The SolidFire Storage System: Reducing Complexity at Scale

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get to know SolidFire and its Storage System product, an all-flash array designed for on-premises use but with some attractive cloud functionality. At first glance, the array looks like many of those in the all-flash space. It’s built out of discrete nodes; uses 10 Gbps networking …

Dell Fluid Cache for SAN

Back in mid-2011, Dell acquired RNA Networks, a small startup out of Portland, Oregon. At the time Dell purchased it, RNA had a product, MVX, that employed three different ways to pool memory across multiple servers in order to accelerate workloads. One was a way to pool memory as a storage cache in order to …

Nasuni: Rethinking Every Aspect of Your Enterprise Storage

A few weeks ago I had a chance to speak at length with Andres Rodriguez, the incredibly passionate founder and CEO of Nasuni. Nasuni is a highly innovative storage company providing storage infrastructure backed by the cloud. I’ve been writing a lot about caching and flash in virtual infrastructures, and went into the conversation thinking …

When and Where to Use NAND Flash SSD for Virtual Servers

Keeping in mind that the best server and storage IO is the one that you do not have to do, then second best is that which has the least impact combined with best benefit to an application. This is where SSD, including DRAM- and NAND-flash-based solutions, comes into the conversation for storage performance optimization.