When I made the decision to deploy virtual desktops in the ROCORI School District’s computer labs, I began evaluating how much horsepower would be required to support my long-range plans. It quickly became clear that my existing SAN had enough IOPS to support 60-80 virtual desktops in addition...
14
Nov
27
Mar
ESG validates that NexGen maintains mission-critical application performance
A lot of us at NexGen spent years selling shared storage solutions for heterogeneous application environments in past lives. Every single customer always had the same questions.
How many applications can I run on your SAN?
AND
If I add more applications do I...
07
Nov
Designing for Performance QoS
VIDEO: Delivering deterministic performance is not an easy thing to do. Every application connected to a shared storage environment impacts every other application. This causes customers to design for worst case, or peak load, which means for most of the time the system is...
05
Mar
EMC Xtrem, What It Really Means
Standard practice says never give competitors any airtime but I believe today’s announcement of EMC’s Xtrem offerings signify a fundamental shift in the storage industry that will have repercussions for decades to come. Here’s why anyone responsible for IT infrastructure should care.
...12
Jun
Improving Performance with Solid-State is Good, but…
As solid-state storage becomes more ubiquitous in shared storage solutions, it’s becoming clear that it has more to offer than just unbridled performance. Don’t get me wrong, that’s all good, but it’s time for some innovation. At this point, most approaches to solid-state have been more...
02
Feb
Unlearn what you've learned about storage
Last week I had the opportunity to meet with a customer that was considering shared storage options for his first server virtualization undertaking. Ensuring adequate application performance was the key driving factor for their infrastructure strategy, so they had been implementing high...
11
Nov
Welcome, ioControl 2.1
Our team has been working hard to improve the NexGen Storage System and is very happy to announce the upcoming release of ioControl version 2.1. We’ve packed a metric ton of features into this release and are excited to see our customers take advantage of our hard work. Here are a...
22
Mar
Are SSD Arrays a Bad Idea?
The recent post ("Are SSD array's a bad idea") at Storage Mojo resulted in a great discussion/debate, so I thought I'd throw NexGen's...
07
Nov
20
Feb
160 storage systems in 10 minutes or less
Thank you SearchStorage.com and Storage Magazine. Given the explosion of new storage companies over the last few years, the industry is more crowded and confusing than ever. In this type of environment, industry...
21
May
19
Jan
Is PCIe the Right Interface for Solid State?
Semiconductor company Marvell, a leader in storage controller chips, sure thinks so. They’ve been working on new PCIe to flash technology that eliminates the bottleneck of legacy disk...
17
Apr
Hybrid storage software enables all-flash data centers
Sounds like an oxymoron, right? Not really. Today, the storage industry has adopted the term hybrid which is generally understood to mean a storage system with both SSDs and spinning disk. As opposed to an All-Flash-Array (AFA) system and today most think the only way to get to an all-...
25
Oct
Performance Where It's Needed
Most storage vendors are still caught up in their efforts to make solid-state fast enough, reliable enough, or cheap enough. But the bottom line for IT admins searching for a storage solution is reduced cost and improved efficiency. Solid-state by itself can’t deliver what customers need. For...
08
Mar
Solid state is bandwidth hungry. Feed it.
If you pop the hood on most SAN and NAS controllers there are one or two disk/RAID controllers. Each controller is connected to an x86 motherboard via the PCIe slot. Even if you have 1000s of disks behind the PCI-e connected controller, all I/O must pass through it. The maximum performance to...
07
Nov
19
Feb
Affordable Storage without Sacrificing Performance
Customer James Gunnarson of Keating Muething & Klekamp PLL, a large law firm in Cincinnati, has documented his experience with NexGen Storage on a blog at VMworld.com. He discusses his evaluation process, the vendors he reviewed, and the conclusions he reached.
Here's a brief snippet...
21
May
Doing Solid-State The Right Way
It’s safe to say that solid-state storage is the most expensive component in most storage systems. As such, you’d expect vendors to be mindful of this and make it as efficient as possible. So it puzzles me to see so many vendors treating solid-state like inexpensive spinning disk. For example,...
17
Jan
Announcement of Promark's Partnership with NexGen's PAID Partner Program
In 20+ years of working in the IT industry, I have had the opportunity to work on the front line both as a vendor and now on the distribution side. It’s my experience that channel program simplicity, margin for profitability, and reseller ownership are important components in ensuring...
09
Apr
The Hidden Truth About Hybrids
Vendors almost always try to focus on end user benefits that their offerings provide and avoid or even hide the shortcomings. Nowhere is this more obvious than the hybrid storage market. Everywhere you turn there's one or more of a dozen hybrid storage vendors dancing on the street corner at a...
16
Jul
n5 Product Family Updates
Many of the customers that we work with are challenged with finding the correct balance between storage performance and capacity. Customers with a tradition of disk-based systems often find themselves addressing performance bottlenecks by adding disks, resulting in systems that have far more...
07
Mar
Green IT Awards Finalist
I’m proud to announce that we’ve been named a Virtualization Product of the Year finalist for the Green IT Awards. It’s a great honor to be acknowledged for something that we care so much about, as well as being...
07
Jan
2013 Storage Predictions
VMBlog has been offering partners the opportunity to post their predictions for the new year. You'll find some interesting reading from a number of storage and virtualization vendors. NexGen's founder and CEO John Spiers contributed his thoughts on...
26
Apr
Solid-State Cache is Not a Silver Bullet
Solid-state (SSD) is disrupting the storage industry and as a result all storage vendors, including NexGen, are scrambling to get ahead of the curve. Everyone has a different perspective on how to take advantage of the change. I wrote about how vendors are using SSD for caching...
11
Jan
SSD - The Big Technical Illusion
Enterprise Solid State Storage is the hottest technology to hit the storage market since the first Winchester disk drive was introduced in the IBM PC-XT, way back in 1983. And, as with any revolutionary technology there is a lot of hype. There are promises to solve...
03
Jul
NexGen Storage Releases Next Generation Virtualization Solutions using Fusion ioMemory
Guest Blog by Marius Tudor, Sr. Director, Strategic Partners & Channels at Fusion-io
When it comes to fast, hybrid solid-state solutions, NexGen sets the bar high for the mid-range SAN market. The company has recently released a whitepaper showing just how fast and efficient its...
21
Feb
Start with Quality
Quality of service is the cornerstone feature of NexGen Storage so it seems only fitting that my first post here should be on the subject. Our team was working on a lab validation that allowed us to fully demonstrate the functionality this week. The results came out more...
31
Dec
Simple, Straightforward, Performance Management
As Director of Systems Administration at the Institute for Health Metrics (IHM), my job is to manage the overall IT infrastructure, and to ensure that it meets our current and future demands. IHM obtains clinical data from healthcare providers, and then analyzes and interprets it to improve the...
16
Apr
Cache: You Can Have Too Much of a Good Thing…
There’s a lot of discussion in the storage industry around how to implement solid-state or flash storage. Most of the debate centers on whether it should be as a tier of storage or as a cache. So what’s the difference?
A tier of storage can be generally summed up as a...
04
Jan
Managing Performance for Virtual Infrastructure
VIDEO: Shared storage systems have been designed around managing capacity. Once the most critical aspect of any data storage system, today we are swimming in it. For years disk drive vendors focused on innovation that increased storage capacity and density. System vendors...
27
Mar
27
Jun
Recreating Problems of the Past
All-solid-state arrays are chipping away at the bottlenecks exposed in traditional storage architectures, but they’re also creating new problems. In reality, these are problems that have been solved previously but are resurfacing with this new technology. For example:
...13
Feb
John Spiers on the Genesis of NexGen
John Spiers recently sat down with Brian Garrett of ESG, to discuss the impetus of NexGen Storage. Watch, as John describes how lessons learned at LeftHand Networks helped shape product requirements in the NexGen Storage solution.
...20
Dec
Doubling Capacity in Roughly 1/3rd the Rack Space
As the IT manager at Whitley Penn LLP, I’ve been a longstanding customer of LeftHand Networks. The scale-out architecture of the LeftHand SAN greatly simplified the regular capacity expansion required for the firm. I also valued the hands-on support and partnership we experienced with LeftHand...
29
Mar
Wrapping Up a Fantastic Week
It’s been a big week here at NexGen. Our channel program received a significant award and ESG released a report validating the storage QoS features of our storage system. We also had some great interactions with European bloggers and press at a Silicon Valley event.
Here’s a quick summary...
07
Dec
The Looming Solid State Interface War
Solid state is forcing the storage industry to adapt new interface technologies to avoid performance bottlenecks.
Just what the industry needs, right, a few more interface or protocols to choose from. Over the last decade or so we’ve seen the following storage interfaces and...
11
Mar
Why VARs Matter
BlueNet from Minneapolis recently implemented a VDI infrastructure with NexGen Storage for Cold Spring, Rocori School District near St. Cloud MN. Not only did they exceed...
21
Jun
I had a conversation with a customer last week where I divulged some of the crazy IT practices that I’ve done over the years. I compiled a huge list of hacked...11
Feb
EMC Confirms Flash on PCIe Is Superior To SSD's
With EMC’s recent announcement of “Project Lightning” or VF Cache, they openly admit that solid state or flash implemented in disk drive form factors is an inferior technology to PCIe.
As we detailed in our previous posts, this is another proof point that solid state belongs on the...