Monthly Archives: March 2013

SCSI, (P)ATA, SAS, NL-SAS and SATA, what’s the difference? (part 1)

Everybody needs storage space nowadays. Whether it is used for high performance computing or simply storing family snapshots, we all need room to store data which is important to us.

In the old days (the 1990s) things were fairly easy: you had either ATA or SCSI. The much older RLL and MFM are now called ancient and therefore not talked about in this article. ATA was mainstream for about 10 years and SCSI was expensive, but also very fast. Both standards used a flatcable and the data was sent to and from the drive in parallel. But when speeds increased the timing of each of the separate signals became difficult and just like cd players in the 1980s manufacturers started using serial lines. This meant that higher speeds could be accomplished and also that the huge flatcables were now traded in for much smaller cable, which improved the airflow as well.

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What is trending in Q1 and what can we expect in Q2 of this year?

What was trending in Q1 of 2013 and what can we expect in Q2?

I made a few observations over the past weeks and I’m seeing a few topics that got my attention:

  1. EMC now has a community appreciation program called EMC Elect and I’m one of the 10 original founders! I blogged about that here: http://www.50mu.net/2013/01/15/emc-elect-2013/.
  2. EMC announced new SAS drives for the formerly FC-only based VMAX
  3. VCE announced new vBlock models. I wrote a little blog post here: http://www.50mu.net/2013/02/22/vce-announces-new-vblock-models/
  4. a new Cloud Solution from EMC: VMAX CE. I wrote a blog about that too here: http://www.50mu.net/2013/02/26/vmax-cloud-edition-4all/.
  5. EMC VFCache is transformed into ExtremSF and faster and larger products will be made available. Also the XtremSW software suite is introduced that eventually is able to use third party flash card to be used as cache or DAS storage
  6. EMC introduces its XtremIO, all flash array with true inline deduplication

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The importance of keeping fibers clean

Fiber patch cables seem to be very forgiving, when light shines through everything is great and everybody’s happy, right? Wrong!!!
You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of keeping the ends of patch cables and the SFPs clean, since the actual diameter of a fiber is either 9 or 50 (or even 62.5) mu (micron).

fiber

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testing a delayed post with the auto tweet feature….

Wrote this post on Tuesday March 5 at 11:50AM CET, but delayed the post to go live at 12:00.

testing the auto tweet feature…..

my appologies for the inconveniece, but I need to test.

 

RRR.