Storage Nation

Yup – it’s that topic again!  Everywhere I go, customers are successfully virtualizing Oracle on VMware.   Yet, the conversation about Oracle’s support stance continues unabated as well. Well, I wasn’t just tilting at windmills in this post , and then in this post , and finally in this post

The news is here . It's gratifying to see our international business growing

As an HDS customer I have had enough of the customer facing HDS Support Portal.

There’s so much fud that gets slung around these days (not implying EMC is immune!!!) that rather than get frustrated by it, my team tries to have a bit of fun with it.   I think the game is fun enough to share out there Ok, this first variant we call “name that vendor”.   A question comes in from a customer, which is clearly a “list of ‘unique's’” that was sent by a vendor.  By “unique’s” I mean a list of pithy points where a vendor makes a grandiose claim of uniqueness on a given feature in the hopes the customer makes that one thing on that list a buying requirement. What we like to do is strip out the customer name, and the vendor source, and play “name that vendor”.  It’s always fun because it’s usually from sales, and they so mangle what the product actually does do that’s cool, or make just flat out incorrect or silly claims.    Since VMware is one of the most popular customer use cases of infrastructure, we get to see some fun ones… Here’s the first Virtual Geek episode of “Fun with Vendor FUD – Name that Vendor”! (I’ll answer the source after a week of polling) Q: Which vendor do you think said the following: The only SAN with vSphere vStorage Fault Tolerance support included at no extra charge Full Application aware API integration with VCB at no extra charge Clustered SAN architecture to match your ESX server cluster Fully integrated MS VSS apps with API hooks Full Synchronous replication software included at no extra charge The only SAN platform which supports SRM for both automated failover and FAILBACK   There’s all sorts of vendor craziness out there.   My advice?   Ignore claims of “uniqueness” (heck, even from EMC in general, or me specifically).   Look at the product on it’s own merits.   What problems could this help you solve today?  Does it have value that is greater than it’s cost.   Does it align with where you see IT going?   “uniqueness” in any industry is hyper-transient.   “Different”, well – every product has architectural elements that mean that it can do things differently – and that’s legit, and customers should consider them.   My other advice?  Have some Fun with Vendor FUD If you think this is funny like I do, I’ll keep posting more episodes…

All of the great content you’ve read here has been preserved and moved to our new website address: www.VoicesofIT.com . Along with our blogs, you’ll also find The Voice of the Customer , first hand experiences from IT professionals using specific IT vendor solutions in their environments. Please update your RSS Feeds!    Contemplating IT XML Feeds RSS 2.0: Posts , Comments Atom: Posts , Comments    IT Toons XML Feeds (formerly known as “Blah Systems”) RSS 2.0: Posts , Comments Atom: Posts , Comments

As the economy starts to revive, and IT spending starts to pick up a bit, I've noticed some optimism return to our industry. Yes, it's great to see some positive earnings reports in the press.  Nothing wrong with that

The Iomega ix2-200d is now out – this is the 2 drive next-gen iomega platform – basically similar features to the ix4, but in a very small 2 drive form factor.  iSCSI, NFS, ships in 1,2,4 TB raw configurations (RAID 1/JBOD).  At home, I use my ix4 to stream movies and my itunes library to my PS3 (which does an awesome job with divx) and Xbox360.   The other thing that’s awesome is the systems support drive spin-down, which is a nice power-reducing effect. Here’s info in a nice little youtube-sized nugget… Remember folks – its no rocket.   As I wrote in Chapter 6 in the Mastering vSphere 4 book – storage newbies think only in terms of capacity.   IOps and throughput matter.  If you only have 2 5400 RPM drives – well – even though you COULD put a ton of VMs on there, just don’t expect it to be a rocket.

I always love doing John Troyer’s podcasts – the one we did yesterday was the one discussing the iSCSI multivendor post we did ( here ).  You can listen to a recording of the podcast – here . A big thank you to Eric, Adam, Vaughn and Andy for the work on the post and on the call. On another note…. I’m always a bit frustrated when the “what protocol is best” or “which protocol is tier 1” question comes up.   Us poor human beings, we like to see the world as black and white, but it just doesn’t work like that

Should be music to any storage vendor's ears, shouldn't it? But, more lately, I've started to groan a bit when I hear those words. Don't get me wrong — EMC still generally sets the industry standard for advanced storage thinking and capabilities, much to the continual consternation of our competitors

So, it's happening more frequently now. We go into a large enterprise customer, or perhaps one of our partners, and do our private cloud presentation. We talk about fully virtualized environments, new operational models, and how VMware, Cisco and EMC are working together to accelerate this world. And then something very interesting happens with increasing frequency.