HDS telegraphed that a big announcement was coming today. They even made it fun, with a (literally) cryptic blog entry to make sure we were all watching. But the announcement of High Availability Manager, a software product to manage existing HDS USP-V and USP-VM arrays, underwhelmed. It isn’t HDS’ answer to the EMC Symmetrix V-Max and it’s forthcoming FAST technology.

The fact that Microsoft has embraced virtualization is an understatement. The fact that Microsoft has been slow to embrace other virtualization vendor’s capabilities to run Windows operating systems as guests is equally an understatement, but what if this wasn’t the case? That is, what if Microsoft abandoned the licensing strategy of anchoring Windows to physical hardware?

Although the technical details of VMware’s version 4 product (dubbed the vSphere family) were known ahead of time, the product’s licensing model came as a surprise. Rather than go with the “base product + options” approach used by many software products, VMware decided on a flat tiered pricing scheme. Both approaches have their fans and detractors, but the details of VMware’s system left many off guard. Has VMware pushed the tiered model too far, eliminating flexibility and forcing enterprise customers to purchase pricey top-tier licenses? The Gestalt IT staff put our heads together to think the matter through.

Although I give the various players a hard time; the industry doesn’t do everything badly and I try to see the positives as well as the negatives. So I was thinking about the perfect array and what features I would like to see!

Despite a lot of the huffing and puffing by the various vendors, I think that we are about to enter a cycle where most vendors admit that their competitors’ arrays are pretty much good enough for what-ever you want them to do. Of course, there are a few features which differentiate but they are all catching up with each other in this space.

Understanding the reasons for migration is a great place to start in developing a strategy. Seasoned IT professionals will know that change for change’s sake is not a good thing; “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” – the old adage says, for good reason. Data migrations will introduce change into an environment and with change comes risk. However there are practical reasons to perform migrations.