Embargoes help us all. I love that I can get inside information ahead of announcements, giving me time to consider the implications of new technology releases. I’m not scoop driven (though I’ve sometimes gotten the scoop) so I’m less interested in timeliness than I am in the depth of insight I can get from a briefing.
NetApp
Flexible IT “Twitterview” With NetApp
I’ll be tweeting about Flexible IT today at the invitation of NetApp. I’d like to open this “Twitterview” up to anyone else who wants to join the conversation, lest this become a useless exercise in talking to ourselves. We’ll get online at 1 Eastern/10 Pacific (that’s 10:30 PM for my friends in Kolkata) and will be using the #FlexibleIT hashtag.
Flexible IT and the Path to the Services Future
I’m an IT revolutionary. I talk all the time about the quaint backwards “state of the art” in enterprise IT, what with its (many) decades old protocols, paradigms, and practices. What we call modern is really just a charade of faked-out old-fashioned open systems infrastructure: Pretend servers talking to fake disks over frankenstein networking technology.
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: I/O As a Chain of Bottlenecks
It is tempting to think of storage as a game of hard disk drives, and consider only The Rule of Spindles. But RAM cache can compensate for the mechanical limitations of hard disk drives, and Moore’s Law continues to allow for ever-greater RAM-based storage, including cache, DRAM, and flash. But storage does not exist in a vacuum. All that data must go somewhere, and this is the job of the I/O channel.
Is NFS v3 Really That Bad?
Did some pNFS proponent slip a love potion into the coffee at EMC? Suddenly it’s pNFS time at the company known for its reluctance to embrace file sharing and filesystems in general. The purple prose is flying, with Chad Sakac declaring himself “a big fan of the application of NFS” and Chuck Hollis extolling the “inherent simplicity and ease-of-management of NFS.” The NetApp guys must be amused by the bear hug from Hopkinton, but many are seeing deja-vu all over again.