In the previous post, I talked about how the Drobo uses metadata monitoring to solve the telephone game and make de-allocation possible. But that approach is challenging in complex enterprise environments. Instead, most enterprise arrays use a complex chain of semaphores to interpret signals from the connected hosts about the capacity that can be un-provisioned. On the … [Read more...] about Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
ESX
A VMware Hypervisor For Networkers?
As my friend Stu Miniman pointed out, a recent VMware video suggests the company is about to jump into networking in a big way. Dubbed "vFabric," This new offering would be a generic hypervisor for virtual network devices, from load balancers to security appliances, and would presumably be integrated with the existing vNetwork Distributed Switch functionality. This appears to … [Read more...] about A VMware Hypervisor For Networkers?
PowerPath To The Virtual People
Hiding in the shadow of the huge VMware vSphere 4 announcement was a very interesting introduction by EMC: PowerPath/VE. As I mentioned in my post on storage changes in vSphere 4, PowerPath/VE plugs into the new pluggable storage architecture (PSA) found in vSphere 4 versions of ESX and takes over the decision-making and heavy-lifting tasks related to communicating with storage … [Read more...] about PowerPath To The Virtual People
Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family
VMware officially launched their next-generation (version 4) enterprise family of products today under the "vSphere 4" name. As I've been doing for the last few major ESX releases, I'm focusing this post on the storage changes present in vSphere 4. For more information on earlier updates, see my articles: Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 Storage … [Read more...] about Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family
Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House
Iomega has been a staple of the desktop computing environment for decades, but the company's products have never been quite at home in even small corporate data centers. That changes today with the introduction of the iSCSI StorCenter Pro ix4-200r. As of now, EMC's SOHO storage subsidiary is a serious challenger in the small business and entry-level VMware ESX storage market. … [Read more...] about Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House