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Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Archives for VMware

Dell, Wall Street, Magic Beans, and the End of EMC

September 7, 2016 By Stephen 1 Comment

Dell, Wall Street, Magic Beans, and the End of EMC

As of today, EMC Corporation is no longer an independent company. Who thought we would see this day? From now on, EMC is simply a brand for parts of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions and Services businesses. This marks a major shift in the enterprise storage world, for IT, and perhaps for American business in general.

Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack

May 2, 2016 By Stephen 1 Comment

Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack

Last week I headed to Austin, Texas to attend the semi-annual OpenStack Summit there. Along with the usual socializing, I was looking to understand the current state of the technology: What does OpenStack really mean these days, and where is it going? Let’s start with “free”. As “the Internet” is quick to point out, this critical word has multiple […]

Doodling on the Value of EMC, VMware, and Dell’s Offer

October 12, 2015 By Stephen 2 Comments

Doodling on the Value of EMC, VMware, and Dell’s Offer

I’m not a stock analyst, and this is merely my own quick calculation, but this doesn’t seem like a good deal for shareholders. Dell walks away with a huge amount of value and shareholders are left hoping for the best. No wonder shares of EMC are still well below the alleged “$33.15 per share” offer price! Right now, it looks like they’re valuing that VMware tracking stock at only $4 per share, not the $9 Dell hoped.

Adding a Second Ethernet Port to an Intel NUC via Mini PCIe

June 5, 2015 By Stephen 14 Comments

Adding a Second Ethernet Port to an Intel NUC via Mini PCIe

As I mentioned in my previous post about Raspberry Pi power monitoring, I recently built a VMware vSphere “datacenter” from three Intel NUC mini PC’s. One limit of the NUC is that it has just one Ethernet port. But there’s a Mini PCIe slot inside the fourth-generation NUC that can be used to add a second Ethernet NIC!

Automated UPS Monitoring for vSphere with NUT and Raspberry Pi (Cheap!)

June 3, 2015 By Stephen 9 Comments

Automated UPS Monitoring for vSphere with NUT and Raspberry Pi (Cheap!)

NUT is a wonderful and extensible power management framework, and the Raspberry Pi is an awesome platform on which to run the UPS monitoring drivers and upsd server daemon. Even if you’re not running vSphere, a Pi running NUT makes sense for the connected servers found everywhere today.

vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?

February 3, 2015 By Stephen 2 Comments

vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?

Way back in the 1990’s, UNIX admins delighted in upgrading from NFSv2 to NFSv3. Then NFSv4 came around and … crickets. Now VMware has become the first major/useful/mainstream application for NFSv4.1, so the floodgates are open! But are they?

The Rack Endgame: Converged Infrastructure and Disaggregation

September 19, 2014 By Stephen Leave a Comment

The Rack Endgame: Converged Infrastructure and Disaggregation

As I’ve written about what I’m calling the “Rack Endgame”, the specter of converged infrastructure hasn’t been far from my thoughts. As others have pointed out, disaggregation of servers, networks, and storage doesn’t require a rack-sized stack; it can exist in a rack-mountable chassis and is already on sale!

Cisco’s Trojan Horse

September 15, 2014 By Stephen 10 Comments

Cisco’s Trojan Horse

Industry watchers like me have long wondered when Cisco will transform itself into a full-line IT infrastructure vendor. This strategy was tipped in 2009 as Cisco barged into the server market with UCS. But one leg of the stool is still missing: Storage remains the province of Cisco partners like EMC and NetApp.

The Rack Endgame: A New Storage Architecture For the Data Center

September 3, 2014 By Stephen 3 Comments

The Rack Endgame: A New Storage Architecture For the Data Center

Top-of-rack flash and bottom-of-rack disk makes a ton of sense in a world of virtualized, distributed storage. It fits with enterprise paradigms yet delivers real architectural change that could “move the needle” in a way that no centralized shared storage system ever will. SAN and NAS aren’t going away immediately, but this new storage architecture will be an attractive next-generation direction!

Virtualized and Distributed Storage: This Time For Sure!

September 2, 2014 By Stephen 3 Comments

Virtualized and Distributed Storage: This Time For Sure!

We were never able to achieve storage virtualization in mainstream enterprise IT because we lacked the ability to identify and move data non-disruptively. This has been solved by caching and distributed storage solutions, and it’s only a matter of time before the legacy need for centralized storage falls away.

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Edward Snowden

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