I talk to dozens of companies every week, and every one says the same thing: “Our product is compatible with VMware!” But not everyone’s definition of “compatible” is the same, and some are not compatible (I couldn’t resist) with the requirements of production data centers. Therefore, I … [Read more...]
Are You a Hypervisor Hugger or a Storage Stalwart?
November 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment
The great battle of enterprise storage is on! The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting … [Read more...]
Is NFS v3 Really That Bad?
October 18, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Do we really need parallel NFS? Did some pNFS proponent slip a love potion into the coffee at EMC? Suddenly it’s pNFS time at the company known for its reluctance to embrace file sharing and filesystems in general. The purple prose is flying, with Chad Sakac declaring himself “a big fan of … [Read more...]
Why Do I Ignore NAS?
May 11, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Why does network-attached storage (NAS) have such a poor reputation? This isn’t what the vendors want to be talking about, but some recent product announcements and discussions led to this thought. IT folks as a whole don’t trust NAS for real work, and 20 years of effort from big names like Sun, … [Read more...]
Iomega Graduates and Goes to Work with the ix12-300r
May 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Iomega's new ix12-300d brings EMC's SOHO company into the data center EMC’s Iomega unit today released the 12-drive rack-mount storage product we have all been waiting for. It was never a question of whether Iomega could produce such a beast: The EMC LifeLine software and Iomega hardware were … [Read more...]
VMware vSphere vDS, VMkernel Ports, and Jumbo Frames
June 30, 2009 by Leave a Comment
In April 2008, I wrote an article on how to use jumbo frames with VMware ESX and IP-based storage (NFS or iSCSI). It’s been a pretty popular post, ranking right up there with the ever-popular article on VMware ESX, NIC teaming, and VLAN trunks. Since I started working with VMware vSphere (now … [Read more...]
Windows Storage Server-Based Systems Step Into 2008
May 5, 2009 by 2 Comments
Windows Storage Server is one of the most interesting products from Redmond. It is a specialized version of Windows Server 2003 R2 with integrated storage target capabilities, including iSCSI, NFS, and of course SMB file services. It also includes single-instance storage (file-level deduplication), … [Read more...]
Fishworks Simulator Hint and other VSA stuff
March 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment
The Fishworks Simulator has been driving me a bit nuts; I couldn't get ESXi to reliably use a Fishwork's iSCSI LUN as a data-store; it would consistently hang whilst installing an Virtual Machine. I coudn't see anything wrong but it would just die. I tried moving things round, running two copies of … [Read more...]