Posts tagged as:

PCI Express

FCoE: “Soft” FCoE Integration

by dave on July 2, 2009


There appears to be quite the interesting discussion going on over at Scott Lowe‘s blog regarding FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) as its relationship to the data center, VMware, and, pretty much everything else. I love watching people put their thoughts to eletronic ink (via the comments section) but recently, I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations around FCoE that focus on different approaches to FCoE within the data center.

It all started with a phone call…
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Atmos Foundations: Hardware

by dave on November 11, 2008


Yesterday, I took a look at Atmos from a software standpoint.  While Atmos is truly a “software” solution, there is an element of hardware to examine as well.  Truth be told, it’s not as interesting as the core Atmos offerings but, there are some notables.  We’ll start with a quick look at 3 basic configurations for Atmos.

3 Sample Atmos configs

3 Sample Atmos configs

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In developing the Future Storage System series, I have been trying to take a part of my excitement for storage technologies and overlay them with systems/platform technology.  Typically, the storage industry lags on the platform development side of the house (mostly out of necessity).  So, part of looking at the Future Storage System was to take into consideration that in the basic design, some of the more current technologies could and should be used to enable “forward” thinking.  That’s why you see such a heavy emphasis on Torrenza, Hypertransport, and integrated memory controllers.  With the exception of Torrenza, each of the other aspects of system design have a rich history.  Hypertransport, arguably, has been an outlier on the bus technology side, but it’s capabilities and industry support are unparalleled.  Integrated memory controllers, while “nothing new” (DEC Alpha, anyone?) really came to the for when AMD introduced them as part of the Athlon series of processors.  Today, I’d like to toss another wrinkle into the “platform meets storage” discussion by including another developing technology: the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit).

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Future Storage Systems: Part 3b – I/O Expansion Node

October 10, 2008

In Part 3a, we discussed the possibility of a purpose-driven Compute Node based on the Torrenza initiative for the Future Storage system.  This expansion node made use of Hypertransport as a “glue” between the base storage compute node and the expansion node (of computation or I/O flavours) that could be added.  The advantages of that [...]

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Future Storage Systems: Part 3a – Node Expansion Overview

October 9, 2008

In the previous two articles on the Future Storage System (FSS), I took a general look at a basic storage system architecture (Part 1) and then went a bit deeper into some of the more interesting bits of that system from a platform standpoint (Part 2).  In this article, I want to dive a bit [...]

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