What elements remain unresolved to make FCoE truly world-class? What should the vendors be prioritizing?
Networking Field Day and OpenFlow Symposium
October 25, 2011 By 1 Comment
This week I’m traveling to the San Jose, CA area for two events I’ve organized: The OpenFlow Symposium and the second Networking-focused Tech Field Day. I’ll be surrounded by some of the smartest and most interesting folks in networking all week, which is both daunting and exciting for a storage guy like me.
Multi-Hop FCoE Is Not Ready For Prime Time (Yet)
October 21, 2011 By 10 Comments
I know that a number of FCoE-related standards are settled, and I know that there are products in the market and even some limited multi-vendor compatibility. I even accept that some customers are deploying real “Full Monty FCoE” in production. But I just can’t recommend that technology yet: It’s not prudent, widespread, and low-risk, so I say it’s not ready for prime time.
VMware ESX FCoE CNA Compatibility in Plain English
January 24, 2011 By 3 Comments
VMware has one awesome hardware compatibility list, but its thoroughness can be daunting. It’s fairly easy to search for a specific piece of hardware, but it’s difficult to tell what’s supported in a general sense. I’ve boiled down certain key hardware categories into a general plain-english list of what’s in and out of the ESX HCL. Let’s kick things off with FCoE CNAs.
Stephen’s HP Product Line Decoder Ring
September 29, 2010 By 7 Comments
HP has always been an alphabet soup company, assigning just about every item in their bewildering array of products a unique product number. Like Mercedes-Benz cars, even the product names are a mix of letters and numbers that can be off-putting to browsers. Now that they have grown to supersize proportions through internal expansion and acquisition, just about everyone outside the company seems to have trouble decoding the product line, so I decided to take a stab at decoding the enterprise lineup in plain english.
The Enterprise IT Acquisition Game
August 26, 2010 By 1 Comment
Today is the (a?) day of reckoning in the 3Par saga, with Dell widely expected to make a counter-offer higher than HP’s bid. But this mega deal, like the Data Domain war before it, sends a strong signal to the enterprise IT world: It’s open season on data storage companies! But the rising superpowers are also likely looking at networking as an area of expansion. The game is afoot!
Meet the Enterprise IT Superpowers
August 24, 2010 By 1 Comment
After years spent focusing on personal technology, businesses are increasingly turning back to the enterprise. The corporate IT market is much more dynamic and competitive, with a few very large “superpower” companies discovering their power to drive purchasing decisions. If a supplier can create an integrated “stack” of hardware and software, they can push product purchases that might otherwise be overlooked or postponed. This is the main reason that enterprise IT acquisitions work so well: Where a small company must fight to sell their product, a large one can hitch it to a much more strategic sale and have it pulled along.
LA Folks: Come to the Nth Generation Symposium!
July 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Nth Generation Computing has a massive presence in the Southern California IT infrastructure community, and their annual Symposia are on the calendars of most in the area. That’s why I’m very pleased to be able to attend and speak at this year’s event, and I look forward to seeing my LA-based readers there, too!
Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
May 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
There were some interesting events and blog posts last week. This new weekly feature highlights those! Enterprise IT Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog. Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into [...]
