Chris Wahl

vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?

February 3, 2015 by Stephen 2 Comments

Way back in the 1990’s, UNIX admins delighted in upgrading from NFSv2 to NFSv3. Then NFSv4 came around and … crickets. Now VMware has become the first major/useful/mainstream application for NFSv4.1, so the floodgates are open! But are they?

Storage Field Day 4: Live This Week!

November 12, 2013 by Stephen 1 Comment

It’s time once again for Storage Field Day! As most of my blog readers are aware, I run the Tech Field Day event series, bringing together experts in various IT fields with key companies for a few days of deep technical discussion. This week it’s our fourth event focused on enterprise storage, and it’s going to be big!

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.

The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

The third-generation iPad Pro is a great machine but also a bellwether of change at Apple. It will be very hard for the rest of the mobile and client computing industry to keep up with this kind of progress!

Not All 802.11n Networks Are Alike

July 2, 2011

Buyers of 802.11n wireless network equipment should not assume they will see a great benefit right out of the box. Most will have to enable by hand a high-performance configuration including wide channels and 5 GHz operation. And some client devices may never reach the levels of performance expected by consumers due to hardware limitations.

A Watch Guy’s Review of the Apple Watch

April 27, 2015

Is the Apple Watch a personal communication revolution like the iPhone, a well-executed gadget like the Apple TV, or a total miss? Does it mark the end of the the world as we know it for watches? And what’s it like to use one? I’m a watch guy and a gadget guy, so perhaps my perspective will be of some value.

SMB 3 is Going to be Huge, in both Scope and Impact

May 6, 2012

Microsoft is about to release the third major revision to their ubiquitous network storage protocol, SMB. Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3 will really highlight this technology, and I predict it will transform the way people think about networked storage for Windows systems. But SMB 3 is big in another way, too: there are tons of new features, and not all will be implemented by everyone.

EMC Redefine Possible (TL;DR Edition)

July 9, 2014

EMC made quite a few announcements today at their “Redefine Possible” event in London. There’s a lot of coverage out there already, so I decided to present a summary of the whole thing in “too long; didn’t read” (TL;DR) fashion.

On the Death of Innovation, or “These Kids These Days!”

May 21, 2012

An obnoxious meme has returned to the fore lately, claiming that innovation is dead. The hippies did it, or maybe it was the Internet, or even a decline of America. But nothing could be further from the truth, and statements like this make me question the perspective of the speaker.

Marketers: Fudging the Meaning of Buzzwords Matters (To You!)

December 2, 2015

Too many marketers and salespeople play fast and loose with words, but they’re only hurting themselves. Improper usage is embarrassing and causes a loss of credibility with the people they most want to reach. It would be wise to spend a lot more time being correct and a little less time jumping on bandwagons and buzzwords!

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).

Defining Failure: What Is MTTR, MTTF, and MTBF?

July 6, 2011

Most computer industry vendors use the term â€œMTBFâ€ rather indiscriminately. But IT pros know that systems do not magically repair themselves, at least not yet, so MTTR and MTTF are just as important!