Why do we care about thin provisioning? Because storage is not getting cheaper. If you went to buy a disk ten years ago, you’re going to spend about the same as would today, but you’re going to get a lot more capacity – a lot more capacity! The fact that we have terrible utilization of enterprise resources is really not helping us, and it’s not getting any better. It hasn’t improved because they are “doing storage” the same way.
Gestalt IT
Introducing The Enterprise IT Infrastructure Events Calendar
As a community service, I decided to put together a calendar of enterprise IT events. My friend Matt Simmons has a similar calendar for SysAdmins, but mine is a little different. Where he focuses more on user groups and the like, I’m focusing on big events like Interop, EMC World, and Cisco Live.
Every Company Is Gunning For Someone Else
One of the amusing aspects of being self-employed is watching all the giants battle it out. Every company is gunning for someone, but the amazing thing is that they rarely have each other in their sights: NetApp is gunning for EMC who’s more focused on HP who wants to knock off Oracle who’s fixated on IBM. It sounds very “high school romance” but this is deadly-serious business.
What is Application Performance Monitoring?
Remember what it was like to drive without a GPS? Sure, it’s possible, but a good GPS takes it to a whole new level. Need gas? A Denny’s Grand Slam? A detour around traffic? You’ve got it! And when the kids start asking “how much longer” you have a precise answer! Old-school server metrics are like the gauges in your car: They show what’s happening now and can be useful to the driver, but a lot of questions are left un-answered. This is where application performance monitoring comes in: Rather than just checking server stats, APM gives credible, actionable, and user-focused answers about the state of your systems.
Overcoming The Limits Of Thin Provisioning With Automatic Provisioning!
I’ve never been a fan of thin provisioning as a storage management tool. Don’t get me wrong, I love having thin provisioning in my toolkit to overcome the limitations of conventional filesystems. Thin provisioning just gets under my skin when folks try to use it to solve business problems like long deployment time and slow purchasing cycles. If you attended any of the thin provisioning sessions I’ve presented at Storage Decisions, Interop, E-Storm, or elsewhere then you’ve heard my wistful dreaming of real automatic provisioning without the hackery of thin provisioning systems. But perhaps I didn’t mention that actual automatic provisioning actually exists today! It’s one of the many things I love about API-driven cloud storage!
