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Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
How granular is your storage? This question is just as relevant today as when I first published this article in 2008! Many storage challenges focus on correlating high-level uses of data (such as...
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Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5
VMware officially launched their next-generation (version 5) enterprise server virtualization product line this week under the “vSphere 5″ name. As I’ve been doing for the last few major VMware...
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Are You a Hypervisor Hugger or a Storage Stalwart?
The great battle of enterprise storage is on! The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the...
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“Our Storage Array Is Compatible with VMware…” Says Who?
I talk to dozens of companies every week, and every one says the same thing: “Our product is compatible with VMware!” But not everyone’s definition of “compatible” is the same, and some are not...
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Storage Arrays Do A Few Things Very Well
Storage arrays are big, expensive, and difficult to manage. Plus, concentrating storage in a single device puts everything at risk if there is an outage. So why buy a storage array at all? Arrays do a...
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The I/O Blender Part 2: What Does Virtualization Do?
Virtualization is a disruptive technology in every sense of the word. By abstracting and simplifying physical resources, virtualization enables dynamic utilization. But this “translation” from physical...
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The I/O Blender Part 3: Behold the Power of the Demultiplexer
Virtualization has disrupted the I/O path, reducing the value of enterprise storage arrays. But all is not lost: An effort is afoot to make things right by increasing communication between hypervisor...
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Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5.1
As I have done since version 3.5, I’m charting the storage changes in VMware’s latest release of vSphere, 5.1. Detailed at VMworld but not released as of this writing, vSphere 5.1 is lauded for...
View ArticleStorage Developer Conference, Santa Clara CA
This week I’m attending the Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. This event always includes fantastic content for storage nerds like me, and I’m glad to be bringing along a few friends as...
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Qumulo: An Enterprise Storage Startup Focused on Scale, Simplicity, and...
Enterprise storage is perhaps the most innovative area of IT these days, with exciting startups springing up right and left. Today, that scene welcomes Qumulo, who are building a new storage platform...
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vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?
Way back in the 1990’s, UNIX admins delighted in upgrading from NFSv2 to NFSv3. Then NFSv4 came around and … crickets. Now VMware has become the first major/useful/mainstream application for NFSv4.1,...
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Using NFS to Share Data Between UNIX and Mac OS X
I had a little bit of a learning experience this week regarding NFS exports and Mac OS X that I thought would be interesting to share with my readers. It’s part “simple tip” and part “facepalm.” Read...
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