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 infrastructure as you like? You can flex up and down on OUR infrastructure.
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. UCS is an important infrastructure element and deserves the continuing attention it has received, but questions about the product and its place in the market continue to be raised.
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. It isn’t HDS’ answer to the EMC Symmetrix V-Max and it’s forthcoming FAST technology.
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. Another discovery: [...]
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 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?
EMC Symmetrix V-Max Is Neither Monolithic Nor Midrange
April 14, 2009 By 4 Comments
EMC today announced a new generation of the flagship Symmetrix enterprise storage array by EMC: Initial reactions have compared it to the CLARiiON (with which it shares hardware), the DMX-4 (with which it shares software), the new 3PAR F-Class, the Compellent Storage Center, the HDS USP, and NetApp’s next-generation clustered filers. In every case, the V-Max is different enough to be compellingly new – it’s a true hybrid of monolithic (tiger) and modular (lion), thus its codename, “tigon”!
Reacting To The Open Cloud Manifesto
March 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Reuven Cohen of Enomaly has penned an Open Cloud Manifesto. This might not have been news but for a curious backlash when two big cloud vendors, Microsoft and Amazon, refused to sign on, although IBM, Sun, and many others have endorsed it. In my opinion, the Open Cloud Manifesto is interesting, forward-thinking, provocative, and a bit naive.
Perfection…
March 13, 2009 By 2 Comments
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.
Scalability in the cloud
February 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment