storage virtualization

Toronto Seminar: Do Canadians Virtualize?

December 8, 2008 by Stephen 1 Comment

I’m off to beautiful Toronto, Ontario, Canada for tomorrow’s storage virtualization seminar. It will be very interesting to learn if there are differences between the two countries in terms of technologies employed or (more likely) business objectives served by server and storage virtualization technology. As I noted after my date with Charlotte, American companies are increasingly […]

Can’t Get There From Here

November 30, 2008 by Stephen 4 Comments

I’m currently making my travel plans for my final storage virtualization seminar. Or, to be precise, trying to make my plans. You see, apparently one cannot (reasonably) get from Cleveland to Toronto, even though they’re only 193 miles apart. Want a direct flight? That’ll be $1,080 round trip on an Air Canada Dash-8. But it […]

Making Plans for Storage Decision San Francisco

November 14, 2008 by Stephen Leave a Comment

Next week is the final Storage Decisions conference of 2008, Storage Decisions San Francisco! I’ll be in the Bay area from Sunday night through Wednesday, and invite you to say hello if you’re in the area as well! If you’re attending the conference, here’s my schedule: Monday, 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM: DATA RETENTION & […]

EMC About To Take Us To Maui…

November 7, 2008 by Stephen 1 Comment

Update: Maui is now Atmos! See my post, EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up? Remember all the talk about a year ago about EMC’s mysterious new storage product, code-name “Maui”? It was teased and pulled by Storagezilla, and rumored by one and all… Well, it wasn’t at EMC World, […]

Storage Virtualization Charlotte: Thoughts and Reactions

October 21, 2008 by Stephen 4 Comments

I’ve just finished my day in Charlotte on my Storage Virtualization Seminar tour for TechTarget. We had another great crowd – everyone seemed interested even if some were shy about speaking up. I was especially pleased to see the optimism about the city’s post-Wachovia future. Comments at the event focused on management, with my concerns […]

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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.

A Complete List of VMware VAAI Primitives

November 10, 2011

VMwareâ€™s introduced the â€œvStorage APIs for Array Integrationâ€ (VAAI) in vSphere 4.1, and block-heads like me went nuts. Weâ€™ve been trying to integrate storage and servers for decades, and VMwareâ€™s APIs finally allowed this to work in truly seamless fashion. But the world of VAAI is a thicket of bizarre naming and puzzling functionality. Some VAAI primitives are ignored or even hidden! Letâ€™s take a look at the complete list.

How To Keep Your Family Activities In Sync With A Shared Google Calendar

April 18, 2010

Smartphones, computers, and iPads are proliferating in families today. Although my three kids do not (yet) have their own mobile phones, we still have quite a few devices with calendar functions: An iPhone each for me, my wife, and our au pair along with an iPad and a few computers. Using Google Calendar, we have set up an awesome shared calendar to keep all of our activities in sync. Read on for instructions!

The Fat Middle: Today’s Enterprise Storage Array

August 31, 2014

Ask any project manager if it’s possible to deliver something that is fast, good, and cheap, and they’ll laugh. The phenomenon known as the Iron Triangle limits just about everything in the world from meeting all three conflicting requirements. Yet, for the last two decades, enterprise storage array vendors have been trying to deliver just this. How’s that working out?

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.

The Rack Endgame: Open Compute Project

September 17, 2014

On reading my thoughts about the evolution of enterprise storage, many pointed out that this looks an awful lot like the Facebook-led Open Compute Project (OCP). This is entirely intentional. But OCP is simply one expression of this new architecture, and perhaps not the best one for the enterprise.

Scaling Storage Is Hard To Do

June 4, 2013

Data storage isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially at enterprise or cloud scale. It’s simple enough to read and write a bit of data, but much harder to build a system that scales to store petabytes. That’s why I’m keenly focused on a new wave of storage systems built from the ground up for scaling!

Debit or Credit? Always Choose Credit!

December 19, 2013

“Credit of debit?”ï»¿ It’s all very confusing for American shoppers. But the news about a massive point-of-sale data theft at Target makes one thing very, very clear: Always choose “credit” when the cashier asks!

Download My Free E-Book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts”!

April 4, 2017

I’ve got a lot to say about storage, as you might have noticed from reading my blog. So I finally sat down and wrote a book on enterprise storage. Now you can download the e-book for free, thanks to support from my friends at SolarWinds!