Storage Nation

This is part of a series of posts with video recorded at the HP Blades Day in Houston, February 2010. Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 1 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 2 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 3 In this final post from the Lab Session, James Singer discusses more about airflow and the chassis design.  The video doesn’t always follow the subject (due to my quality videoing techniques; in fact I was trying to pay attention), however the soundtrack is accurate

Those of you with relatively good memories will remember last year’s announcement from Hitachi/HDS, which at the time promised more than it delivered.  In fact, the anagram posed by Claus Mikkelsen on his blog and used as part of the press release was “REGRADES OUR CLASSY TREATS” and should have translated to “STORAGE ARRAYS CLUSTERED”  my tongue-in-cheek alternative was “A DREARY STORAGE CLUSTER” (who could have imagined such a serendipidous alternative).  With EMC’s new release of VPLEX, it’s deja-vu all over again…. With the usual EMC fanfare, VPLEX has been heralded as “ a new storage platform “.

I finally managed to attend a London CloudCamp last Thursday, which conveniently co-incided with a #storagebeers evening.  For two hours of listening to the collective wisdom of the presenters and the “unpanel” we were offered free beer and food

As part of my work at Storage Fusion , I get to dig into the inner workings of storage arrays in a way most people don’t (either through inclination or time).  One interesting anomaly we discovered this week was the variability in capacities of CLARiiON disks.

I’m in the process of migrating my existing physical infrastructure into a virtual environment. There’s nothing like “eating your own dog food” (there’s got to be a better expression than that) for testing out your beliefs on how technology should be implemented, so it’s only fitting I virtualise the IT infrastructure I rely on. In summary, I run a “production” Windows AD domain, Exchange, IIS and file services. This is a typical scenario for many small businesses, with perhaps a few variations thrown in for good measure, such as SharePoint

Following on from my Personal Computing: Drobo Wierdness , I have received a replacement unit from Data Robotics.  I thought for a change I’d produce a video and so here is my attempt to swap out my drives into the new unit.  In the end I formatted the existing drives as four new NAS shares.  So the unit is back and working.