Here's a fabulous resource for Wi-Fi professionals, and anyone interested in the subject. Keith Parsons "stress tested" most of the major enterprise Wi-Fi access points and his results are startling. There will likely be major controversy about this in the AP vendor space! After weeks of planning, … [Read more...]
Microsoft Adds Data Deduplication to NTFS in Windows 8
January 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Windows 8 server editions will include a filter driver for NTFS for data deduplication The next version of Microsoft Windows Server includes integrated data deduplication technology. Microsoft is positioning this as a boon for server virtualization and claims it has very little performance … [Read more...]
Flash Storage and Automated Storage Tiering
September 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment
In recent years, a move toward automated storage tiering has begun in the data center. This move has been inspired by the desire to continue to drive down the cost of storage, as well as the introduction of faster, but more expensive storage in the form of Flash memory in the storage array … [Read more...]
What is VAAI, and how does it add spice to my life as a VMware admin?
December 6, 2010 by 1 Comment
EMC EBC Cork I spent some days in Cork, Ireland this week presenting to a customer. Besides the fact that I’m now almost two months in to my new job, and I’m loving every part of it, there is one part that is extremely cool about my job. I get to talk to customers about very cool and new … [Read more...]
SolarWinds: Live From Tech Field Day San Jose
November 15, 2010 by 1 Comment
The Tech Field Day staff have been working behind the scenes to improve the quality and timeliness of video output from our event. We are pleased to present the first result of this work, in the form of live streaming from Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week. After fighting yet more networking … [Read more...]
STEC Spills the Beans on ZeusRAM SSD
May 12, 2010 by Leave a Comment
STEC may not have been quite ready to reveal their next-generation ZeusRAM solid-state disk (SSD), but they are demonstrating it anyway at EMC World in Boston this week. The ZeusRAM is a fundamentally different animal from the existing ZeusIOPS drive in one critical way: Rather than using flash … [Read more...]
Why Does Cloning A VM From Template Take A Long Time?
April 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Over the past few years I’ve been asked to troubleshoot and explain why cloning a virtual machine (VM) from a master template would take a longer time than expected more than once. Usually when I’m asked the virtualization admin is frustrated at the hypervisor. “This shouldn’t take this … [Read more...]
Multipath: Active/Passive, Dual Active, and Active/Active
March 31, 2010 by 2 Comments
Although it’s rare in the PC world, multipath I/O is not new in enterprise IT. I’ve been juggling paths to storage and networks as long as I’ve been a systems administrator, and that’s a bit longer than I care to admit. But the proliferation of technologies has made it difficult to … [Read more...]
“Storage tiering is dying.” But purple unicorns exist.
March 28, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Chris Mellor over at the Register put an interview online with NetApp CEO Tom Georgens. To quote from the Register piece: He is dismissive of multi-level tiering, saying: “The simple fact of the matter is, tiering is a way to manage migration of data between Fibre Channel-based systems and … [Read more...]
The Benefits of Wide Striping – Avoiding A Long Tail
March 25, 2010 by Leave a Comment
IOPS Per RAID Group, ordered by most to least I took part in a podcast last night that discussed the XIV platform. One of the “key features” of XIV is the wide striping of data across all spindles. It’s a concept we’re seeing more and more in contemporary storage hardware … [Read more...]