PRO+ Premium Content/Storage

Chances are, you haven't heard of IRIS, which stands for Intensified RAM Intelligent Server, from Symbolic IO. Well, you are about to. And, from what you read in this column, I hope you will be as intrigued by it as I am. Readers know I seldom advocate for a hardware kit. Truth be told, I was on the "I hate hardware" path long before the software-defined storage (SDS) crowd made it hip and cool. Indeed, most of what I've written here has sought to critique costly and overbuilt hardware kits, including storage area networks that weren't really networks, or shared arrays built with commodity components but nonetheless sported huge price tags because of some silly value-add software service. I preferred my servers and storage simple and manageable, mostly finding value only in storage software that was hardware-, vendor- and workload-agnostic. While those positions may not have put me on the Christmas card lists of most vendors, and have largely framed my public persona as something of a curmudgeon or naysayer, they are not ...