Scale Computing

Three Thoughts on the Nutanix & StorageReview Situation

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I’ve watched the recent dustup between VMware and Nutanix carefully. It’s very instructive to watch how companies war with each other in public, and as a potential customer in the hyperconverged market it’s nice to see companies go through a public opinion shakedown. Certainly both VMware and Nutanix tell stories that seem too good to be true about their technology. On the VMware side VSAN is new-ish, and VMware doesn’t have the greatest track record for stability in new tech, though vSphere 6 seems to be a major improvement. On the Nutanix side I have always had a guarded opinion of technologies that introduce complexity and dependency loops, especially where storage systems are competing with workloads for resources. I’ve argued …

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Two Big Vendor Takeaways from Storage Field Day 5

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Storage Field Day 5 is now over and was a marathon of vendor information and tech information. A marathon. I’m tired from 17 hour days, I’m addicted to caffeine, and my brain and body hurt. We had some great people along, on both sides of things. We had great vendors all around, even if some of the presentations were more controversial than others. That’s what I want to talk about here. Problem #1: Efficient Use of Time Tech Field Day participants and viewers already know a lot about the problems a vendor is addressing. We’re on the front lines of this stuff. We help our customers and organizations work around these problems every day. We know budgets aren’t infinite, that …

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VMware & Virsto

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Howard Marks has a great piece on VMware buying Virsto over at Network Computing (link is below): Some of my fellow analysts have lumped Virsto into the flash acceleration category along with caching solutions like Proximal Data, Sandisk’s Flashsoft and Intel’s CAS. While Virsto can use flash to accelerate some storage I/O, it’s not primarily a flash acceleration product. In fact, Virsto is a log-based, clustered file system that uses a dedicated log device, which can be a shared SSD, to accelerate virtual machine I/O. I saw Virsto for the first time at VMworld 2012, and it looked interesting as something that tries to turn a lot of the random I/O from a virtualization environment back into sequential I/O that arrays can better handle, while adding a …

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