Tony Bourke really stirred up a hornets' nest with this one! Who would have thought that "storage NAT" would be so controversial? NPIV and NPV are among the two most ill-named of acronyms I’ve come across in IT, especially since they sound very similar, yet do two fairly different things. NPIV is … [Read more...]
What Is a Blade Server?
February 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment
I’ve been watching enterprise IT for over 20 years now, and I’ve seen some radical changes. In the server space, one of the biggest shifts was the form factor of the servers: From tower to rack-mount to blades. But what makes a blade server anyway? Let’s consider this for a moment, as we watch … [Read more...]
Eight Unresolved Questions About FCoE
February 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment
It's not going to be this easy to bridge Fibre Channel and Ethernet! Before the holidays, I posed a question on Google+ that generated quite a bit of interest and feedback. Now that it has settled down a bit I’d like to summarize the unresolved elements to make FCoE truly a world-class … [Read more...]
Thoughts On A Dell Acquisition Of Compellent
December 9, 2010 by 10 Comments
The news came out this morning that Dell is in exclusive talks to acquire network storage specialist Compellent for just under $900 million. I will leave it to the real reporters to track the ups and downs of the story; what piques my interest is the value Dell gets from Compellent's technology and … [Read more...]
Don’t Drop The Baby: Data Center Bridging Wants Storage To Trust Ethernet
October 8, 2010 by 1 Comment
Convergence: The Early Days “Convergence” is a buzzword seen in the IT press constantly these days. All convergence means is placing communications that used to ride on its own network onto one unified network; Ethernet’s cheapness, ubiquity, and ever-growing link speeds makes it the … [Read more...]
More From HP Tech Forum: Silentium and QLogic
July 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment
There was much to see from HP at Tech Forum in Las Vegas, but we wanted to highlight some of the smaller companies exhibiting there. Two in particular caught our attention: Silentium, with their noise-reducing server racks, and QLogic's entry-level Fibre Channel switches. Silentium … [Read more...]
FCoE Symbolism
April 28, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Do you know me? Visitors to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) booth at Storage Networking World in Orlando were greeted by a strange symbol (pictured above). It was included in the FCIA Fibre Channel roadmap presentation as well. The group even made identifying the symbol a … [Read more...]
Brocade – What’s Their Direction?
April 25, 2010 by 1 Comment
Bought Foundry - rushed it? Brocade paid $3.4 billion for Foundry and rushed the acquisition using a lot of cash to close the deal quickly. HP just completed the 3Com purchase for $2.7 billion. To my mind, the 3Com assets are a lot more valuable since they also have firewalls, IDS and a wide range … [Read more...]
Microsoft and Intel Pushing iSCSI Performance Limits
January 7, 2010 by 2 Comments
How fast can iSCSI get? “Maximizing Hyper-V iSCSI Performance with Microsoft and Intel” might sound like another “blah blah” marketing piece, but a little birdy tells me that this webcast will drop a bombshell about iSCSI performance. Lots of storage and networking folks … [Read more...]
EMC Symmetrix V-Max: When Does It Get FAST and Virtual?
May 8, 2009 by 4 Comments
EMC caused a major stir on April 14 as they announced the next-generation Symmetrix enterprise storage array, the V-Max. Since that time, many of the features have been discussed and dissected on various blogs at the same time as EMC moves forward with sales of the new system. But one question … [Read more...]