Storage Nation

Today is the day that VMware announces the availability of 4.1, and a key set of storage integration APIs (VAAI) that provide all sorts of cool speed-ups between server and storage.  EMC's announcement of day-one support is here . Chad Sakac (our legendary Virtual Geek ) does a great job of explaining what they are, how to use them, and what they can do for you.  If your passion is hands-on tech, please head on over there. However, if you're more like me, and are always curious about what things might mean in a broader sense, this post might be more to your liking …

The sub-title of my blog is “an insider’s perspective, technical tips n’ tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution”.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – I think I’ve got the coolest job on the planet    I’ll give you a couple “insider” hints.   2010 will be a very big year on the VMware front – loads of big releases, new functionality and expanding use cases.   Likewise, it’s shaping up to be a block-buster year on the product front at EMC.   The number of “headline” level things down the storage and security fronts between now and EMC World (May) are huge.   Between now and the end of the year – massive. So today, a big move occurred on the management side of the house that’s been underway for a while.   You can read more here . For more detail, and that “insider perspective”, read on… My blog posts are long, and I’m long-winded by nature – so here’s the conclusion before the detail: This is a move where VMware in an instant, makes a quantum increases the depth of resources, tools and capabilities in things that are focused on server-layer and up.   This expands the vCenter family of management capabilities, and the teams that develop them, and the teams take them to market. This is a move where EMC, in an instant, can focus ongoing management M&A and R&D and go to market on the things that focus on UCS, networks, and storage – the server layer and down.  This accelerates EMC’s management efforts

Many of you guys out there have gathered a lot of digital information. This might be your private photo collections, home videos, scanned documents and your home administration. All sorts of data that sits somewhere on your computer(s) or NAS devices

They say that you learn the most when you make mistakes and things go wrong.  Well, last night I certainly must have learned a lot.  What started as a simple physical re-organisation of my hardware turned into a rebuild of my production VMware ESXi server – finishing at 1am.  Here’s what happened.

I’ve been pondering Cisco and their Unified Computing System (UCS) and decided to finally blog on it. I participated in a InfoSmack podcast that included a brief discussion on UCS and recently talked to Cisco’s Jesse Freund – who manages analysts relations for the Cisco UCS.

For most of this year, I've relied on a single deck to explain the concepts of a private cloud and describe the recently announced VCE Coalition. This rather long post is basically a scripted version of the presentation — although there are always a few things that usually get said that go above and beyond what's here. Disclaimer: these are the slides and the story that I've personally been using recently.  I'm not entirely sure if it's 100% official or sanctioned or anything else like that. Hope you find this useful and entertaining! Introducing The VCE Coalition My favorite Chinese curse is "may you live in interesting times".  Well, if you're involved in IT, those "interesting times" have started.  Many of us believe that IT infrastructure is ripe for a seminal change in how it's built, operated and paid for

Server virtualization represents a major infrastructure transition on par with past transitions, like the ones from mainframe to mini (e.g. VAX), mini to UNIX, and most recently UNIX to Wintel. (I don't mean the rise of Wintel on the desktop, although that's also an interesting trend, but the emergence of Wintel running critical business apps in high-end corporate data centers.) At VMworld last month, a customer mentioned that he felt this transition was harder and slower than the earlier ones

Those of us who speak on IT topics often find ourselves waxing poetic about the future of technology, or the future of the data center, or something similar.

This was the third tip in a ‘handbook’ for SearchStorage.com.