What elements remain unresolved to make FCoE truly world-class? What should the vendors be prioritizing?
VMware PSP and SATP in Plain English
June 6, 2011 By 2 Comments
I am often questioned during my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar presentations about VMware’s Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). This system is fairly straightforward and concept: VMware provides native multipathing support for a variety of storage arrays, and allows third parties to substitute their own plug-ins at various points in the stack. But the profusion of acronyms and third-party options makes it difficult for end-users to figure out what is going on.
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: I/O As a Chain of Bottlenecks
October 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
It is tempting to think of storage as a game of hard disk drives, and consider only The Rule of Spindles. But RAM cache can compensate for the mechanical limitations of hard disk drives, and Moore’s Law continues to allow for ever-greater RAM-based storage, including cache, DRAM, and flash. But storage does not exist in a vacuum. All that data must go somewhere, and this is the job of the I/O channel.
PowerPath To The Virtual People
April 22, 2009 By 5 Comments
Hiding in the shadow of the huge VMware vSphere 4 announcement was a very interesting introduction by EMC: PowerPath/VE. As I mentioned in my post on storage changes in vSphere 4, PowerPath/VE plugs into the new pluggable storage architecture (PSA) found in vSphere 4 versions of ESX and takes over the decision-making and heavy-lifting tasks related to communicating with storage systems.D
Attending Microsoft’s MVP Global Summit
February 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment
As y’all might know, I was pleased to receive recognition from Microsoft for my contributions to the storage community in the form of an MVP award. This award has allowed me to have much more insight into Microsoft’s products behind the scenes, and has helped me immensely in supporting my customers who use Microsoft products [...]
Windows Server 2008 Changes Storage
July 31, 2008 By 2 Comments
Although it’s been available for a while now, Windows Server 2008′s storage changes aren’t widely reported. TechTarget’s Dave Raffo wrote a piece about it today, Windows Server 2008′s hidden storage features, including some quotes from me, but it’s still less than clear. So let me sum up: Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 is probably the biggest [...]
Microsoft: The A-Rod of Storage
March 10, 2008 By 2 Comments
Imagine there was someone many people loved to hate, but grudgingly loved just the same because of their incredible prowess. In Red Sox Nation, that would be Alex Rodriguez, who we follow year after year with a mix of admiration, envy, and anger as he seems to make all the right moves for the wrong [...]
