Posts by: bfoy
What’s the Forecast? Storage…
In this second to last post in this series, I'll review my thoughts on the near term future of the storage industry, technology adoption, and challenges faced by the incumbent storage array manufacturers. The next and final post will lightly touch on End User Computing and evolution of application development and delivery. If you have thoughts, comments, or would like to see more on any of what I have published in this series, I welcome all comments / questions / requests. Thanks for reading! - Brett
Storage Forecast:
As they have over the last 3-5 years, enterprise storage requirements will continue to grow at accelerated rates over the next 3-5 years. Information and intelligent access/use of that information is already a critical differentiator for companies in most ...
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Forecast – Server Virtualization and Compute (x86)
Second post in the series about where I see things going - this is a brief synopsis of my views on near term futures for Virtualization and Compute.
Virtualization
x86 virtualization will continue at a rapid pace. Over the next 3-5 years, compute and memory capabilities will continue to grow. Hypervisor technologies will continue to increase their ability to handle workload on both consolidated and non-consolidated basis. Rapid and massive server consolidation for cost savings alone will no longer be a core driver for virtualization. The focus of virtualization will shift as enterprise organizations begin to virtualize all Tier 1 applications as a driver to increase availability through virtualization attributes including scalability and portability. Most organizations will be challenged to identify any applications that will not be ...
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What’s the Forecast? Network…
Without the network - it really wouldn't matter what applications, servers, storage, or virtualization technologies are deployed. The network is by definition, what brings everything together and ensures that systems and users can interact to run business. I figured this would be a good place to start with my observations on what's coming...
Network virtualization will continue to the point that traditional models of distinct location or geographic-based network topologies will in many cases no longer be sufficient to support applications. In order to provide high availability, location independence, and application portability, many organizations will look at a massive flattening of the network infrastructure and the expansion of Layer 2 networking across datacenter locations.
Traditional three tier designs and the approach of extending L3 as far as ...
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What’s the forecast?
One of my customers was recently challenged by his CIO to come up with a vision for datacenter infrastructure technology trends for the next 18-36 months. The focus was not on any one technology, but more about how changes in many traditional datacenter technologies would change the way that technology is applied, how it interacts, and what that means for application development and deployment. This customer, like many, is distantly intrigued by the "sometime future" promise of public cloud, but is significantly more interested in what they can do today to increase datacenter efficiency and otherwise prepare for taking advantage of new and coming technologies to make their current and near future datacenter infrastructure the best it can be.
During the process of reviewing various parts ...
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VMworld 2011: Day 4 (Thursday)
VMworld 2011 - Thursday
This is going to be my second to last update on VMworld 2011 – I’ll write up one more summary with a glossary to help easily find things next.
Today I attend the keynote followed by three sessions. Today’s sessions included NetApp’s solution to metro distance HA/DA (disaster avoidance), HP CloudSystem Architecture, and a vCenter Ops deep dive. So – to jump right in:
BCO2863 – Using Distance to your advantage to create a Unified Data Protection Strategy
Maybe because it was the last day of the conference, maybe because it was the first time slot, maybe it was the topic – not sure, but there really weren’t a lot of people in this session. Felt a little sorry for the presenters at the light ...
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VMworld 2011 – Wednesday
VMworld 2011 – Day 3
I ended up missing a couple of (what I thought would be less critical) sessions today so I could catch up on work, calls and blogs… I sure am glad that I did not miss VSP2884 - What's New in Performance for VMware vSphere 5.0.
Unlike some of the other technology sessions that I have attended – this one did not go very deep, but instead it provided a broad swath of information around every facet of vSphere – specifically why vSphere 5 is better. I could have gone to 10 different deep dive sessions to cover each of these. For both mine and hopefully your purposes – this synopsis was most excellent.
Also covered in this post – CMI3257 – vCenter Chargeback ...
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VMworld 2011: Tuesday Part III
Two great sessions - 1 hopefullygreat blog post:
VSP2122 – Everything you could possibly want to know about vMotion (my name not their’s)
I went to this session to learn more about vMotion. I really did learn more than I probably ever wanted to learn. I have very detailed notes written up that will eventually be supplanted when they release the slides to attendees – for now, I am not going to share the DETAILED technical notes of vMotion in 4.1 and 5.0 – but I will offer a synopsis. If you want the raw notes, let me know!
Both vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 effectively do the same thing when a VM is vMotioned from one host to another. It’s pretty straightforward – assuming network and shared storage ...
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VMWorld 2011 – Day 2 – Part 2 (running behind)
VMworld 2011 – Tuesday – Part II
Originally, my schedule for today had the Steve Herrod keynote session and six other partner super-session and technical deep dives. Again, best laid plans and “out of Las Vegas” interruptions kept me from getting as much as I wanted to get out of the day – but I did attend 4 sessions, 3 of which I am going to cover here:
SUP1006 – EMC Supersession
I attended this based on the almost daily blog postings from EMC’s Chad Sakac around the face-melting awesome sauce that would be on display. Even though I consider myself pretty deep with EMC technologies, I was looking forward to learning something new about EMC’s approach to working with and integrating to VMware.
To put together a quick ...
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VMworld 2011 – Tuesday Keynote
Well, it's been a lot harder today to take notes, clean them up, and get them ready to post. I've been in back to back sessions -and there is a lot to cover!
This post was focus exclusively on Steve Herrod's keynote from Tuesday morning. Hope you find it useful. I should get one more post up later about EMC's Super Session, some deep dive on vMotion in vSphere 5, and where things are going with Stretched / Distance vSphere clusters. Hold tight!
Today’s VMworld activities started with Steve Herrod (VMware CTO) doing a deep dive on the latest and newest round of VMware tools and capabilities around end user virtualization and the general vSphere 5 infrastructure stack. While Paul’s session last night was aimed at laying ...
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VMworld 2011 – Growing Pains – or “The New IT”
Today at VMworld, Paul Maritz (CEO of VMware) took the stage in front of ~19,000 IT professionals to deliver the keynote of VMworld 2011. The topic of Paul’s session was “The New IT”.
Overall, the message that Paul delivered was clear and concise – and it articulated VMware’s goals for the future of the company, and their vision of the future for IT in general. The overall message – loud and clear – is that Cloud is here. Cloud is now. It’s time for Cloud.
The underlying theme to that message was laid out in the statement that cloud is enabled through three distinct focus areas, all of which should be lead by VMware:
The vSphere 5 Infrastructure is the cloud platform – it’s ready, its scalable, and ...
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