I have spent the first three parts of this series describing the evolution and current state of Flash storage. I also described how to configure an NVMe over Fabric (NVMeoF) storage network to export NVMe volumes across RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and again over native TCP.

A remote NVMe block device exported via an NVMe over Fabrics network using TCP.

Bareos (Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced) is a cross-network, open-source backup solution that preserves, archives and recovers data from all major operating systems. The Bareos project started 2010 as a Bacula fork and is now being developed under the AGPLv3 license.

On November 12 at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Germany, the Linux foundation formally announced the Ceph Foundation. Present at this same summit were key individuals from SUSE and the SUSE Enterprise Storage team. For those less familiar with the SUSE Enterprise Storage product line, it is entirely powered by Ceph technology.

Who needs a custom NAS OS or a web-based GUI when command-line NAS software is so easy to configure?

More than ever, small to mid-sized businesses demand and rely on their networks to carry out mission-critical business activities. As always, however, budgets and expertise constrain these companies from using complex managed switches to run their networks.

Gartner analysts noted in a recent Cool Vendor report:

With software-free setup and operation, the new iStorage diskAshur group of ultra-secure storage drives works across all operating systems, including Linux, macOS, Android, Chrome, thin and zero clients, MS Windows and embedded systems.

Compute-intensive workflows are the environments in which the newly developed JMR SiloStor NVMe family of SSD drives is designed to show its colors.

At one point in time, when you wanted to attach an external block storage device to a server, you mapped it as a Logical Unit (LU) across a Storage Area Network (SAN). In the early days, you would do this over the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. More recently, iSCSI (SCSI over IP) has usurped FC in most data centers.

CodeLathe counts Dropbox and OneDrive as competitors to its Tonido Personal Cloud storage service. While the former can cost anywhere from 50ドル and up per year to store a TB of data, CodeLathe's cross-platform Tonido for the desktop is fully free, and storage space is limited only by users' hard drive capacities.

By now you have heard your peers raving about flash storage. But perhaps you have not made the switch from your enterprise HDD storage solution yet, because of nagging questions you may have, about the cost of flash storage or its technical capabilities.

Across a wide range of consumer devices, from cameras to smartphones to laptops, flash storage has become the de facto standard for digital data storage.

For every article, I try to write something that is interesting, entertaining, educational and fun. Sometimes I even succeed. Many other times I have some things I'd like to talk about, but there's not enough of it to fill the space. This time, I decided a disjointed hodge podge would be the theme. So let's just have a virtual nerdy talk about stuff, shall we?

At the time I got into the data storage industry, I was working with and developing RAID and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) controllers for 2 Gbit Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SAN). This was a time before "The Cloud". Things were different—so were our users. There was comfort in buying from a single source or single vendor.

How would you find out how much RAM is free on your Linux desktop? That's a really easy question with a lot of answers—free, any of the implementations of top and Glances all are valid responses.

In perfect alignment with its self-described identity as "the data reduction expert", Permabit Technology Corporation recently announced availability of its Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) 6 for Canonical's Ubuntu Server.

IT operations seeking to optimize valuable data-center rack space while improving efficiency are the target customers sought by Equus Computer Systems, Inc., for its "unique" new 1.5U server with data transfer rates of 12GiB/s.

The metachallenge in today's data-saturated world is turning Big Data into actionable insight. A straight line to faster insights can be found in Netlist, Inc.'s new HybriDIMM Storage Class Memory (SCM), which the company describes as the industry's first standards-based, plug-and-play SCM solution.

An IT megatrend in progress involves the shift from legacy monolithic apps running on enterprise storage to systems of engagement that interact with users, collect real-time data from many sources and store it in elastic and shared data services.