Storage has changed dramatically over the last three years driven by SSD developments. Most of the key components necessary for a powerful storage system are available and the cost is highly favorable for direct placement of data files. Some additional infrastructure elements could greatly enhance the flexibility of storage systems with ...

Revenge, Return of Big Iron. In the old days, standard server systems did not have the power to run large enterprises, hence there were vendors that built really big servers. However it became apparent if not widely publicized that there were serious technical challenges scaling up on big iron systems. (Many of these difficulties have since ...

Last month, Scott pointed out the really bad performance characteristics of the Dell PERC6 in RAID0 sequential write, particularly compared with RAID-5. Granted, this is not necessarily a red flag because few people use RAID 0 in production. Still, if one can't write code or test correctly, one should not be in the hardware/firmware business. Dell ...