I’m currently making my travel plans for my final storage virtualization seminar. Or, to be precise, trying to make my plans. You see, apparently one cannot (reasonably) get from Cleveland to Toronto, even though they’re only 193 miles apart. Want a direct flight? That’ll be $1,080 round trip on an Air Canada Dash-8. But it [...]
Physical Security for the Road Warrior
November 30, 2008 By 2 Comments
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I am posting on Sundays. In this digital age, it is easy to overlook the critical element of physical security. Put simply, it is often far more efficient to steal or gain access to a physical object like a laptop or flash drive than to [...]
Storage Folks Are Talking 10-Gig and FCoE
November 21, 2008 By 2 Comments
I continue to be amazed by the level of interest I’m seeing in Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and 10 Gb Converged Ethernet among storage people. As I noted after my Charlotte virtualization seminar, end users at the largest enterprises seem to think that FCoE is their future, not just one of several options. But [...]
Top Ten Innovative Enterprise Storage Hardware Products
November 15, 2008 By 13 Comments
Looking around at the enterprise storage landscape, it is plain that certain archetypes rule: Monolithic enterprise arrays, dual-controller modular arrays, standard-sized hard disk units, NAS servers, tape libraries. Are these really the optimal designs for storage in our modern open systems world? On the contrary, I suggest that the enterprise storage world we know was [...]
Making Plans for Storage Decision San Francisco
November 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Next week is the final Storage Decisions conference of 2008, Storage Decisions San Francisco! I’ll be in the Bay area from Sunday night through Wednesday, and invite you to say hello if you’re in the area as well! If you’re attending the conference, here’s my schedule: Monday, 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM: DATA RETENTION & [...]
EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
November 10, 2008 By 14 Comments
As I guessed on Friday, EMC has officially announced their Maui Atmos software layer today, calling it the “industry’s first COS (cloud-optimized storage) offering”, “a new era for IT”, and “a new category of storage.” So the new era for IT is a cloud with globally-distributed object stores with policy management? Great! But I thought [...]
Flash Forward or Flash Back?
November 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I am posting every Sunday. The tech industry has been buzzing about solid state drives (SSDs) again lately, but many questions remain. Even after many major vendors (Apple, EMC, and Dell to name a few) have introduced NAND flash-based disk into their core products, it is [...]
EMC About To Take Us To Maui…
November 7, 2008 By 1 Comment
Update: Maui is now Atmos! See my post, EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up? Remember all the talk about a year ago about EMC’s mysterious new storage product, code-name “Maui”? It was teased and pulled by Storagezilla, and rumored by one and all… Well, it wasn’t at EMC World, [...]
Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3
November 7, 2008 By 3 Comments
Just over three months after releasing Update 2 for ESX 3.5, VMware has released Update 3. That last Update brought major storage changes like VSS support, hot VMFS extension, Storage VMotion across Fibre Channel and iSCSI, and support for 10 Gb Ethernet and 8 Gb FC support. For more information on Update 2, see my [...]
