VMAX – The Mainframe of Storage

In this piece, Chris Evans compares Dell EMC’s VMAX storage array to classic mainframe computing. This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but is actually astute praise. Like the mainframe, VMAX caters to legacy applications that need industry leading high availability and performance. In that niche, the new All-Flash VMAX array performs excellent, and Chris would recommend for the right legacy workloads.


A Conversation with Congruity360 COO Mark Shirman

At Commvault GO 2017, Stephen Foskett sat down to interview Congruity360’s COO Mark Shirman. They discussed the company’s managed services portfolio, business model, and new data center.


Dell-EMC VMAX All Flash Review

At Storage Field Day last week, the delegates got to see presentations from a number of Dell EMC divisions, including an update on their flagship VMAX All Flash array. René van den Bedem thinks the platforms long legacy of high performance and availability makes it a no-brainer for organizations that need five 9s or greater availability on a 3-tier storage platform .


DellEMC SC progressing well

At Storage Field Day, Chin-Fah Heoh and the other delegates got a look at Dell EMC’s SC series midrange storage arrays, which came out of the company’s acquisition of Compellent back in 2010. The presentation highlighted the arrays RAID Tiering and All-Flash SC hardware lineup.


Storage Field Day 14 Preview: E8 Storage

Chris Evans gives a preview of what he saw from E8 Storage at Storage Field Day last month. They use a disaggregated approach, combining the impressive parallelism of NVMe with RoCE to offer extremely low latency and high throughput on commodity storage hardware. Make sure to check out their full presentation from Storage Field Day to get a full overview.


Storage Field Day 14 Preview: Scality

Scality returns for their second Storage Field Day experience this week. Chris Evans will be there and wrote up a preview of the company ahead of the event. In the post, he provides a quick overview of what exactly is object storage, and how Scality differentiates within the category.


Storage Field Day 14 coming up

Storage Field Day is coming up later this week, and Erik Ableson has a full preview. He’ll be attending Commvault Go before the event, hearing about their latest data management solutions. Then at Storage Field Day, he’ll get updates from Dell EMC across their vast portfolio, E8 Storage, and Scality. It should be a busy week, with many fascinating solutions on tap.


TFDx and SFD14 Delegate Thoughts: Pre-Attendance

Becky Elliott has an exciting week ahead of her. She’ll be attending Commvault GO for the first time, including a Tech Field Day Exclusive presentation, as well as her first Storage Field Day. Becky is pretty familiar with NetApp’s position in the storage market, so she’s interested to drink from the Dell EMC firehose to see how they compare. Make sure to follow along on the Storage Field Day live stream and watch alongside all of the delegates.


Attending #SFD14 next week

René van den Bedem will be attending Storage Field Day next month, and he’s sharing his excitement with a preview post. Make sure to watch the event live, and follow #SFD14 on Twitter for updates from all the delegates.


Dell EMC XtremIO At Storage Field Day 2017

Dell EMC CTO for ExtremIO Itzik Reich previews the company’s presentation at Storage Field Day next month. Make sure to mark your calendar, Dell EMC will be presenting across two days of the event.


Storage Field Day 14 Preview: EMC

Chris Evans will be at Storage Field Day next month and he has a preview up looking at what to expect from Dell EMC. He takes a look at the company’s diverse portfolio of storage options, and hopes to get some clarity on how Dell EMC will better unify their midrange offerings at the event.


Back to SFO for Storage Field Day 14! – FastStorage

Storage Field Day is coming up next month, and we’re happy to have the inimitable Jon Klaus returning! Returning for his seventh Storage Field Day, expect plenty of probing questions, quality analysis and stroopwafels from Jon as he sees presentations from Dell EMC, E8 Storage, and Scality.


I will be at Commvault Go and Storage Field Day 14!

Max Mortillaro will be back for a pair of events in November. He’s excited to attend Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO as well as attending Storage Field Day. He’s looking forward to a deep dives from Commvault, various Dell EMC divisions, comparing storage approaches from E8 Storage and Infinidat, and getting deep into object storage from Scality. It’ll be a busy month for Max!


It’s Time for Hard Drives to Join Tape In The Archive Tier

Mechanical hard drives are wonders of engineering. Despite proclamations of potential capacity limits, we’ve seen companies innovate to produce increasingly dense drives. But Chris Evans makes a compelling case here why spinning disks should be relegated to archiving going forward. This is because while throughput has increased much more slowly than capacity, we’ve actually seen latency get 50% worse in the last ten years. Combined with increased viability of cloud storage, Chris sees hard drives as viable for archive only.