Monthly Archives: May 2011
Vblock or FlexPod? (Part II)
This is Part II in a Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
In the introduction to this series, I outlined a number of considerations that typically play into conversations around whether a customer should look at building a “stack” of infrastructure compute. The most heavily marketed and most mature “stacks” today are the VCE Vblock and NetApp’s FlexPod. Prior to digging into the questions around flexibility and investment, I wanted to take a couple of minutes to talk about each infrastructure stack. Specific focus areas include: what they are, how they are similar, how they are different, and ...
Read More
6 Comments
Read More
Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 7 – Tintri
It has been a busy few weeks in the Ahead lab, and for me personally, so I'm a bit behind in getting the latest and greatest info on to this space. I'm finally feeling a bit back to normal after last week's EMCworld. Some pretty cool announcements from EMC, but I actually enjoyed some of the incoming tech from the partner ecosystem. I'd recommend checking out John Cole's blog as he details some of the bigger announcements from the conference.
With at bit out of the way, let's get back to the topic of this entry. I made a disclaimer a few months back regarding the fact that our lab is a constantly evolving environment, marrying bits of gear that our customers are using today, and ...
Read More
Comments Off
Read More
Final Update – High Availability Design for Healthcare Part V
Over the last 2 months, I have chronicled the journey of one of my healthcare customers' deployment of a "High Availability Design for Healthcare". Cancer Treatment Centers of America built and deployed their new data center based on the design previously discussed, and has been running production workload on this high availability design for over a month. Things have gone great - and they are only going to get better.
Today at EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas, EMC announced a number of product enhancements to the VPLEX product family. The most widely discussed announcement is the go-live of the VPLEX GEO release to allow active/active datacenter solutions at asynchronous distances. Two additional (and less heralded) features added to the VPLEX family for VPLEX Metro have also become ...
Read More
Comments Off
Read More
A Flash of Lightning
Among the flurry of announcements coming out of EMC World was Project Lightning, a new server card that can front end array data into the compute cluster, integrated with EMC Storage Array tiering technologies. Buried in that announcement was the new support of all flash drive based VNX and VMAX arrays. This announcement explicitly shows EMC's belief that there is a market for flash only array customers (I know of a few that exist already), and also implicitly says a few things about the storage industry in general Here are a few quick thoughts from the conference floor:
Joe Tucci was right when he said in 2008 that Enterprise Flash Drives and storage arrays tuned for them will fundamentally change the game in the storage arena.
The ...
Read More
Comments Off
Read More
EMC World Kickoff – Big Everything
Joe Tucci just wrapped his keynote at EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas. There were no earth shattering announcements, the most surprising thing being EMC's embracing and support of Hadoop. What I found more interesting thought was to compare this keynote with the ones I have seen going back to 2006. What struck me is that Joe continued on themes he had started over five years ago, indicating that he has a pretty good feel on the pulse of the market. Here are the dates that go with the concepts I saw today:
Information universe - first in 2006, still going strong as part of the message, now called "Data Deluge"
Fully Virtualized Data Centers - 2007, still here now merged with the following topic
Private Cloud - ...
Read More
Comments Off
Read More