Silicon Angle claims that Cisco is dumping HP as a partner and it makes sense. After all, HP and Cisco have been trading blows for the last two years and progressively escalating the war. Once the Acadia / VCE project was announced, it was clear where Cisco is planning to go.

It has been nearly a year since Cisco shook up the IT infrastructure world with their unified computing system (UCS) server line. UCS is an important infrastructure element and deserves the continuing attention it has received, but questions about the product and its place in the market continue to be raised.

There is some misconception by many in the storage industry that FCoE is some type of replacement for Infiniband. My view is that FCoE is cheaper, dumber but MARKETABLE alternative.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is receiving a great deal of attention in the media these days. Fortunately, setting up FCoE on a Nexus 5000 series switch from Cisco isn’t too terribly complicated, so don’t be too concerned about deploying FCoE in your datacenter (assuming it makes sense for your organization). Configuring FCoE basically consists of three major steps:

My last post about technology choices got derailed into a discussion about I/O virtualization technologies. So, I’m going to try again to get my point across about technology choices.

Every technology decision is a double-edged sword: vendors gain advantages and create disadvantages with their technology decisions. It’s important to evaluate technologies to discover both sides of the coin.

Enhancements to EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems is possibly around the corner (FY09 Q4). FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) is due this quarter and will be one of the most awaited software release in the enterprise storage space by EMC. Bundled together with FAST, possibly a new microcode version the enables FAST (its associated features) and other expected enhancements.

A while back, I discussed speculation from EMC around Emulex’s proposed cloud-block storage appliance, E3s (Enterprise Elastic Storage). With my current focus on Cloud Storage, I thought it would be good to delve a bit deeper into some of the aspects of why block-based cloud computing could prove tricky and why without an appliance it may be impossible.

Much ado has been made—some of it by yours truly—about the current lack of ability to create a multi-hop Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) fabric. After digging in deeper with Cisco during my recent Unified Computing System (UCS) class, I have some additional information to share about the different forms of multi-hop FCoE and why multi-hop FCoE still isn’t available.

I mentioned yesterday on Twitter that I’d had something of a revelation with regard to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). This is probably nothing new to the experienced storage intelligentsia, but I’m just a simple guy so this was a big deal. After a spirited discussion in the Cisco UCS class about how to best leverage “FCoE-capable” storage, I have come to this realization: there is no such thing as an end-to-end FCoE solution.