One of the new features of vSphere 5.0 is a VMware VSA, or virtual storage appliance. VSAs are nothing new, as HP and FalconStor have offered VSAs for vSphere for a number of years. VSAs work by using DAS (direct attached storage, e.g. SAS or SATA) and turn it into shared storage...
According to Citrix, the number one mistake people make when deploying VDI is not sizing their storage properly for performance. However, calculating a target IOPS for your environment is far from easy and you really need to understand VDI, its unique workloads, and your storage subsystem. There are many blogs...
Some backup software manufacturers are offering a capacity based licensing model, instead of a agent based model. Depending on your situation, this may be a dramatically easier and cheaper licensing model. Traditionally you had to buy per-server licenses, per-agent licenses, per-library licenses, and maybe other options as well. Backup software...
Veeam is offering free, permanent, licenses for Backup and Replication v5 and Veeam Monitor Plus with Business View. These are NFR (not for resale) licenses, and limited to two sockets. But it's great for a home lab, demo, training, etc. I don't know how long the deal is good for,...
A co-worker of mine, Mark, turned me on to this company called QNAP. They make a really dizzying array of SOHO and small/medium business "NetApp" like NAS devices. These little babies support a wide range of protocols including iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, ftp, etc. It's really amazing what these critters can...
Last week I was listening to a HP video where the HP CTO said that Fibre Channel drives will cease to exist in the coming years. Instead, enterprise storage disk arrays will be configured with two tiers of storage: SSD and SATA. I thought for a minute, and this made...
Back in January I wrote a blog about emerging Ethernet standards that are converging Ethernet, Fibre Channel and virtualization. During one of HP's recent tech days they had a session on all of these new standards, their ratification status, and how they will apply to HP products. Even if you...
I'm in the process of doing a market survey for various enterprise backup products. During my investigation, I've found that picking the right backup licensing model can save you a large amount of money. How? Companies like IBM and Symantec offer different licensing models for the same product. Specifically, you...
If you use HP Proliant servers and want the HP-ized version of ESXi 4.0 update 1 you can now download it from here. The ISO image is about 380MB. The only difference between the HP download and the vanilla VMware ESXi 4.0 U1 ISO image is the inclusion of Proliant...
The free 'non-production use' EMC Celerra VSA (virtual iSCSI appliance) is a great way to test iSCSI and SRM in a lab or evaluation environment. A few days ago EMC released a new version of the virtual appliance (5.6.47.11), based on the latest physical EMC Celerra product. You can find...