When is a solution integrated and when is it a Frankenstein-like mashup of tangled tech? Apparently, that line is crossed when it’s your competitor’s offering… In my time in the storage industry, I’ve seen enough franken...
Latest Posts
Seagate Announces New Constellation Hard Drives
Seagate announced this week the release of their new Constellation hard drives. Compared to the Savvio range (which are high-performance, low form-factor), these drives are aimed at lower tier archiving solutions and will scale...
Storage Efficiency
So, I've been sitting here thinking that with the current economic distress everyone is looking to save money. In the storage business, this means an almost myopic focus on something called "storage efficiency". Everyone wants to...
Wide striping is a two edged sword
I have spent a lot of time lately talking with some of my coworkers, friends, etc. on the topic of wide striping. This topic keeps coming up since there are now a number of vendors selling storage arrays with SATA drives that...
P2V strategy for a Physical Server with an iSCSI Partition
Most physical to virtual migrations (P2V) of servers end up as virtual machines with the partitions encapsulated in virtual disk (.vmdk or .vhd) files. But what if the physical server already has a partition that's configured...
Essential Reading for VMware ESX iSCSI Users!
If you use or are interested in VMware ESX 3.x and iSCSI, you simply must go read Chad Sakac’s post on the topic. Co-written with just about everyone in the industry (including EMC, VMware, NetApp, Dell/EqualLogic, and...
Storage Utilization Remains at 2001 Levels: Low!
I’ve been talking about storage capacity utilization for my entire career, but the storage industry doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Every year or so, a new study is performed showing that half of storage capacity in the...
IBM XIV Could Be Hazardous to Your Career
So, I haven't blogged in a while. I guess I should make all of the usual excuses about being busy (which is true), etc. But the fact of the matter is that I really haven't had a whole heck of a lot that I thought would be of...
Who Will Capture the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Crown?
Today, Brocade announced that it has completed its acquisition of Foundry Networks. This is just the latest move in the strategic game to control the next generation of Ethernet, and possibly all local connectivity, including...
Where Will Virtualization of Data Center Infrastructure Take Us?
Virtualization of IT systems decouples physical infrastructure from logical resources, hiding complexity and enabling new capabilities. However, not all potential benefits of virtualization have meaningful value outside IT...