The Final Post: Hardware Is Dead

Chris Buckel hanging up the flashdba jersey – marking the transition from storage and database blogging to enterprise infrastructure and production AI

Seven years in the all-flash storage industry ends with one conclusion: hardware has lost the battle. The real competition now is in software, cloud and the economics of abstraction.

Flash Debrief: The End (part 1)

Abandoned railway tracks ending at a shoreline at dusk, a rusted dead-end leading into still water

A retrospective on seven years in the All-Flash storage industry – from Violin Memory’s $2bn valuation to Chapter 11, through acquisitions and consolidation, to the conclusion that the flash wars had only one winner: cloud.

Oracle ASM and Thin Provisioning – How To Reclaim Space

Thin provisioning lets storage arrays report more capacity than they physically have – but Oracle ASM doesn't automatically return space when data is deleted. Here's how to reclaim it.

All Flash Arrays: Scale Up vs Scale Out (Part 2)

Signpost at a fork in the road representing the choice between scale-up and scale-out storage architectures

Scale-out adds performance by adding controller pairs, but forces unnecessary hardware spend when only capacity is needed. Combining independent scale-up and scale-out is the architecture that makes composable storage possible.

All Flash Arrays: Scale Up vs Scale Out (Part 1)

Buildings of different heights representing the trade-off between scale-up and scale-out storage architecture strategies

Enterprise storage has two independent requirements: capacity and performance. Scale-up-only architectures struggle to address both – hitting metadata and DRAM ceilings before either dimension is adequately satisfied.

The Flash Insider: To POC or Not To POC?

Guest Post I'm excited announce another guest blog written by my good friend and funny-talking American cousin Nathan Fuzi. Like me, Nate comes from a database background but joined the all-flash storage revolution back in its infancy. Which means, like me, Nate how has a little tombstone on his résumé marked Violin Memory. But even though he … Continue reading The Flash Insider: To POC or Not To POC? →

All Flash Arrays: Active/Active versus Active/Passive

Runners in a race – representing the active/active vs active/passive controller performance trade-off

Active/passive architecture limits a storage array to 50% of its available controller performance – and costs more per unit of throughput than a true active/active design.

All Flash Arrays: Controllers Are The New Bottleneck

Road narrowing to a bottleneck – representing how flash storage shifted the performance constraint from disk media to array controllers

When flash eliminated mechanical latency, the bottleneck moved – from the persistence layer to the controllers. Deduplication and data reduction now place crushing demands on controller CPU and DRAM.

How the Next Generation of Flash Storage is Changing the Economics Of SaaS Businesses (Recorded Webinar)

This week I had the opportunity to record a webinar on a subject very close to my heart, the Software-as-a-Service industry. From 2003 to 2007 I managed the production infrastructure for a global SaaS company through the transition from startup to acquisition (partly by Salesforce.com). At the time, SaaS was a relatively new phenomenon, predating any concept … Continue reading How the Next Generation of Flash Storage is Changing the Economics Of SaaS Businesses (Recorded Webinar) →

Understanding Flash: The Fall and Rise of Flash Memory

NAND flash was declared dying in 2012 – but the industry's pivot to 3D NAND proved the sceptics wrong. Here's what the "Bleak Future" paper got right, and what it missed.