A tiered storage model is different from caching

Storage tiering has taken on added significance in recent years because of the emergence of solid-state drives (SSDs) in enterprise storage. It has also come to be confused with caching, which plays a significant role with SSDs. In this podcast, Evaluator Group senior strategist Randy Kerns drills into the specifics of a tiered storage model, explains the differences between tiering and flash caching, and looks at the benefits that tiering brings to hybrid arrays combining flash and spinning disk.

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PernixData extends flash hypervisor platform

Server-flash aggregation software provider PernixData Inc. this week added native support for VMware Inc. vSphere 5.5 and the vSphere web client with its newest product release at the VMware Partner Exchange 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. The startup also launched the PernixDrive technology storage alliance for interoperability with flash hardware devices.

PernixData’s FVP software aggregates server-side flash across storage and computing devices and decouples flash capacity from performance. PernixData calls FVP a flash hypervisor because it lets users cluster flash resources to VMware features such as vMotion and high availability (HA), and create a scale-out flash strategy. FVP is deployed within the VMware hypervisor, not as separate software, so no changes are made to deployed virtual machines (VMs), servers, or primary storage.

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Storage Products of the Year 2013: Storage Infrastructure Product of the Year

QLogic Corp.'s first product release from its Mt. Rainier server-side PCI Express (PCIe) flash cache-pooling technology is our 2013 storage infrastructure Product of the Year. Our judges scored the QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series host bus adapter (HBA) highest in innovation and performance among the four category finalists to give QLogic the top prize for a second year in a row.

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Pure Storage Forever Flash program aims at lowering support charges

All-flash storage array provider Pure Storage Inc. today launched its Forever Flash program, which provides free controller upgrades when renewing maintenance and support contracts and allows organizations to reset contracts when upgrading or expanding hardware.

Matt Kixmoeller, Pure Storage's vice president of products, said the Forever Flash program is designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for the Pure Storage FlashArray by addressing two storage-industry practices that can significantly increase the operating and capital expenses associated with storage arrays. One is the out-year maintenance bill that customers get hit with when their initial maintenance contract expires. The other is the time and expense of forklift upgrades.

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