It's just a network
Yes, the N in SAN stands for network. Ethernet networks are not loseless. In a Fabric Channel capable network, you can't loose packets. You just lost data. And when a server thinks the disk has lost data, bad complex things happen. Packet loss in an ethernet network is expected. In a FC SAN, it's bad.

Queue Depth
Queue Depth is a term any knowledgable SAN/Storage administrator knows, but surprisingly often has no idea how the value actually...

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First, a moment from Michael Hay, somebody important at HDS (Sr. Director of Product Strategy for Hitachi Data Systems):
Michael Hay » Blog Archive » These Are the Voyages of the Virtual Storage Platform
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In a move surprising nobody, Hitachi Data Systems finally announced their newest generation of Storage Hardware, the VSP. Why they didn't announce back in April when the majority of launch purchased USP-V's came off their initial maintenance contract is beyond me, but hey, probably a nice gain for EMC.

You see, they took their old name, and changed one of the letters to Virtual, because Virtual is the cool fucking IT buzzword. EMC did the same thing, they changed DMX to VMX, but...

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Check it out:

HDS: Hitachi Data Systems Introduces Breakthroughs in Storage Cost Savings and Dynamic Provisioning

Personally, HDS' recent announcement is extremely more exciting than their rollout of clustered heads.

Most of it is just plain nice. Like EMC, HDS can now drain the pool. This allows you to remove space from your Thin/Virtual/Dynamic Pool if you have sized it too large. Personally, I've become a fan of just making all of the disk in the...

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Hitachi Data Systems recently announced HAM. A pork product? No. HAM is their cluster technology for their monolithic storage.

What the heck does this mean or do? Honestly? Who knows! This product announcement was barely more than a few paragraphs on a news page. From reading into the HDS blogs and others, this is what I have gathered:

HDS USP-V arrays can be clustered to be made aware of each other. Think NetApp (And any Hitachi engineers reading this just...

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