Everyone wants to be the best, so outrageous claims of supremacy are as old as time. In IT, these claims often revolve around synthetic benchmarks chosen to highlight a system’s performance. Buyers have grown wary of these claims, smartly asking to try before they buy. But predictability is even more important than real-world testing, and this is particularly difficult for storage systems to achieve.
Musing: Could We Replace Ethernet With PCIe?
Greg “EtherealMind” Ferro recently “mused” that it might be a good idea to replace PCI Express (PCIe) inside servers or rack-scale infrastructure with Ethernet. But this seems to be the exact opposite of the direction the industry is headed. Rather than replacing PCIe with Ethernet, companies like Intel seem set on replacing short-range Ethernet (in rack-scale systems) with PCIe!
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?
New England Takes On Seattle To Determine Who’s Number 2 … In Tech!
Although New England ought to win that big football game, they’re losing when it comes to innovation and technology. Seattle and Austin are gaining rapidly, and Massachusetts has itself to blame thanks to oppressive non-compete clauses and the threat of litigation. As for Tech Field Day, look for us to return to Silicon Valley for seven of our nine full events in 2015. At least now you know why!
NexGen Storage is Back!
The re-birth of NexGen Storage is surprising to be sure, but it’s a positive move for the industry. Competition is good, especially when it comes from folks who know how to “do” storage. And the world of midrange storage just got a strong new competitor!