There's a lot of talk about Dynamic Data Centres, Dynamic Infrastructures; mostly in a cloudy context and mostly as some over-arching architectural vendor-focused vision. At times, I wonder if when a vendor talks about a 'Dynamic Infrastructure'; if they actually mean, you can use as much of OUR … [Read more...]
One Year Later: Questioning Cisco UCS
February 19, 2010 by 6 Comments
It has been nearly a year since Cisco shook up the IT infrastructure world with their unified computing system (UCS) server line. Predictably, although the introduction set the world buzzing, customer uptake has been somewhat slower. Although evaluations are reported to be widespread, production use … [Read more...]
HDS’ HAM-Fisted Announcement Can’t Be All
May 27, 2009 by 4 Comments
HDS telegraphed that a big announcement was coming today. They even made it fun, with a (literally) cryptic blog entry to make sure we were all watching. But the announcement of High Availability Manager, a software product to manage existing HDS USP-V and USP-VM arrays, underwhelmed. In fact, … [Read more...]
Lessons From the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo Prague 2009
May 19, 2009 by Leave a Comment
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. … [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...]
EMC Symmetrix V-Max Is Neither Monolithic Nor Midrange
April 14, 2009 by 4 Comments
We live in a strange world. New products introduced into existing markets are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are. Today's announcement of a new generation of the flagship Symmetrix enterprise storage array by EMC is no exception: Initial reactions have compared it to the … [Read more...]
Reacting To The Open Cloud Manifesto
March 30, 2009 by Leave a Comment
In case you haven't been following the news,Reuven Cohen of Enomaly has penned an Open Cloud Manifesto. This might not have been news but for a curious backlash (perhaps a Streisand Effect) when two big cloud vendors, Microsoft and Amazon, refused to sign on, although IBM, Sun, and many others have … [Read more...]
Perfection…
March 13, 2009 by 2 Comments
Although I give the various players a hard time; the industry doesn't do everything badly and I try to see the positives as well as the negatives. So I was thinking about the perfect array and what features I would like to see! So a random stream of consciousness produced the … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
Scalability in the cloud
February 17, 2009 by Leave a Comment
We think of web apps as what belongs in the “cloud”. Virtualization is changing this so that both small and enterprise apps are a fit. To me there can be an internal cloud and an external cloud. As virtualization continues to evolve, we will see the lines blur between both. I recently … [Read more...]