It’s been a long, strange trip for Overland Storage. Best known in recent years for the tape backup libraries it sold through Hewlett-Packard, Overland is in the midst of an iSCSI-focused renovation at the hands of former Snap Appliance and Data Robotics execs. Could this reboot breathe new life into Overland as well as the SMB storage market it is focused on?

One of the major new components in Virtual Machine Hardware 7 is the new Para Virtualised SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter. When it first came out there were a number of posts regarding the much improved I/O Performance and latency reduction this new adapter delivered, such as Chad Sakac’s I/O vSphere performance test post.

For all those that complained just 4 months ago that VMworld 2009 was disappointing because the announcements were few and far between, all I can say is, based on what I watched, experienced, and touched this week at PEX 2010, VMware should grab your attention again soon!

I am in the process of planning for a large infrastructure upgrade from ESX3.5 to vSphere 4. As part of the planning I've been looking at Virtual Machine Virtual Hardware Versions. Currently all VM's are running Version 4, but as we migrate to ESX4 we will have the option to upgrade to Version 7.

On the 25th January 2010, 3PAR announced the release of the 3PAR Management Plug-In for VMware vSphere.
Working at a 3PAR Cloud-Agile Partner I have free access to this application, so I have downloaded, installed and given it a whirl. (Note. The vCenter plugin and Recovery Manager for VMware are supported only on version 2.3.1 of [...]

I wanted to address this whole “Don Joey” thing. See, I’m not at all like this in person. I’m more like a friendly grandfather. I guess my Italian heritage makes people take me wrong.

So we got this growth problem, but there’s also an opportunity, and that opportunity is in Round Rock. How can we swing it? Simple: We got a great asset to sell off.

My latest meeting with the boys on the strategy committee caused me to reappraise a few things. Our biggest threat is HP, but we got a real problem growing this company. We need to think bigger.

They say that you learn the most when you make mistakes and things go wrong.  Well, last night I certainly must have learned a lot.  What started as a simple physical re-organisation of my hardware turned into a rebuild of my production VMware ESXi server – finishing at 1am.

I got something to say to Mark Hurd over at HP about Dave Donatelli and all that.