Last week, after the Exec Event in Palo Alto, I joined my friend W. Curtis Preston for his first Backup Central Live! event. Curtis has spent years educating IT pros about data protection, this was the first week of a new series of self-produced events. And let me tell you, although I’ve seen him present dozens of times, Curtis was really in his element here. He held the packed room enthralled, and the vendor sponsors I talked to were very pleased about the event!
Gestalt IT
VMware ESX FCoE CNA Compatibility in Plain English
VMware has one awesome hardware compatibility list, but its thoroughness can be daunting. It’s fairly easy to search for a specific piece of hardware, but it’s difficult to tell what’s supported in a general sense. I’ve boiled down certain key hardware categories into a general plain-english list of what’s in and out of the ESX HCL. Let’s kick things off with FCoE CNAs.
Talking Cloud Storage Gateways With Nasuni and Cirtas
I’ve got a new video podcast up and running: Raising the Floor is a series of discussions about the future of enterprise IT. I kicked the series off talking about one of my favorite topics: Cloud storage. It was a pretty broad discussion, all packed into less than half an hour, but I wanted to share a few excerpts.
Thin Provisioning: Playing the Telephone Game
What happens in the telephone game is that a little bit of information gets lost at each step along the path, and at the end of the chain you’ve basically lost all the information. And this happens all the time in computers, especially in data storage. Thin reclamation is the core technical challenge to thin provisioning, and the telephone game is the reason.
De-Allocating is the Core Issue for Thin Provisioning
One of the biggest problems for thin provisioning is not the provisioning part: It’s fairly easy for a storage array to allocate on request: “I need a block; here’s some data I want you to write.” And the storage array just starts allocating, and allocating. But, the operating system never goes back and says “I don’t need that block anymore.”
