EMC’s Iomega unit today released the rack-mount storage product we have all been waiting for. The new ix12-300r packs 12 drive bays, scaling from 4 TB all the way to 24 TB, and backs it with quad gigabit iSCSI, redundant power, and everything else the small data center needs.
HP
Conference Loot: SNW Orlando 2010 Edition
I’ve never been a fan of the junky, wasteful side of conference attendance. I railed about “booth babes and chotchkies” last year, and tried to make my presentations qualitatively different. But there is another class of giveaway at conferences: Solid, pricey loot.
Multipath: Active/Passive, Dual Active, and Active/Active
Although it’s rare in the PC world, multipath I/O is not new in enterprise IT. I’ve been juggling paths to storage and networks as long as I’ve been a systems administrator, and that’s a bit longer than I care to admit. But the proliferation of technologies has made it difficult to understand path management. What’s the difference between “dual active” and “active/active”? Is “active/passive” really that bad?
Thin Provisioning and Cloud Storage: My Interop 2010 Topics
I’m pleased to be heading back to Interop this spring with two sessions on enterprise storage. Although significantly changed from the old “Networld + Interop” days, the event is enjoyable and technical, with many interesting sessions and speakers. And the New York show at least had plenty of end user attendees!
Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks
HP recently commissioned Tolly Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolly focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. What’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?
