I am often questioned during my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar presentations about VMware’s Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). This system is fairly straightforward and concept: VMware provides native multipathing support for a variety of storage arrays, and allows third parties to substitute their own plug-ins at various points in the stack. But the profusion of acronyms and third-party options makes it difficult for end-users to figure out what is going on.
VMware
Tech Field Day Boston: Virtualization and Baseball
A few weeks from now, I will head off to Boston for a special event focused entirely on server virtualization. Tech Field Day 6 brings together so many great things that it’s hard for me to summarize it!
IBM Adds VAAI Support to XIV and SVC
VMware’s vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) is one of the most-important storage technology advances of the decade, allowing the ESX to integrate and coordinate operations with supported enterprise storage arrays. IBM was notably absent from the party, but they’ve turned on the VAAI heat, releasing full support for the XIV and SVC and promising DS8000 in the near future.
I Don’t Care If You Claim It Works (The Support Matrix Blues)
As an IT professional, I subscribe to a simple rule: I won’t recommend a solution that’s not listed in the support matrix or HCL. “I don’t care if it works, only that it supported,†is really a cynical overstatement of this position. Of course I care whether or not a solution works! But merely claiming that something works is not sufficient for me to recommend it. I need to be able to demonstrate that it’s a supported configuration. Show me the listing, and I’ll start recommending it.
Changes in Technology Drive Changes in IT Organizations and Roles
Lots of my IT infrastructure management clients are talking about how the advent of Ethernet/IP and virtualization is changing the roles of storage, server, and network administrators. The evolution of the storage role in particular in enterprise IT organizations has been a topic of particular interest to me for a while: I definitely remember thinking about […]
