Dave Graham

This is a tongue in cheek video that I took in one of my labs showing why, for no other reason but fabric reduction, that CEE/DCE/FCoE is a valuable thing for ANY IT infrastructure. A couple of things you’ll notice here are: a.) it’s loud. Sorry about that…this lab is in a thermal chamber and it gets crazy loud. b.) I’m running Qlogic 2562 HBAs (fibre channel) and Qlogic 5802V switching (more switches are coming) c.) My GigE switches are, in a word, terrible (with the distinct difference being the Foundry/Brocade switching which is good). d.) I copt a TERRIBLE NorthEastern accent…I don’t even know where it came from… Anyhow, this Flip UltraHD recorder is pretty awesome… Related articles by Zemanta QLogic gets into servers from IBM, HP, Dell, and SGI (insidehpc.com) QLogic gets another CNA kiss from IBM (theregister.co.uk) QLogic gets vendor quartet for quad data rate ... (more)

Why Policy is the Future of Storage

As many of you may know, I work for EMC’s Cloud Infrastructure Group as part of the Atmos solution team. In this role, I’ve been blessed with getting a closer look at where the future of cloud storage is going as well as some of the drivers that will get it there. In this post, I’d like to talk a bit about policy and how this will shape the future of storage. I’m going to keep this as abstracted from product as possible, but where appropriate, I’ll try to show you how products are implementing this technology TODAY. What is Policy? By definition, policy is “[an] action or proce... (more)

An Introduction to Cloud Optimized Storage Solutions

Dave Graham's Blog With the advent of Cloud Computing and the general resurgence of computing grids, data storage has been taken for granted. However, as cloud computing’s storage and access demands continue to grow, the need for an optimized storage layer and hardware accompaniment become even more critical. The general focus has been on computational power, integration points via software (API access, for example), and code portability.  Storage, on the other hand, was considered a commodity to be taken advantage of; a simple pool of storage for whatever data needed some level of... (more)

Cloud Computing Expo: Cloud Optimized Storage Solutions

The basic ideology of Cloud Optimized Storage Solutions, as noted in the three previous installments, is to ingest significant amounts of both structured and unstructured content and, operating within the confines of SLAs and tiering, provide this data back to users with acceptable performance. In the previous three Cloud Optimized Storage Solution (COSS) articles in this series, I’ve discussed the content being stored, the method of storage, as well as principles derived from data tiering.  Today, I want to jump ahead a bit and discuss how neural networks and heuristics can impa... (more)

Storage Fabric Lifecycles: An Overview

Continuing the thread of explaining the roles of storage fabrics that we’ve come to know and love (FCoE, Infiniband, 10GbE iSCSI, etc.), @rjhintz asked the following question: What’s the expected technical life of a storage fabric install today before it’s upgraded to a new generation or forklifted out? There are a few significant events that precipitate storage [...] ... (more)