family movies, things of importance taped off the TV a list of trivialities to me but to them it made killing the VCR impractical.

Or it did until this weekend I looked under the TV to see the loyal 14 year old Japanese VHS machine with it's broken buttons and weird sounds while playing tapes staring back at me and I decided the kill the VCR once and for all.

Do unto it before it finally expired and did unto me first.

When choosing a replacement format I decided that optical discs were out. DVDs are cheap but BluRay is state of the art and isn't cheap. There also wasn't a BluRay writer available to me within the 15 minutes driving radius I was willing to commit to the project.

Instead of mucking around with physical formats it's better to muck around with file formats so it was going to be a hard drive solution. I get a company discount for Iomega gear, but who's willing to wait for shipping when you know you could buy it 15 minutes away.

And away I went...