December 28th, 2019 by Guest Author
Home Lab Deep Dive: Dive Into Storage
We’ve now got servers out of the way and if you’re like me, you’ve chosen some power-hungry beasts that heat your little home office. At some point I want to move back into a house that has basements as those seem to an awesome location for such things unless you have an actual wiring closet built in to your house. We will now go over another important piece to your home lab - storage. There are several decisions that need to be made regarding storage, and each one will affect your lab a little differently. In this post, we will go over the differences between disk types, controllers, storage, and storage protocols so you are completely prepared to make the best decision.
December 27th, 2019 by Brian Beeler
StorageReview Podcast #27
In this weeks podcast the abbreviated team dives into the wonders of Silly Putty, the benefits of a warm Christmas day and waxes nostalgic on the shopping mall. We do get around to some tech news as well including the latest large capacity hard drives from WD and a few new SSD reviews the team produced over the break. Join us on another adventure that's tangentially related to enterprise IT! Warning, this podcast may contain explicit language.
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December 27th, 2019 by Tom Fenton
Atrust s101C Server Review
The system in this review is an Atrust s101C which is a moderately-priced, mini-server form factor server. The s101C has an Intel Xeon E3-1268L v3 processor, integrated on-board RAID, has Intel AMT for out of bound management, supports up to 32GB of RAM, and two 2.5” SATA drives. It has multiple ports for USB and video and audio connectivity. It also supports various versions of Windows, Linux, VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Userful Multiplatform.
December 26th, 2019 by Alex Schuchter
SK hynix PE6011 Enterprise SSD Review
We last discussed SK hynix back in August as we looked into the history of the company and overviewed their Enterprise SSD solutions. Today we are reviewing and looking at the performance of the SK hynix Enterprise SSD the PE6011. The PE6011 features a U.2 7mm form factor, 3D TLC NAND, PCIe NVMe interface, and capacities up to 7.68 TB. It is ideal for read-intensive workloads and light write usage. What's unique about this product is that from conceptualization to manufacturing everything is done in-house by SK hynix. This product is aimed at those looking for an economical PCIe solution for the datacenter environment.
December 24th, 2019 by Guest Author
Home Lab Deep Dive: Choosing & Buying Servers
Whether it’s for learning technology for a current or future job, “geeking” out on hardware, or giving your household specific services, there are many reasons to own your own home lab servers. I love computer equipment and the feeling of potential productivity in those small sheets of aluminum. I can say without a doubt that my home lab has helped me get to where I am today and it continues to help me even now. Whether one, or all of those are your reasons, you have found yourself here as part of a series for home labs. In this series I will start with basic concepts and ideas so that you can use those to help you design and bring your own home lab to life.
December 23rd, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Kingston DC450R SSD Review (3.84TB)
Released a couple of months ago, the Kingston DC450R is an enterprise SATA SSD created for the data center. The R at the end of the name is indicative of the focus of the drive, in this case, read-centric. Specifically, the DC450R is designed with strict QoS requirements, to ensure performance consistency over a wide range of read intensive and read caching workloads. The Kingston DC450R SSD is ideal for Content Delivery Networks (CDN), edge computing applications, as well as various SDS architectures.
December 23rd, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Western Digital Sampling 20TB SMR & 18TB CMR HDDs
Western Digital (WDC) announced that it is shipping high capacity HDDs are sampling with enterprise OEM and hyperscale partners. These new HDDs include the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDDs and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs. These HDD’s were announced in September of this year.
December 20th, 2019 by Brian Beeler
StorageReview Podcast #26
This week's podcast features the Cincinnati squad in addition to four-toe Tom and our special guest Blaise, from his homelab in the great north wilderness. The team talks more about Scale Computing's NUC-based HCI solution, Kevin highlights the simplicity of adding Quest's QoreStor to our existing Veeam environment, Adam sums up his learnings from 13 companies on the IT Press Tour last week, Blaise lays out the benefits of computing from within a QNAP NAS, and Brian provides a cowboy-themed music playlist for those who want the proper inspiration for their cowboy hat wearing adult time.
December 20th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
Actifio Announces 10c
This week the multi-cloud copy data management company, Actifio, announced their newest version of its comprehensive, secure, cloud-centric copy data management platform, Actifio 10c. This update is said to help customers to consume, migrate and use cloud services faster and at lower costs for data-driven transformation initiatives. The name 10c, stands for Cloud, Containers and Copy Data, though they seem to be missing 7c’s.
December 19th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
WD_BLACK P50 Game Drive SSD Review
Back at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced a new portfolio of external storage solutions for PC and console gamers, its new WD_Black products, including the new WD_Black P50 SSD. As the name states, the WD_Black P50 is a portable NVMe SSD that gamers can use to store part of their game library on for potentially faster loading times than the internal hard drive in their console or PC. The WD_Black P50 adds extra games to users Xbox One consoles, PlayStation 4s, or PC Gaming computing.
Among the significant challenges faced by storage administrators are the fast-paced evolution of technologies and the operation of the ever-growing storage environments. With these challenges, managing storage systems becomes more complex, and sometimes, even substantial training is required. Administrators are required to make quick provisioning decisions, generate reports, and ensure the health of all systems in the environment. Therefore, they need a simple, intuitive, and customizable cross-platform tool for managing storage environments. To address these concerns, Dell EMC Unisphere provides simplicity, ease of use, and flexibility; all of which are critical requirements for optimal storage management. Unisphere, specially designed for the Dell EMC Unity Family, serves the needs of storage administrators by providing advanced features and optimized performance for enterprise data..png)
Last week we started a new configuration in our lab using a 3-nodes vSAN cluster. You can check the introduction of this configuration 
Earlier this month Samsung introduced a next-generation external storage solution, the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch. This drive is faster, more compact, and features convenient data protection all wrapped inside a sleek and slim aluminum palm-sized case roughly the size of a credit card. The T7 Touch delivers read/write speeds of up to 1,050/1,000MB/s, which is more than 1.9 times faster than current SATA-based portable SSDs and more than 9.5 times faster than external HDDs. Additionally, the T7 offers password protection based on AES 256-bit hardware encryption and fingerprint recognition as means of convenient but powerful security.
As every business grows, information and data grow as well. With this abundance of data (now considered a primary and permanent asset), an unforeseen disaster could potentially bring the organization to a break, causing significant operational and financial damage due to downtime. As a result, every organization should have an exhaustive disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) solution in place. While there are a variety of mechanisms to architect a DR strategy, they are often cumbersome, expensive and potentially unreliable. Dell Technologies has partnered with Faction to offer Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services, which provides disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering designed to address these legacy DR concerns.
In the datacenter, there is a never-ending race between processors and storage. Over the past decade, processors have increased the number of cores they contain from one or two to 8, 16, 32 or even 64. Storage technologies over this time have dramatically decreased their latency and increased data throughput. However, the reality is that far too many CPU cycles are being wasted waiting for data residing on PCIe devices or on network storage. We are reaching an inflection point with the emergence of a new type of storage hardware: Storage Class Memory (SCM). SCM resides on the memory channel, which is not hampered by latency and data bandwidth limitations of peripheral storage. Being on the memory channel places SCM far closer to the CPU, meaning it has more concurrent "swim lanes" for shuttling data to modern CPUs. This significantly increases the speed at which data can be accessed by the processor.
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