Eric Burgener

There's a new segment emerging in the industry around storage hypervisors. This is a simple idea that makes a lot of sense. We all understand the benefits that server hypervisor technology brought to servers in terms of utilization, flexibility and cost savings. The promise of a storage hypervisor is to do for storage what server hypervisor technology did for servers, providing the same utilization, flexibility, and cost savings benefits. Keeping with the analogy, a storage hypervisor must meaningfully improve the utilization of existing storage resources to drive lower costs and, second, it must provide the level of virtualization necessary to offer unfettered management flexibility. Let's face it: we have been over-provisioning storage for years. The wastage this has caused has driven the development of some interesting technologies like storage capacity optimi... (more)

Storage Can Be the Key to Aggressively Priced Cloud Offerings

One of the key reasons for moving to a cloud-based infrastructure is to lower overall infrastructure costs. This is true regardless of whether you are building an in-house (private) cloud or are a public cloud provider looking to price your offerings competitively. Because storage comprises such a large part of the outlay of any cloud-based infrastructure, it's an obvious place to look for optimizations that can lower overall costs. A lower cost virtual infrastructure gives cloud providers pricing leeway, which can be used to either out-price competitors or to increase margins. N... (more)

What Windows 8 Hyper-V R3 Storage Enhancements Will Mean

Last September, Microsoft released some information about what customers could expect to see in Windows 8, and at the very end of February the Windows 8 beta became available. There's been some interesting activity on the blogosphere about it (see a good blog from Jason Perlow here). What Are the Enhancements? There are a couple of interesting storage enhancements in Hyper-V R3, including VHDX, ODX, built-in deduplication, support for SMB 2.2 and the introduction of ReSF (Resilient File System). VHDX: Larger Capacity VHDs In Hyper-V R2, VHDs can be up to 2TB in size, but in Hyper-V... (more)