Starboard Storage Blog

We are just past Memorial Day and pools across the country are open for business so I thought it might be a good time to talk about Storage Pools. You see there is a big push at the moment from vendors to deliver a simpler way of dealing with managing the underlying storage in a storage system and the Storage Pool is the answer to the inflexibility of the 25 years old RAID controller architecture. New hybrid storage solutions are delivering a new way to manage storage.

The question I get asked more than any other with regard to storage is “How can I manage my storage more efficiently?” 

Most of the customers I am speaking to already have shared storage of some kind (Although not all do) and they have found that the storage they purchased 3 years ago is now no longer meeting the needs of their organization.  I have been in the industry for over 20 years and this is in stark contrast to 10 years ago when SAN and NAS storage systems had much longer usage cycles.

At Starboard Storage our mission is to help you manage your storage more efficiently and to do that we provide a single platform for consolidating mixed workloads on a single Pool of Storage with on demand SSD acceleration built in for your hot workloads.

As such the Starboard AC72 Storage System neatly fits the accepted definition of Unified Storage. Other platforms may not be as true to the original definition though so I thought we would have a little fun and see if “ ….you MAY be using Unified Storage.”

If your Control Stations sit on top of your Data movers which sit on top of your Array - You MAY be using Unified Storage

If acquiring your second storage network protocol is an optional expense – You MAY be using Unified Storage

If your NAS hardware specs are different than your SAN hardware Specs – You MAY be using Unified Storage

If your Storage Pool is a management layer on top of your Array Controllers – You MAY be using Unified Storage

If you have a SAN and a NAS expert to run your storage – You MAY be using Unified Storage

Do you have an example of a “unified storage” system that is not as unified as it should be? Let us know by tweeting your “…you May be using Unified Storage” line using the hashtag #youmaybeusingunifiedstorage. The best line we see by the end of June wins a Jawbone Jambox.