Understanding the accumulation of data
The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting their vote while the rest flounder. But the storage industry must wake up and embrace the divide.
I do not necessarily endorse or recommend FalconStor NSS over competing products from more familiar names, but I commend them for adding VAAI support. There the first small vendor to do so, and their software virtualization platform spreads the availability of this important software capability.
VMware’s vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) is one of the most-important storage technology advances of the decade, allowing the ESX to integrate and coordinate operations with supported enterprise storage arrays. IBM was notably absent from the party, but they’ve turned on the VAAI heat, releasing full support for the XIV and SVC and promising DS8000 in the near future.
Iomega is well into its second coming as EMC’s entry-level storage division. First, they applied EMC’s compact and full-featured LifeLine home storage software to existing gear, giving birth to the Home Media Network Hard Drive, StorCenter ix2, and StorCenter Pro ix4-100. Then they wooed the small-business community with the rack-mount StorCenter ix4-200r, adding iSCSI target [...]
It was an interesting week, with a cloud computing summit in Washington DC, the release of Windows Storage Server 2008, and discussions of best practices and non-compete agreements. Apple MacBook Users: Turn off This Bluetooth Default Setting Now – Now I know what turned on my MacBook Pro in the bag: My BlueTooth mouse! Enterprise [...]
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 [...]
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
VMware officially launched their next-generation (version 4) enterprise family of products today under the “vSphere 4″ name. As I’ve been doing for the last few major ESX releases, I’m focusing this post on the storage changes present in vSphere 4.
This week, two blog readers let me know what Google Chrome was warning them of malware on my blog. I dived in and discovered that, indeed, a nasty, obfuscated JavaScript attack had made its way into my site. Although I was disappointed by the lack of clarity about how to fix it, I believe I was able to remove it last night.
Although Clear clearly wants buyers to sign up for monthly service, they also have “secret” on-demand 2-hour, daily, and weekly plans. Here’s how to get online cheap!
HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.
For a massive IT company, Dell sure doesn’t get the kind of respect given their competitors. Time and again, I’ll hear the sneers about Dell being little more than a “box shifter” who doesn’t “get” real enterprise IT needs. After a series of acquisitions in storage and networking, Dell is trying to stake a claim as a serious competitor to HP, IBM, Oracle, and the like. But why should anyone take Dell seriously, especially in enterprise storage?
Any time OS X corrects your spelling or (more likely) inserts appropriate accent marks, Dictate loses its mind and can no longer correctly enter some random letter. There are two ways to fix this problem (apart from just restarting Dictate all the time).
Moving cold virtual machine images from system to system, or even across great distances, is one of the main selling points of server virtualization. But it becomes much more difficult to manage movement of virtual machines that are still running, especially outside cluster or across WAN links. When talking about virtual machine mobility, it is important to consider what is being moved, the state it is in, and where it is going.
The difference between American and European mobile phone providers are vast, and the modern traveler is likely to run afoul if they are unprepared, running up a surprisingly large bill! Here’s a rundown of my standard techniques to prepare my American mobile phone for travel abroad.
The CompactFlash Association announced a new media card format last month, and now Sony and Nikon have introduced the first media and digital cameras, respectively. But what exactly is an XQD memory card? Read on for the details.
What elements remain unresolved to make FCoE truly world-class? What should the vendors be prioritizing?
Although they are ridiculously inefficient, incandescent lightbulbs seem to have a huge number of fans. Despite the romance of the glowing filament, many governments are moving to ban the use of incandescent light bulbs in many applications. Here in the United States, the federal government intends to encourage the use of more efficient light bulbs but there is no outright ban.