tech field day

On Disabling Comments

by

There has been some variably constructive criticism of my disabling comments on the “Two Big Vendor Takeaways from Storage Field Day 5” post. This isn’t the first time I’ve disabled comments, and it won’t be the last. In fact, I had my post ready to go 48 hours before I published it, postponing partly because I wanted to make a calm decision about whether to disable comments. I ultimately decided to disable them. Here’s what I thought about. Before I get into it, this is not a post about Storage Field Day 5. If you want to talk about that, this is not a good place! This is a post about why I chose to discourage conversation! Given what we’d already seen on …

Read More

Two Big Vendor Takeaways from Storage Field Day 5

by

Storage Field Day 5 is now over and was a marathon of vendor information and tech information. A marathon. I’m tired from 17 hour days, I’m addicted to caffeine, and my brain and body hurt. We had some great people along, on both sides of things. We had great vendors all around, even if some of the presentations were more controversial than others. That’s what I want to talk about here. Problem #1: Efficient Use of Time Tech Field Day participants and viewers already know a lot about the problems a vendor is addressing. We’re on the front lines of this stuff. We help our customers and organizations work around these problems every day. We know budgets aren’t infinite, that …

Read More

VMware & Virsto

by

Howard Marks has a great piece on VMware buying Virsto over at Network Computing (link is below): Some of my fellow analysts have lumped Virsto into the flash acceleration category along with caching solutions like Proximal Data, Sandisk’s Flashsoft and Intel’s CAS. While Virsto can use flash to accelerate some storage I/O, it’s not primarily a flash acceleration product. In fact, Virsto is a log-based, clustered file system that uses a dedicated log device, which can be a shared SSD, to accelerate virtual machine I/O. I saw Virsto for the first time at VMworld 2012, and it looked interesting as something that tries to turn a lot of the random I/O from a virtualization environment back into sequential I/O that arrays can better handle, while adding a …

Read More

Wisconsin VMUG in Green Bay – April 5, 2012

by

Just a reminder that there’s a Wisconsin VMUG gathering in Green Bay, WI this coming Thursday, April 5, 2012. Rod Gabriel (@ThatFridgeGuy) says that 80 people are registered so far, so the turnout will be excellent. Scott Herold of VKernel/Quest will be there to talk about performance & capacity planning (ostensibly with the VKernel tools). Mike Chudzik from Pure Storage will be there to talk about smashing performance bottlenecks, ostensibly by using their storage devices which are all-flash storage arrays and pretty sweet. I’ve seen both of these vendors via Tech Field Day, and they have some interesting things going on. Last in my list (may not be last in the presentation order), Jeremy Gruenke of Johnsonville Sausage will be …

Read More

Dell PowerEdge 12G Is Here

by

Over the last week there’s been a number of different posts about the new Dell PowerEdge models, the 12th generation (12G) of their server line. I was briefed both by Dell technical staff and by Dell executive staff on the Rx20 lineup and I took a few notes. I was mainly briefed about the Dell PowerEdge R620, R720, R720xd, which will be in the first wave of refreshes. The higher-end models, like the R820 and R920, and the cloud & HPC focused C-series, will be part of another release soon after, and reach into the higher-end E7 CPU models (8 way, 10 cores) from Intel. The new mid-range hosts are built around the Intel Xeon E5 CPUs, also known as …

Read More

Is it possible to have too much monitoring?

by

In the category of shameless self-promotion[0] I’m one of the SolarWinds thwack Ambassadors for the month of March, and I’ve posted my first discussion topic, asking whether it’s possible to ever have too much monitoring. If you’re not familiar with thwack it’s the SolarWinds community site, it’s great. I’ve been in orbit around SolarWinds since Networking Tech Field Day #1, and I’m happy to take a few topics that are more discussion-oriented and post them over there. SolarWinds also has a whole bunch of free tools there, like a Wake-On-LAN tool I’ve used to wake my VMware ESXi hosts up from standby, a VM-to-Cloud calculator to let you see how expensive it would be to take all your VMs and …

Read More

The Realities of Single Panes of Glass

by

The folks at Virtualization Tech Field Day 2 were tweeting about single panes of glass (I think they were playing buzzword bingo) and reminded me of my feelings on the topic. I’ve never thought a single pane of glass was all that special, or necessary. Once upon a time, when I was the IT guy for a small environment, I never used them because I didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle of tying everything together, arbitrarily creating dependencies and unnecessarily complicating my life. Now, as an “enterprise” guy, I can’t use a single pane of glass to see into my storage, network, backups, etc. because of the politics & silos with the storage, network, and backup teams. And even if …

Read More

Why Your Company Should Be A Part of Tech Field Day

by

Next week I will be participating in my third Tech Field Day, this one in Austin, TX. It’s a great opportunity for both independent bloggers and companies. Here are four big reasons I think more companies should be participating in Tech Field Day. 1. The ability for actual users, and potential users, to give you direct feedback. Who is your company listening to for feedback? How does your company get feedback from actual users of your products, or potential users of your products? If it’s through your marketing or PR channels you might be getting a filtered version. Analysts are good, but in many cases they’re not actually going to use your product. With Tech Field Day there’s no filter. …

Read More