Monthly Archives: February 2012
On Transformation
My customer interactions seem to come in thematic waves. The current wave of customer initiatives I have been working on seem to all revolve around IT transformation. In the case of four separate clients over the past few weeks, I have encountered the following situation:
IT Centralization, or a move to a shared service model for internal or external consumers
Challenges with optimization of data center processes to support this new scale
Challenges with reporting, chargeback, and consumption forecasting to be able to run these new models
Competition with shadow IT or a resistance to change
In each case, the challenges and desires were consistent, even though the customers were in different industries and at different phases in the maturity of their projects.
What each organization is dealing with is a ...
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EMC VFCache the new face of “EMC Project Lightning”
EMC debuted VFcache today, which was codenamed "Project Lightning." So what is this thing they call VFCache? VFCache is a server Flash caching technology that reduces latency and increases throughput by moving the active dataset up to the server-side PCI-e cache. It accelerates block I/O reads and also protects data by using a write-throughcache to the back-end storage.
First thought is how is VFCache different from similar products currently in the marketplace? Well let’s first look at how it compares to a DAS based cache solution.
DAS-based PCIe Flash technology stores the application directly on the Flash card, so in this architecture it doesn't provide protection if the card were to fail. With VFCache write-through cache, you have protection against data loss as it ...
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