Chris Lyttle

Aruba Airheads Conference – Las Vegas

March 16, 2012 by Stephen Leave a Comment

Next week, I will be attending the Aruba Airheads Conference in Las Vegas. My previous experiences organizing Wireless Field Day opened my eyes to the exciting world of Wi-Fi, so I jumped at the chance to help Aruba organize blogger participation at their conference. This is one of the services my company, Foskett Services, offers!

Wireless Field Day 2 – Silicon Valley

December 20, 2011 by Stephen Leave a Comment

A year ago, Gestalt IT hosted our very first Wireless Field Day, and the event was a smashing success. This year, we are pleased to have a number of new delegates and sponsors and have added an additional event, the Wi-Fi Mobility Symposium.

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

This is week “1111111111” in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week “0000000000”. How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we’ve seen so far!

Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro

I remain enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, despite getting a scratched screen and my concerns about durability. It’s a worthy successor to the original and offers enough improvements that I’d recommend the upgrade for just about anyone who uses their iPad for serious work. It’s still not yet a laptop replacement, but this is due more to a lack of desktop-class software for iOS than anything in Apple’s control.

Sony NEX-5 Camera Review

September 15, 2010

The world of photography is like so many others: A vast gulf separates the amateurs and enthusiasts, from equipment to nomenclature to skills. I am decidedly in the amateur camp when it comes to photography, but I recently upgraded to a new compact interchangeable-lense camera, the Sony alpha NEX-5. It is an excellent match for my needs, allowing me to expand my skills and explore more advanced photographic techniques without sacrificing portability and ease of use.

New England Takes On Seattle To Determine Who’s Number 2 … In Tech!

January 19, 2015

Although New England ought to win that big football game, they’re losing when it comes to innovation and technology. Seattle and Austin are gaining rapidly, and Massachusetts has itself to blame thanks to oppressive non-compete clauses and the threat of litigation. As for Tech Field Day, look for us to return to Silicon Valley for seven of our nine full events in 2015. At least now you know why!

Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?

January 16, 2012

Moving cold virtual machine images from system to system, or even across great distances, is one of the main selling points of server virtualization. But it becomes much more difficult to manage movement of virtual machines that are still running, especially outside cluster or across WAN links. When talking about virtual machine mobility, it is important to consider what is being moved, the state it is in, and where it is going.

Nimble Storage Rolls Out an All-Flash Array

February 24, 2016

It took longer than I expected for Nimble Storage to introduce an all-flash array, but their AF7000 looks to be a very credible offering. They’re targeting XtremIO and Pure with their marketing, but I expect HP, Dell, and especially NetApp to be cross-shopped more frequently. In that fight, I expect the Nimble AF7000 to be very attractive indeed!

Why Big Disk Drives Require Data Integrity Checking

December 19, 2014

Hard disk drives keep getting bigger, meaning capacity just keeps getting cheaper. But storage capacity is like money: The more you have, the more you use. And this growth in capacity means that data is at risk from a very old nemesis: Unrecoverable Read Errors (URE).

Scaling Storage Is Hard To Do

June 4, 2013

Data storage isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially at enterprise or cloud scale. It’s simple enough to read and write a bit of data, but much harder to build a system that scales to store petabytes. That’s why I’m keenly focused on a new wave of storage systems built from the ground up for scaling!

The Rack Endgame: Open Compute Project

September 17, 2014

On reading my thoughts about the evolution of enterprise storage, many pointed out that this looks an awful lot like the Facebook-led Open Compute Project (OCP). This is entirely intentional. But OCP is simply one expression of this new architecture, and perhaps not the best one for the enterprise.

Faster Ethernet Gets Weird

June 19, 2015

“One size fits all” doesn’t work for Ethernet, but this proliferation of speed options sounds like trouble without automatic capability negotiation. It’s nice to have options, but the IEEE must remain focused on interoperability and rein in the interests of the various companies proposing next-generation Ethernet technologies.