Gestalt IT

Independent Experts United

Caching vs Tiering – The On-Premise IT Roundtable

by Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:30 — 11.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS | More

Caching and tiering have been abused by marketing in enterprise IT, often used interchangeably, or simply when not applicable. Luckily, we’ve got a table, it’s round, and surrounded by storage experts. They’ll explain the technical differences between caching and tiering, how to identify which is being used, and what are the performance implications of each.

Ransomeware and Backup Considerations

by Leave a Comment

Richard Arnold put together a concise piece to address a lot of questions and concerns coming out of the WannaCrypt crisis. He outlines a little history and context for what exactly is ransomware. He then takes a storage centric approach to outlining basic IT policies that would help mitigate future disruptions.

The piece is a great summation. It doesn’t have the audacity to say the attack was preventable, but rather that best practices could serve to limit future disruptions. It’s an interesting read to wrap your head around a global issue.

What is Backup?

by Leave a Comment

My life has been a lie. Up until reading this article, I thought my RAID setup was providing a backup of my data. I’ve longed idolized ZFS for its robust snapshotting capabilities, thinking that was a formidable backup as well. My walls of perception have been torn asunder by the fundamental question of what actually is a backup. This Socratic examination goes to the root of the question.

Imperial IT is Hot Garbage

by 2 Comments

WARNING: Potential spoilers ahead for Rogue One.

I read a piece by Lee Dallas that reassured me I wasn’t alone in the universe. I saw Rogue One over the weekend. There has been a lot of reaction to the film. Some call it a refreshing change of tone for the franchise, other a dreary slog with unmemorable characters and an ultimately irrelevant plot. I definitely fall more on the positive spectrum of reactions. Right after the showing, I had had a shocking realization. I’ve been a Star Wars fan most of my life. I’ve read my fair share of the expanded universe novels, played most of the video game properties, and seen the movies more than I’d be comfortable counting. But seeing Rogue One made me realize that for all the monolithic terror the Empire represents, they have garbage IT.

Seeing Your Storage With Komprise

by Leave a Comment

Ethan Banks made an excellent point in his post about Ixia’s network visibility portfolio. It’s no longer enough to simply make an enterprise IT product that works as intended. For an analysis tool, ease of deployment and simplicity of operation are just as valuable as raw functionality. Otherwise that analysis just becomes another bottleneck to solving a problem. I was thinking about a recent product briefing from Komprise, and they seem to share a similar sentiment about storage.

Gestalt Storage News 16.1

by Leave a Comment

What’s happening in Storage

StorPool’s storage distribution solutions
Dell EMC Isilon’s presentation at Tech Field Day
Matt That IT Guy tells us about ioFabric
J Metz answers the question: When should a administrator use a storage area network technology and when should he use a network area storage technology?

Transform and Scale Out with Isilon

by 1 Comment

Going into their building for their presentation, I was immediately struck by the building as an institution. Other companies we saw had offices, perhaps a floor. Dell EMC has a campus. When you’re there, the company surrounds you, ensconces you in a building created just for them. It was a space you could explore, perhaps get lost in. Luckily we were given generous supervision to get us to the Isilon presentation.

Gestalt – an organized field having properties that cannot be derived from the sum of component parts; a unified whole

Editors: Stephen Foskett, Tom Hollingsworth, Rich Stroffolino