Garth Gibson

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 Developer Conference, Santa Clara CA

September 17, 2012 by Stephen 1 Comment

If you’re a real storage geek like me, you simply must attend SDC. If you’re there this year, come say hi! If not, you should start making plans for next year. Be there!

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.

10 Mysteries The Lost Finale Definitively Settled

May 25, 2010

The series finale of Lost didn’t settle every question, but it did settle many of the long-running questions raised by fans. Although my live viewing was frustratingly complicated by failed transmission equipment at ABC affiliate, WEWS, I was able to watch the entire episode thanks to iTunes. So let’s settle the things that can be settled regarding Lost.

VMware’s Hardware Partner Strategy: Heads I Win, Tales You Lose

February 11, 2013

VMware is in an enviable but tricky situation: The company must work closely with hardware partners, keeping these prime sales and promotional channels happy and supportive. But VMware must also innovate around proprietary OEMs, subverting their products with integrated software before a rival steps up with an integrated alternative.

Scaling Storage At The Client

November 25, 2013

Scaling storage is a serious challenge for the industry, but there is a great deal of thought, effort, and creativity going into it right now. Companies like Gridstore, Oxygen Cloud, and Cleversafe have come up with effective client-side solutions to enable scale-out storage to sing. If you’ve got an appropriate application, client, or gateway, scale-out is a real possibility!

From LAN Manager and SMB to CIFS: The Evolution of Prehistoric PC Network Protocols

March 22, 2012

Computers aren’t much good on their own. This simple fact was evident even at the dawn of the microcomputing age, and has never been more true today in the “post-PC” world. If the standard microcomputer is the “Wintel” box (Microsoft’s Windows, Intel’s CPUs, and all that implies) then the standard network services protocol is SMB. So let’s take a nice deep dive into SMB, past, present, and future!

Aerobie AeroPress Review: The Hacker Coffee Maker

February 7, 2011

Computer geeks like me love coffee, the stronger the better. We computer folks are also known for experimentation and a do it yourself ethic. Some of us even love to get outdoors and toss around a flying disc or football. What happens when you mash up all of this? You get the Aerobie AeroPress, the hacker coffeemaker.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Software-Defined Future

November 29, 2012

The Software-Defined Datacenter is a great concept, but it just won’t work. The big enterprise companies will never allow VMware (and daddy EMC) to commoditize them out of existence, so useful implementations will be rarer than ruby slippers. The best we can hope for is point enhancements to enable greater virtual machine mobility through SDN and improved storage integration.

The Rack Endgame: A New Storage Architecture For the Data Center

September 3, 2014

Top-of-rack flash and bottom-of-rack disk makes a ton of sense in a world of virtualized, distributed storage. It fits with enterprise paradigms yet delivers real architectural change that could “move the needle” in a way that no centralized shared storage system ever will. SAN and NAS aren’t going away immediately, but this new storage architecture will be an attractive next-generation direction!

How Will Cisco Recover From The Consumer Strategy Blunder?

January 2, 2013

Cisco made a massive strategic blunder in the last decade, aggressively moving into consumer devices rather than focusing on their core enterprise and service provider markets. It seems that Cisco is now in the process of rectifying this mistake, but charting a path to growth is an entirely different matter!