Rick Gouin

Tag: Storage

Dell EMC Takes Aim at Low End Storage

· Rick Gouin

I’ve been involved in solutions for a few customers recently where they opted to not buy part of the solution, instead choosing to go with a less expensive storage option for data that they perceived to not merit the cost of higher end storage solutions.  QNAP, Synology, and similar providers have been quietly meeting this low end storage need for some time now, while larger providers like Dell EMC only had some aged offerings in their portfolio.  The PowerEdge ME4 is designed to meet this need by bringing some pretty high end features down market at a low price point. […]

Dell Releases New SC5020

· Rick Gouin

I previously blogged about the release of the SC7020, which is part of the “odd number refresh” that has now added the SC5020.  By this, I mean that it appears the even numbered SC platforms (SCv2000, SC4020, SC8000) will be refreshed via odd numbered platforms, of which we now have details on 3 of them: SC5020, SC7020, and SC9000. At Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas this week, Dell announced the availability of the SC5020.  Its available for quoting any day now, and will start shipping in June 2017. What are the promises? Up to 45 percent more IOPS, […]

How to Install Crashplan on Your Headless NAS

· Rick Gouin

One of the most popular articles of all time on this blog has been an article on how to get CrashPlan running on a headless server.  Crashplan changed some things in how this needs to be done, so my old article was no longer correct.  I went through the process and updated this blog, so as of today, this process is working correctly. Many of you run a NAS of some sort at home.  Crashplan is a great choice to backup these devices, but its not terribly intuitive to do so, and it’s technically not supported to use Crashplan in […]

Dell Releases New SC7020

· Rick Gouin

** UPDATE ** This platform is no longer unified.  Dell has removed the ability for the SC7020 to provide NAS services.  The system has also had its scalability limited from a drive count perspective.  Now at 500 drives.  I will keep my comments on these changes to myself.   *** A couple weeks back, Dell made a new storage platform available with very little fanfare.  This new array, the SC7020, is positioned as a refresh for the SC8000 series.  You may recall this post, where we talk about how the SC9000 is not meant to replace the SC8000.  This is […]

Nutanix Acropolis File Services – .NEXT 2016

· Rick Gouin

Last year at .NEXT 2015 in Miami, Nutanix announced scale out NAS services which was for Acropolis only.  In version 4.7, which was announced at .NEXT 2016 in Las Vegas, this feature will be available on AHV and ESXi.  Its pretty cool.  Check out the official feature page here. Here is the basic idea.  You can deploy scale out file services straight from Prism (the Nutanix UI) without creating any front end VMs or rolling out any images.  What happens is you create a file server via the Prism interface (see below).  You can create multiple separate file server environments. […]

Nutanix Acropolis Block Services – .NEXT 2016

· Rick Gouin

Day 2 of the 2016 Nutanix .NEXT conference at the Wynn in Las Vegas. This morning brought out a couple interesting announcements, as well as the delivery of some features that were announced last year in Miami. Acropolis Block Services is the most interesting one to me.  I expect some fun conversations around this in the months to come.  This is an extension to the in-cluster iSCSI services previously released that was primarily targeted to address some specific workloads.  The way it works now is that the cluster will get a Data Services IP (DS-IP) which will be a cluster […]

Whats new in SCOS 7.0?

· Rick Gouin

Dell recently announced the release of SCOS 7.0.  SCOS is the Storage Center Operating System, which is the software that runs Dells SC storage line, including the SCv2000, SC4020, SC8000, and SC9000, with more to come soon.  These are the products that were formerly known as Compellent.  Check out the announcement from Alan Atkinson (GM of Dell Storage) here.  So whats new?  There are a few things in this release that long time Compellent users have been anticipating for quite some time.  Lets chat about a few. Dedupe.  The Compellent line already does compression, and we see pretty good returns […]

Notes on EMC Unity

· Rick Gouin

EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas just wrapped up a couple hours ago, and I thought I would share my thoughts on the Unity product line that was officially announced here. What it is: Unity is the next evolution of EMC’s midrange storage array.  It would fall into the traditional dual controller storage array category, and is an improvement on the existing VNX line.  The VNX and Unity will co-exist for a while, but Unity is positioned as the eventual replacement for VNX. Lets get into the details. First is the packaging.  Unity was built with 3 different deliveries in […]

New Dell SC9000 – Revolutionary or Evolutionary?

· Rick Gouin

Dell released the Dell SC9000 at Dell World 2015 in Austin TX this week. The SC9000 is the new high end Compellent controller, a space currently occupied by the SC8000. Much of the messaging I’ve consistently heard around the new Dell SC9000, however, is that it is not a replacement for the SC8000.  In fact, the SC8000 will continue to be available side by side with the SC9000 for quite some time. The new SC9000 has a lot of improvements over the previous controller from a hardware perspective, but it is really a discrete offering?  Or is it really just […]

Compellent SCv2000 Series

· Rick Gouin

Dell announced the SCv2000 series storage arrays back in May of 2015.  I’m a bit late to the party here, but I wanted to wait until I had actually had the opportunity to integrate several of these systems into customer environments. These systems start at about $10k via the Dell website, so there has been a lot of interest in this one. I’ve read a few articles suggesting that the SCv2000 series is aimed to replace the Equallogic product line, but after spending some time with the product and its pricing, I think it is more directly targeting certain portions […]