If VMware aims to transform storage presentation, and is working with major storage vendors to make it happen, HDS ought to be part of it. Their history, technology, and market position earn them a spot in the “VAAI Cabal” and their omission was a bombshell to industry-watchers like me.
Gestalt IT
Micron Bursts Into the PCIe SSD Market
PCIe SSDs like Micron’s new P320h offer mindbending performance and enterprise class reliability. Although expensive, these devices are in an entirely different league from any other storage option. Micron promises to bring the PCIe P320h to market at nearly $15 per gigabyte, a substantial discount over other PCIe SSD competitors.
MetaGeek and Ekahau: Wi-Fi Analysis To Go
The most interesting products and companies at Interop Las Vegas 2011 were found around the edges of the show floor. Companies like NEC, Synology, Ciphertex, and Endace may have gone unnoticed in the shadows of towering booths of the industry titans but deserve attention. One such pairing was two Wi-Fi analysis companies, MetaGeek and Ekahau. Both work together to enable spectrum analysis and site surveying on portable devices – smart phones and tablets.
Where Will Virtualization of Data Center Infrastructure Take Us?
Virtualization of IT systems decouples physical infrastructure from logical resources, hiding complexity and enabling new capabilities. However, not all potential benefits of virtualization have meaningful value outside IT circles: Too many of our discussions revolve around the very complexity that virtualization technology should be hiding! True business value is derived from transformed virtual resources in the next-generation data center, not the incremental capacity gains of virtual servers. But how will we get there, and what will this future look like?
VMware VAAI Storage Array Support in Plain English
The most exciting enhancements in VMware vSphere 4.1 is the addition of vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI). This new API allows VMware ESX to offload storage processing functions to capable storage arrays, reducing the workload on the server hardware in introducing new and exciting possibilities for performance and efficiency. VAAI in ESX 4.1 includes three separate capabilities: block zeroing, full copy, and hardware assisted locking.
