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On the Air at 2PM EST

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:58:25 +0000

Tech Target is taking a video they shot of my last DR Planning seminar and is streaming it on the Internet right now. Here are the details I received after pinging the site.

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On the Air at 2PM EST

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

Data Center Transformation Part 2 – Server Transformation

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:48:16 +0000

This is the second post in my series on data center transformation. In my first post , I offered up several warning signs that indicate why it is time to take action and transform your data center to be agile, sustainable, and business-oriented.

Originally posted here:
Data Center Transformation Part 2 – Server Transformation

Storage Is Software

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:43:38 +0000

The title of this post is a variant on the intriguing " infrastructure is code " meme from the #devops community. I think it's a useful idea to remind ourselves of — especially as technology transitions. Even though some of you reading this might thing the statement is blindingly obvious, it's clear that the vast majority of people think of boxes with blinking lights when you say the word "storage"

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Storage Is Software

My Friday Rant — Transparency

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:10:25 +0000

Four things happened this week that sort of bothered me, and it finally struck me that all four revolved around the concept of transparency. Transparency is one of those things I didn't realize was truly important until later in my personal development. Once I learned of its importance, though, life became better for me and those around me. I can only hope that others aren't as slow as I was to catch on ..

Excerpt from:
My Friday Rant — Transparency

Data Center Transformation Part 1

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:17:20 +0000

Andy Kyte from Gartner was been sounding the alarm for data center modernization for a number of years. He warns that the data center is headed for a train wreck

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Data Center Transformation Part 1

Wow what a compliment.

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:42:20 +0000

I’ve been crazy busy for a while – and it’s a beautiful thing to see the vSpecialist team (aka “Chad’s Army”) grow and blossom. The newbs are becoming vets, and helping the other newbs. It’s becoming self-sustaining, and it means that I can be focused on a lot of other things – which is great. I’m very proud of the team collectively and the individuals that comprise it. It means I have no lack of confidence (though I wish I was there – work/life balance) that they go to Cisco Live 2010 and cover it without me. It means that craziness like the picture below happens – yes… that is John Chambers in the VCE booth getting his vSpecialist shirt We try to have a lot of fun – and I love the team. It’s a bit crazy because today these two links crossed my path – posts by Elias Khnaser and Nigel Poulton It’s crazy to have outside folks making those comments. Flattering, but they give me WAY too much credit.

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Wow what a compliment.

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