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From viral spam to virulent sham

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:18:22 +0000

The twitterverse is busy again today with discussions surrounding EMC's us of spambots to generate views of videos they are trying to make viral. If you are interested in seeing what is being said, check out these people's tweets and you'll be off on a trip down a dark hole. @ johnful , @ dvellante , @ sfoskett , @ valb00 , @ furrier Here are a couple cartoons I made about it last week from my new cartoon, Ineption : Netapp's Val Bercovici suggest this viral spamming as the end of innocence in social media, but innocence exited the social media stage long ago. I'm much more concerned about how large companies like EMC can use social media to suggest product and customer relationships that stretch the truth well beyond the impressions that a reader might take away from reading suggestive blog posts from respected corporate voices. As "unofficial company statements" that are more influential than press releases, social media pieces can distort things in a way that more-accountable corporate marketing are not allowed to. Last week, Chad Sakac and Chuck Hollis published blog posts that pointed to an EMC white paper about details of a VMAX implementation at Terremark, an excellent 3PAR customer. Readers of these posts would probably think that VMAX was being used as the storage behind Terremark's multi-tenant, Enterprise Cloud service offering. That would be stretching things more than just a little bit. I commented on both blogs and the responses to my comments were interesting. I guess I feel a little kinder towards Chad as a result. It is possible that somewhere in the world, a VMAX is being used by Terremark. One would expect Terremark to be looking at various storage platforms as a matter of course, it only makes sense for them. After all, VMware made a significant investment in Terremark last year and we all know who owns VMware.

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From viral spam to virulent sham

The Netapp vSphere 4.1 decoder ring

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:31:34 +0000

There was a lot written last week surrounding VMware's release of vSphere 4.1 . Netapp appeared to have a lot to say, but it was confusing to figure out what they were really talking about. I think I've got it now. It's unusual for a company to be invited as a centerpiece of high-visibility festivities and then mysteriously decide not to follow through

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The Netapp vSphere 4.1 decoder ring

Robert Cockerill from Thames River Capital: A man with broad responsibilities and 3PAR storage

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:46:23 +0000

3PAR customers like that fact that 3PAR arrays are so easy and fast to manage. In this video, Robert Cockerill from Thames River Capital in London talks about all the various things he does, his Windows-based infrastructure, how 3PAR’s thin provisioning helps him manage it all and how simple it was to protect it with 3PAR Remote Copy.

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Robert Cockerill from Thames River Capital: A man with broad responsibilities and 3PAR storage

Clarifying VAAI capabilities and implementations

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:15:55 +0000

Virtual Geek and I had a discussion on his post yesterday about vSphere's VAAI capabilities announced yesterday . I wrote about the fact that we already had zero detect technology in our product, which is useful for the new Full Copy command because it allows customers to remove zeroed data from clones when they are created and return them to array free space. The discussion became a bit confused when Chad interpreted what I was saying as pertaining to Block Zeroing.

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Clarifying VAAI capabilities and implementations

vSphere 4.1 – What do the vStorage APIs for Array Integration mean to you?

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:03:36 +0000

Well – in a nutshell – more, for less. The vStorage APIs for Array integration (or VAAI) have been something that we previewed back at VMworld 2009. Now that vSphere 4.1 is officially out, we can now talk about it without tapdancing around a lot of stuff

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vSphere 4.1 – What do the vStorage APIs for Array Integration mean to you?

Cisco sneaks into the corporate laptop/desktop market with CIUS

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:10:48 +0000

I've been going slightly nuts since yesterday after Cisco announced the CIUS. It looks like the perfect tablet for the sorts of things I really want a personal screen device for – communicating with other people. This review by Erik Parker of InfoWorld is a pretty good read and it summarizes key advantages and disadvantages of CIUS. If it can make the technology of video conferencing transparent to end users, it will be a big deal. But the hidden story to this is that Cisco is also making a play to get into the corporate desktop/laptop business with the CIUS. The idea that companies could deploy these with VDI is definitely part of Cisco's grand plan for world domination . Whether or not the CIUS could replace laptop or desktop computers remains to be seen, but there are reasons to think they could eventually if the stars align. The arguments for VDI are strong, but there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome, such as back end storage performance to support boot storms . By the way, people looking at large VDI implementations might want to look at 3PAR's wide striping storage systems to get the sort of affordable IOPS needed to support large VDI environments. My previous post illustrates our design for massive throughput, which supports a huge number of IOPS without needing SSDs or requiring storage administrators to create special disk pools to isolate the VDI workload from other applications running in the same storage array.

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Cisco sneaks into the corporate laptop/desktop market with CIUS

Small comparison of IaaS Cloud vendors

admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 13:56:02 +0000

The company I work for does some neat things with backup and failover using the Cloud. But… I am not here to sell or promote that. That just goes against our little community here that Tim has built. We use two main Cloud vendors – Amazon and Terremark with a 3rd – RackSpace.

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Small comparison of IaaS Cloud vendors

The transparent facts of open benchmarking

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:32:58 +0000

Nate at Techopsguys has put together a comparison of SPC-1 benchmarks with six different bar charts showing the various characteristics of the configurations, performance and cost. Here's an example of what's in is post.

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The transparent facts of open benchmarking

Best practices for managing multiple storage pools – avoid them

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:23:08 +0000

Nigel Poulton tweeted today: " What are peoples thoughts on best practices for multiple pools on the likes of USP V and VMAX. Trade-off between perf vs resiliency etc…" Good question Nigel, one of the biggest problems customers have is being able to fully utilize all their resources. It's not just that the ROI for storage tends to be underwhelming, but more frustrating is the fact that their storage was provisioned in a way that makes resources inappropriate or unavailable for the pressing needs at hand. Pools are used two ways – to reserve storage capacity for certain functions such as snapshots or to create QoS levels for storage. The difficulty lies that in the creation of pools for QoS, resources that are committed to pools are practically locked into them and cannot be easily redistributed to other pools to meet changing demands. As storage systems age and are filled with data, the various pools are consumed unevenly

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Best practices for managing multiple storage pools – avoid them

10 common misconceptions about sub-volume tiering

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:03:19 +0000

1. Everybody has it. 2. All implementations are the same.

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10 common misconceptions about sub-volume tiering