Today at VMworld in San Francisco VMware announced a new product to help with the Software Defined Datacenter called EVO:RAIL. The goal of EVO:RAIL is to simplify how you buy, deploy, and operate your SDDC. EVO:RAIL is a scale out elastic hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Sold by a qualified hardware partner and enabled by VMware, EVO:RAIL is built using vSphere, vCenter Server, and vSAN. Hardware wise the appliance is a 2U 4 node platform. Each node has dual processors and 192GB of memory. For vSAN it uses three 10k 1.2TB SAS drives and a single 400GB MLC SSD for IO acceleration. The first version of EVO: RAIL can scale out to four appliances for a total of 16 ESXi hosts with a single Virtual SAN datastore backed by a single vCenter Server. New appliances are automatically discovered and easily added to an EVO: RAIL cluster. EVO: RAIL Deployment, Configuration, and Management is the slick new HTML5 interface thatRead More →

By:
On:
In: Converged

It’s almost time for my first departure to VMworld in San Francisco. As most of you know this is my first, hopefully of many, VMworld. I’ve got a lot going on – so much that I had to map my time out in a spreadsheet. What i’m looking forward to at VMworld: Some definitive information about Marvin or Whatever. We’ve been hearing and reading about Marvin being some type of hyper-converged offering from VMware, but not much else.  VMware has always stated they are a software company,  not a hardware company.  So I’m expecting some type of partnership or certification process for hardware vendors. It’s going to be interesting for people like Nutanix as this could open up that market in a vastly different way. CloudVolumes.  Oh man,  VMware recently announced this acquisition with a lot of social media buzz.  I see this as VMware’s answer to the container craze being drive by, largely, Docker.   I’m sureRead More →

By:
On:
In: VMworld

I know for many of you this will be the umpteenth time you’ve been to VMWorld,  but for me this is my first chance to go! I want to start by thanking the people who’ve helped me go, from the VMWare marketing guys giving me a blogger pass,  to a friend letting me crash at their hotel,  and everyone else – a HUGE thank you for making this possible for me.  I’ve excited tocatch up with people I’ve met on social media the last few years,  and hearing whats up and coming from VMWare and other vendors.   i wanted to share  from of the sessions i’m most looking forward to. 1)  EUC1155 – Enabling True Mobile Productivity John Marshall – SVP & GM, AirWatch Chris Hazelton – Research Director, Enterprise Mobility, 451 Research Tuesday, Aug 26, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM 2) INF1864-SPO – Software Defined Storage – What’s Next? Chad Sakac, SVP, Global Systems Engineering Tuesday, AugRead More →

By:
On:
In: VMworld

It wasn’t that long ago when the mainstream technology world was all abuzz with this whole virtualization thing. It didn’t take long before every enterprise was developing a virtualization strategy. In fact virtualization is a requirement for most enterprise IT shops seeking to enable automation and standardization of infrastructure. Containers are quickly becoming mainstream due, in part, to Docker. What is a container? It’s another form of virtualization, but rather than emulating hardware like a virtual machine, it’s provided an isolated software environment on top of an existing operating system. Certain system resources, such as operating system binaries, are shared amongst the containers on an operation system. Other resources can be dedicates to ensure performance of a container. This containerization allows for the standardization of application deployment and delivery. This is a change in how we build and delivery software services. As more and more businesses move to cloud infrastructures services they are faces with the challengeRead More →

By:
On:
In: Cloud

At Mega Launch this year EMC announce a product called ProtectPoint which stands ready to change the way we think about backups in the datacenter.  With modern data protection solutions we struggle to maintain a delicate balance between backup performance, data protection, and recoverability. This balance has left us with host intrusive and backend intensive data protection processes on complex and costly backup infrastructure.  Many companies have looked to snapshots technologies to help improve the speed at which they meet stringent protection requirements, but snapshots are not backups unless the data is copied to a secondary media.  A snapshot depends on the original data existing and being functional. That means if the primary storage were to become unavailable so does the snapshot.  That is a huge gap in recoverability. EMC ProtectPoint will help you bridge the gap between snapshot technologies and backup storage media by combining the performance of snapshots with the functionality of backups.  ProtectPoint accomplishedRead More →

By:
On:
In: Backup