What is the cloud? What will become of it? I spent May 17 and 18 in Prague at the Sys-Con Cloud Computing Conference and Expo exploring these questions with some of the smartest cloud-focused folks in Europe. The consensus: The IT world is changing and remote managed services are a big part of it. Another discovery: [...]
Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into Vista?
April 27, 2009 By 2 Comments
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.
Governance And Peaks In The Cloud
March 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment
As large organizations begin to look towards cloud computing, many find themselves questioning the suitability of the infrastructure for their business needs. As consumer-focused services like Carbonite lose data and startup-focused systems like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure suffer outages, the image of the cloud has darkened. How are providers protecting the data? What RTO and RPO is offered? Are these sufficient for the types of applications being considered for the cloud?
Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 1
March 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Why Buy EMC?
March 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Enterprise arrays have been successful because they offer high reliability and availability. This was achieved through monolithic designs of high cost components and a focus on engineering quality. That was then – now we have much more reliable components – disk drives really don’t fail that often – SATA drives are much more reliable than they ever were.
How Big Is It?
March 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Sometimes I think storage vendors use a special type of man-ruler when measuring the size of their bits and bytes; especially when it comes down to working out how much storage their array can support. Please note, this is not about utilisation; this is about the maximum number of disks that a array can support and actually use.