Next week I’ll be at OpenStorage Summit EMEA 2012. Really, I can’t wait. First because I’m seeing that end users are asking for cheaper storage like crazy and then because I’m very curious to know the latest updates on Illumos and ZFS. (do I need to repeat that I’m very fond of Solaris?) I’ve already arranged some meetings with Nexenta representatives and I’ll share with you their point of view about storage and news from the conference. Stay tuned! Disclaimer: I was invited at this conference by Nexenta and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not...

Last week, EMC bought XtremeIO (an israeli Startup developing a 100% scale-out SSD storage, here a link to their website) for 420M$. This acquisition, less important than many others in EMC history (at least in terms of dollars), gave me the spin to write this post. SSD arrays are getting traction Well, this acquisition gives us the final proof that there is a lot of interest about SSD Arrays. Flash Arrays (Flash only) are a new market segment under the spotlight of end users and primary vendors. We often write about SSD storage startups and there are a lot of juicy things that are coming up. Ordinary...

During the last Storage Field Day we met an interesting SOHO/ROBO-focused storage company called Drobo. Drobo was the talk of the town a few years ago when their first 4-bay RAID array stunned the home storage enthusiasts with their BeyondRAID technology, that enabled a very smart use of those drives laying around the house giving the user the power to mix & match different drive sizes using a technology once found only on high-end storage arrays. Here’s a video recorded during Storage Field Day that shows how BeyondRAID works. After this breakthrough, Drobo slowly sneaked into the SOHO...

John Spiers, CEO and co-founder of NexGen Storage (and former cofounder of Lefthand Networks), talks about NeXGen Storage and the strategy of the company. Enjoy the video! Disclaimer: I was invited at this meeting by Condor Consulting Group and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku’s...

After having digested all the awesome things that I gathered during the last Storage Field Day I’m ready to start talking about some of the interesting things we saw last week in beautiful north California. Kaminario was our first host, Kaminario is a relatively new play in the flash array market, being founded in 2008, Dani Golan, Founder and CEO of the company, presented the company and their product to #SFD1 audience in an engaging and technical manner, he initially laid out what, I believe, everybody knows already: flash needs a completely new architecture at the storage array side, otherwise...