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vSphere 4.1, SIOC, and Array Auto-Tiering

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:06:04 +0000

So – do these ideas work together? Do they complement each other or compete? What’s the source of these questions Chad – and why are you asking them? (BTW – this topic is one I’m covering at VMworld, along with some of the testing data) If you’re interested, read on… Storage IO Control (SIOC), along with Network IO Control (NIOC) represent VMware’s first forays into expanding the IDEA of DRS (which is in essence distributed resource prioritization) beyond CPU cycles and memory – and into storage and network IO subsystems.

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vSphere 4.1, SIOC, and Array Auto-Tiering

Private Clouds And Dealing With Legacy

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:55:43 +0000

The good news — there's general consensus from the enterprise IT organization I speak with that — yes, they'd like to pursue a private cloud model. The challenging part — as they look around their data centers, all they can see is the legacy of past decisions: incompatible architectures, stove-pipe stacks and the rest. It's like an archeology project: you can see the layers of different waves that have come through the IT organization. How can you move forward when all you can see is history

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Private Clouds And Dealing With Legacy

Data Center Transformation Part 3: Storage Transformation

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:56:51 +0000

This is the third part in my series on data center transformations. My last post was on server transformation and the impact of virtual servers on the data center. In this post I will address the impact of storage transformation on the data center. Data is at the core of the Data center Data is at the core of the data center, and any effort to transform the data center must involve the movement, provisioning, access, and protection of data which is provided by storage systems

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Data Center Transformation Part 3: Storage Transformation

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

Meet Ray

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:13:48 +0000

The downturn in the economy has been difficult for many IT shops as it has been for many of the storage vendors. Our strategy during this downturn has been to focus on the needs of our customers and help them increase the utilization of their storage assets and reduce their operational costs. When we entered this downturn in 2008, IT shops were typically running at about 30% to 40% utilization with most of their data on expensive tier 1 storage. Through offerings like Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning and Zero Page Reclaim we were able to help some customers reclaim as much as 40% of their allocated unused storage and reduce their need to buy more capacity

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Meet Ray

Hitachi Data Systems Priority During the Down turn

admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:00:50 +0000

The down turn in the economy has been difficult for many IT Shops as it has been for many of the storage vendors. Our strategy during this down turn has been to focus on the needs of our customers and help them increase the utilization of their storage assets and the reduce their operational costs. When we entered this down turn in 2008, IT shops were typically running at about 30% to 40% utilization with most of their data on expensive tier 1 storage. Through offerings like Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning and Zero Page Reclaim we were able to help some customers reclaim as much as 40% of their allocated unused storage and reduce their need to buy more capacity during this down turn

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Hitachi Data Systems Priority During the Down turn

SAP and VCE

admin — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:15:44 +0000

The news coming out of SAPPHIRE this morning is fairly compelling to many of us. SAP is publicly endorsing the private cloud model, the VCE coalition and the Vblock infrastructure package. They've highlighted the work that the VCE coalition (together with Accenture) has done to validate and benchmark a real-world SAP environment from Levi Strauss. This announcement is in addition to the recent EMC Information Intelligence Group's tie-up in the content management and workflow space, covered here and here — a big piece of news in its own right. And, predictably, there are a lot of interesting angles to the SAP and VCE story — some obvious, some a bit more subtle ..

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SAP and VCE

VPLEX undressed

admin — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:36:56 +0000

OK, Monday's post lacked the punch that people have come to expect from me where EMC announcements are concerned. Thanks to my readers who were disappointed and told me so. This post is for you. VPLEX (announced Monday with all the hype that EMC could muster) is the result of EMC trying to become something more than a storage company.

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VPLEX undressed

CIOs Understand Storage Virtualization

admin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:02:24 +0000

I was recently asked by an analyst firm to review a survey that they intended to send to end users to evaluate the extent of virtualization in the data center. While most of the survey asked very relevant questions, when it came to storage virtualization, it was all over the map, primarily because there was no clear definition of storage virtualization

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CIOs Understand Storage Virtualization

Cloud Computing: Cloud /= Virtualisation

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:04:13 +0000

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

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Cloud Computing: Cloud /= Virtualisation