Dave Graham

If you follow me on Twitter at all, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Qlogic.  I appreciate the functional simplicity of what Qlogic designs encompass as well as the “get business done” attitude that they bring to their switches, HBAs, NICs, and CNAs.  Imagine my happiness, then, when I got ahold of one of their latest “edge” fibre channel switches, the SANbox 5802V.  The SANbox 5802V follows the typical edge-switch formula: 20 SFP ports for either 4Gb/s SFPs or 8Gb/s SFP+, 4 stacking ports that default at 10Gb/s Fibre Channel connection and can be upgraded to 20Gb/s FC when additional bandwidth is needed, a serial and IP-based management port setup, and dual redundant power supplies (the 5802V ships with 2 PSUs; the 5800V model ships with only 1).   SANbox 5802V Sp... (more)

Why Policy Is the Future of Storage, Part 2

In my first post on policy, I tried to show what policy’s influence would be like from a top-level standpoint. We see that policy can start from a localized array standpoint and “fix” performancing or hotspot issues based on key LUN migration technologies (like EMC’s FAST promises to do; Compellent already does this) while allowing business processes to continue “unharmed.” To a certain ... (more)

Deploying FCoE: What you need to know

So, my good friend Stu Miniman (@stu on Twitter) put out a video a few months back extolling the virtues of FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) for the next generation data center.  This video, while fascinating, didn’t answer the underlying hardware questions that we all had: What the heck does all this stuff look like?  To make us happy, Stu created a Part 2 video showing off some of th... (more)

A Vision of Failure

I’m probably the last person in the world you’d ever expect to write a post titled “A Vision of Failure” but, perhaps that’s more due to my inability these days to provide anyone with a sense of hopefulness regarding where cloud computing and the like are headed.  Visions, much like prophecies, exist to denote the “what ifs” not necessarily the “what will be” standards approaching on the... (more)

Cloud Optimized Storage Solutions (COSS) Explored

Dave Graham's Blog In part one of this series, we discussed the nature of content within the cloud. After determining the nature of the content being stored, it is important to understand how this unstructured and structured content will be stored. The mechanism for storage has significant impact on a provider’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) to the end user and can also promote the conc... (more)