The Truth About HP’s Tech Day
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage on 01. Oct, 2009 | View Comments
HP and Ivy did a darn fine job of putting together a set of sessions to tell us what they have. They presented folks who really knew their stuff, warts and all. They invited a variety of independent voices and let us ask and say anything we wanted with no expectations, let alone an NDA. This was a stellar event, and every other IT company should be asking why they didn’t do it first.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 09. Feb, 2009 | View Comments
The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990’s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets [...]
Essential Reading for VMware ESX iSCSI Users!
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 26. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
Update: Check out the latest multi-vendor iSCSI post!
I usually don’t write about other peoples’ articles on this blog, preferring to stick to my own independent work. But this time I’m making an exception.
If you use or are interested in VMware ESX 3.x and iSCSI, you simply must go read Chad Sakac’s post on the topic. Co-written [...]
Changes in Technology Drive Changes in IT Organizations and Roles
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 03. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
Lots of my IT infrastructure management clients are talking about how the advent of Ethernet/IP and virtualization is changing the roles of storage, server, and network administrators. The evolution of the storage role in particular in enterprise IT organizations has been a topic of particular interest to me for a while: I definitely remember thinking about [...]
Is the FCoE Starting Pistol Aimed at iSCSI?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 16. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
To hear this week’s storage industry news reports, one might think that Wagner’s fat lady came to Storage Networking World (SNW), singing her song as the iSCSI world collapses. Storagebod wonders what iSCSI’s death will look like. Chris Mellor at The Register says “Game Over” as NetApp, QLogic, Emulex and VMware join EMC and Cisco in singing the [...]
Compellent Does Enterprise SSD Right
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 13. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Yes! Compellent has just announced at Storage Networking World that they’ll be adding enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) to their excellent fully-virtualized storage arrays. Why is this worth shouting about? Simply because their automated block-based tiered storage architecture ought to be able to really take full advantage of the performance offered by SSDs. If you’ll [...]
HP Picks Up iSCSI Contender, LeftHand Networks
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage on 01. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
It’s all over the industry news – HP will acquire LeftHand Networks for a reported $360 million in cash. The last funding press release I could find was dated September 8, 2005, when Valhalla Partners led a $25 million round, bringing LeftHand’s total funding to $75 million. This is a very nice payday for the [...]
Grapples and Tangelos: Why it’s Impossible to Compare Fairly
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage on 28. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
I get the same questions all the time: Should I buy X or Y? Is Z better than Q? But as much as it sounds like a cop-out, I always answer, “well, this sounds like a cop-out, but that depends on what you’re doing with it…”
Now EMC’s Chuck Hollis has (bravely) stuck his neck out [...]
