I stirred up a lot of controversy last week after posting what I thought was a fairly innocuous question: Will 16 Gb Fibre Channel Derail FCoE? That short post focused on the prospects for 16 Gb FC and was the result of questions I received from the audience at Interop New York. Yet the resulting controversy is all about the fitness of FCoE and my personal motivations. So I … [Read more...] about Why I Am Biased Against FCoE
best practices
Four Fundamental Best Practices for Enterprise IT
Although many people are cynical about the whole idea of best practices, I'm a believer. I think that such beasts do exist, just that too many companies, analysts and especially consultants spend too much time applying the label to whatever works in their best interest at the time. To counteract this cesspool of non-best practices, I thought it best to put down a few ideas of … [Read more...] about Four Fundamental Best Practices for Enterprise IT
Why Do I Ignore NAS?
Why does network-attached storage (NAS) have such a poor reputation? This isn't what the vendors want to be talking about, but some recent product announcements and discussions led to this thought. IT folks as a whole don't trust NAS for real work, and 20 years of effort from big names like Sun, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, and the rest hasn't changed that. Fear Back when I used … [Read more...] about Why Do I Ignore NAS?
The Techie/Business Schism
IT is fixated on endless technology upgrades but fails to adequately address the human side of the equation. The schism between application developers and infrastructure managers is reflected in many current controversial topics, and IT infrastructure must radically change its course to avoid it being left in the dust. What Works IT folks don't "get" cloud computing. The … [Read more...] about The Techie/Business Schism
Use Process Solutions For Process Problems, Technical Solutions For Technical Ones
If there is a universal best practice, it's the simple idiom, "use the right tool for every job". Yet we in IT spend so much time trying to fit square pegs into round holes, it becomes second nature. How else to describe our attempts to solve virtually every business need through added technology? No matter what the request, we think there must be a technological solution. But … [Read more...] about Use Process Solutions For Process Problems, Technical Solutions For Technical Ones