storage | Recovery Monkey

October 28, 2024October 29, 2024

How to Successfully Navigate Storage Vendor Capacity Guarantees

I want to arm you with the knowledge needed to properly navigate storage efficiency guarantee contracts and arrive at a safe system sizing, with reasonable assumptions.

This is another of my generic, vendor-neutral posts aimed at helping the audience be aware of certain important things that I often see overlooked.

How does one navigate the small print around storage data reduction guarantees? What are you entitled to if the vendor misses the mark? And how do you minimize your risk when faced with certain sales teams that are determined to win even if it means huge customer risk?

Do you know your data makeup? And how it may affect a capacity guarantee? But, more importantly, how it will affect your overall efficiency?

Let’s start with a nice reductio ad absurdum example to illustrate what I mean.

April 13, 2023April 19, 2023

HPE GreenLake for File Storage

A critical part of the recent April 4^th, 2023 announcements from HPE Storage was the scale-out HPE GreenLake for File Storage.

For the foundational piece explaining the common hardware between the various offerings please go here. For the Block storage piece, here.

The new HPE File offering is based on the HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware, and uses a common management interface for both File and Block, providing a seamless, centralized, multiprotocol management experience.

For the people that like looking at boxes, a small one would look like this:

A Small HPE GreenLake for File Storage System – Compute Separate from Capacity

April 6, 2023April 13, 2023

The New HPE GreenLake for Block Storage – Powered by Alletra Storage MP.

Now that we have the basic Alletra Storage MP hardware architecture details explained, what is the new Block storage offering from HPE?

It is the next evolution of HPE storage, combining novel approaches with certain tried-and-true elements and concepts from our existing systems.

For the people that love looking at boxes, here’s a photo of one of the new systems.

Bezel designers are the unsung heroes of storage. Without them everything would look the same.

August 24, 2020September 2, 2020

When Terrified Vendors Attack: The Dell PowerStore Edition

Dell is at it again. This time, they paid Principled Technologies to do some tests in order to produce a ridiculous report trying to compare the high-end HPE Primera to the midrange Dell EMC PowerStore.

I’ll expose some of the more egregious errors in their methodology and overall thinking, but first I want to direct readers to an easy way to impartially compare for themselves, without having to read a FUD document sponsored by anyone at all.

Executive Summary: A Primera 670 is multiple times faster than a PowerStore 9000T, has stronger data protection, and much higher uptime.

Continue reading “When Terrified Vendors Attack: The Dell PowerStore Edition”

August 20, 2020August 20, 2020

The Harsh Realities of PCIe Lane Shortage in Storage Systems

There are a lot of myths and misinformation, plus more than a modicum of misunderstanding, regarding how storage systems can use available bandwidth, especially with certain newer kinds of media.

I wanted to explain some of the harsh facts of storage system design in the real world, and why one shouldn’t just add up drive speeds to estimate performance.

Continue reading “The Harsh Realities of PCIe Lane Shortage in Storage Systems”