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 remains: When can end-users actually purchase and use the V-Max system as described? And in particular, When does the V-Max get the most desirable and hyped Fully-Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) and scale-out features?

We often talk about trying to make capital acquistions cost neutral in less than eighteen months; a reduction in Opex to offset the capital cost. Vendors are often complicit in this, as I mentioned in my previous entry, inflated maintenance costs mean that is often cheaper to refresh and take the bundled maintenance offered with a new system than to continue to pay maintenance on the legacy kit.

Many companies are working on a three-five year refresh cycle, but should this be increased to seven? What needs to happen to make this so?

Whilst HDS and EMC throw rocks at each other with regards to whether it is better to build custom parts or take things off the shelf and just use custom when you require. I think we should look beyond the hardware and look at what is coming down the line to us.

So, the announcements have started; EMC have unveiled their next-generation version of the Symmetrix high-end storage array family and it is called the V-Max.  So I guess previous guesses about DMX-5 or DMX-V weren’t far off!

Depending on the age of the arrays and depending on the software sitting on the arrays and especially if the arrays were out of warranty periods; the maintenance costs are generally so high that it simply does not make economic sense to keep them around.

So Cisco announced it Intel Servers today. Its kind of exciting if you are into Data Centers and Virtualisation. They have done something very different.

Virtualization is seen as the technology that makes it possible to do more with less, but there are many pitfalls to consider when virtualizing server infrastructure. This article suggests planning decisions to be considered that, if overlooked, could ruin the total cost of ownership (TCO) and the return on on investment (ROI) expected from this virtual infrastructure.

Previous posts have discussed reasons for migration and the need to identify all of the servers accessing your storage resources. In this post, I will cover the need to perform a full inventory of connected hosts and the gap analysis work to be performed before migrations can start.

Put NetApp in because you want to use NetApp but don’t put it in to virtualise your existing environment unless you are prepared for a whole lot of work. If you simply want to virtualise and build a consolidated pool of disk, you might well be better looking at SVC or USP-V.