There’s a lot of talk about Dynamic Data Centres, Dynamic Infrastructures; mostly in a cloudy context and mostly as some over-arching architectural vendor-focused vision. At times, I wonder if when a vendor talks about a ‘Dynamic Infrastructure’; if they actually mean, you can use as much of OUR infrastructure as you like? You can flex up and down on OUR infrastructure.

NetApp’s Filer is a single great product which you have built a business on but it is just a single product.

NetApp worry me as a company; despite their record revenues this quarter, they strike me as a company in trouble. And as an end-user who wants/needs a competive storage market, this is a little concerning.

Can Snaps and Replication ever replace traditional back-up applications? It’s an interesting thought and certainly one that we’ve considered in the past. We often find that the answer that you get very much varies from what the favourite technology is with generally the NetApp fans saying yes and the EMC fans saying no.

NAS just works, doesn’t it? Well no, not always. We’ve just come across a bizarre bug in OnTap 7.3.2 with CIFS running a Mac. If you rename a file and whilst doing so, change case; the file disappears.

Two very different press conferences/product launches happened today, and both had a very common theme: control.

If you don’t cluster your arrays, how do you protect against the failure of a RAID rank? Statistically unlikely but it is it more or less unlikely than a loss of data-centre? I’m not sure and the failure of a RAID rank for many people could well mean the invocation of the disaster recovery plan. Why?

Did VMWare save EMC? Did EMC need saving? At the point it bought VMWare probably not but if EMC had not bought VMWare, I suspect it would have been in dire straights or at least not the company it is today. I’d go as far as to propose that it would have been bought itself by now.

Availability figures lull people into a false sense of security as actually no-one knows what they mean!

A lot of posts and talks from people involved in VMware and especially when we start talking about the Private Cloud talk about 100% virtualised data centres. And there’s always the nay-sayers like me who point out that there are niche applications which currently can’t be virtualised. These include applications which run specialist hardware and applications which have real-time requirements; in my world of Broadcast Media, these are often one and the same.