Eric Burgener

Legacy storage architectures do not perform very efficiently in virtual computing environments. The very random, very write-intensive I/O patterns generated by virtual hosts drive storage costs up as enterprises either add spindles or look to newer storage technologies like solid state disk (SSD) to address the IOPS shortfall. SSD costs are coming down, but they are still significantly higher than spinning disk costs. When enterprises do consider SSD, how it is used and where it is placed in the virtual infrastructure can make a big difference in how much enterprises have to spend to meet their performance requirements. It can also impose certain operational limitations that may or may not be issues in specific environments. Some of the key considerations that need to be taken into account are SSD placement (in the host or in the SAN), high availability/failover r... (more)

What Windows 8 Hyper-V R3 Storage Enhancements Will Mean

Last September, Microsoft released some information about what customers could expect to see in Windows 8, and at the very end of February the Windows 8 beta became available. There's been some interesting activity on the blogosphere about it (see a good blog from Jason Perlow here). What Are the Enhancements? There are a couple of interesting storage enhancements in Hyper-V R3, including VHDX, ODX, built-in deduplication, support for SMB 2.2 and the introduction of ReSF (Resilient File System). VHDX: Larger Capacity VHDs In Hyper-V R2, VHDs can be up to 2TB in size, but in Hyper-V... (more)

Storage Can Be the Key to Aggressively Priced Cloud Offerings

One of the key reasons for moving to a cloud-based infrastructure is to lower overall infrastructure costs. This is true regardless of whether you are building an in-house (private) cloud or are a public cloud provider looking to price your offerings competitively. Because storage comprises such a large part of the outlay of any cloud-based infrastructure, it's an obvious place to look for optimizations that can lower overall costs. A lower cost virtual infrastructure gives cloud providers pricing leeway, which can be used to either out-price competitors or to increase margins. N... (more)

Just What Is a Storage Hypervisor?

There's a new segment emerging in the industry around storage hypervisors. This is a simple idea that makes a lot of sense. We all understand the benefits that server hypervisor technology brought to servers in terms of utilization, flexibility and cost savings. The promise of a storage hypervisor is to do for storage what server hypervisor technology did for servers, providing the same utilization, flexibility, and cost savings benefits. Keeping with the analogy, a storage hypervisor must meaningfully improve the utilization of existing storage resources to drive lower costs an... (more)