Visitors to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) booth at Storage Networking World in Orlando were greeted by a strange symbol, but what is the symbol exactly? I was amused to get some puzzled looks (and no correct answers) when I polled a number of industry insiders.
Enterprise storage
The CEO Shuffle
It’s an old story: Hot startups are created by clever technologists, but it takes a different kind of leadership to really hit the big time. Many of today’s smaller companies are following this well-worn path, with both Panasas and ParaScale this week replacing their CEOs with industry veterans. These changes show that the investors in these businesses are looking either for a path to growth or an exit as the economy improves.
1000Base-What?
Networking may be straightforward, but the world of networking terminology is not. I’ve been steeped in the strange lingo of Ethernet for many years, but I still get confused by some of the terms. What’s the difference between 1000BASE-CX, 1000BASE-SX, and 1000BASE-T? In this post, I’m going to tackle this Ethernet network naming convention.
Where Is Microsoft’s FCoE Support?
The storage and networking industry is pushing for high-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and its dominance of FCoE seems almost certain to many industry watchers. But where is Microsoft when it comes to FCoE? Put simply, Microsoft does not seem to be participating in FCoE development, either on the initiator or target side.
Multipath: Active/Passive, Dual Active, and Active/Active
Although it’s rare in the PC world, multipath I/O is not new in enterprise IT. I’ve been juggling paths to storage and networks as long as I’ve been a systems administrator, and that’s a bit longer than I care to admit. But the proliferation of technologies has made it difficult to understand path management. What’s the difference between “dual active” and “active/active”? Is “active/passive” really that bad?
