Next time you walk into your local Mega Lo Mart take a look around and try to think about the sheer volume of data potentially created. Shoppers have rewards cards, items have barcodes, cash registers keep track of money, and countless other things that could be recorded. In thousands of stores like this companies place small data centers to manage and analyze all that data, but for the average enterprise remote offices as much smaller.   These enterprise IT remote offices typically have a very specific need: file shares. File shares don’t have the scale that warrants spending much money building a cluster or a small virtualization farms, but they are critical to the remote users. They depend on them as part of their daily work lives, so building a remote office solution can be more complicated than plugging in Windows server. The solution needs to think about disaster recovery, traveling employees, network bandwidth, data protection, dataRead More →

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In: Converged, Infrastructure, Tech Field Day, Virtualization

Networking at tech conferences like VMworld has been a huge part of my career. Talking to people who’ve faced the same challenges I’ve faced is so much more valuable than most of the sessions. On this weeks CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith and I talk vBrownBag with one of the pillars of the community of ours, Alastair Cooke. We discuss what vBrownBag does, VMunderground, and what they are doing at the conference. If you’re going to be at VMworld, I can’t recommend finding them enough!   Show Notes:  VMUnderground and Opening Acts Keith’s comedic vBrownBag vBrownBag Podcast Pure Storage Build Day Subscribe iTunesRead More →

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In: Podcast, VMworld

We think of the cloud as this vast pool of unlimited storage, usually at not super fast speeds, and accessed via the internet. Great use case if your compute is in the cloud, or you’re not concerned about the latency. If you want low latency access to the data, you’re probably going to at least look at a storage array. We think of storage arrays as having a finite bucket of capacity, the polar opposite of cloud storage. The closest thing a storage array has to unlimited capacity, snapshots, are usually tied to some strict limits. Your storage array needs more capacity. Public cloud providers have extra capacity. It sounds like the beginnings of a match made in heaven. At Storage Field Day 13 Dell EMC talked about their Unity storage array and its integration with their own Cloud Tier Appliance. The Cloud Tiering Appliance is an external device that allows data to move from the storageRead More →

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In: Cloud, Events, Infrastructure, Storage, Tech Field Day

Sometimes when you’re roasting a Thanksgiving turkey in the oven, you notice what appears to be uneven cooking on the bird. Uneven cooking can create a problem for the cook because you risk drying out one part or under cooking another. The last thing you want to do is serve undercooked and dangerous food. The second to last thing you want to do is serve dry turkey to your grandma. Uneven cooking is the bain of cooks everywhere, so they take great care to avoid and mitigate the problem. No, you haven’t stumbled onto a random food post, I just wanted to point out that consistency and predictability matters in the kitchen. Just like it matters in the kitchen, it matters in nearly every aspect of technology. We want web pages to load quickly, search results to return instantly, and our turkeys to cook evenly. We want gravy without lumps and wifi without bumps. Nowhere is consistentlyRead More →

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In: Infrastructure, Storage, Tech Field Day

In Enterprise IT we’re all used to life cycle managed of equipment.  For a long time, one of the most painful areas for this was the storage array. Every few years it became time to rip out the old gear and bring in the new.  That process has gotten much better, but one thing still bothers me. What happens to the software that I paid for when I bought that storage array? The idea isn’t limited to storage arrays either.  Enterprise IT shops buy software to do something,  then their needs change, and they replace that software. As long as they got the business value from the software, no one cares that they essentially throw the bits away.  When dealing with big vendors, like VMware or HPE, this is where the Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) comes into play.  It’s an agreement between a vendor and a customer saying that vendor agrees to provide and support software inRead More →

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In: Business, EMCWorld, Infrastructure

Last week I moderated a panel at the annual Cincinnati VMware User Group conference with some great panelists. As a moderator, I had a pretty simple job: enable the panel to educate and entertain the audience.  Ask some questions, engage the audience, and don’t let anyone ramble on. Pretty straight forward, but when I got off stage one of the staff members commented that it was hard to find IT people who are decent at speaking to a large audience. I dismissed his comment at the time,  but it got me thinking about being a high school freshman. That was the first year I had to write and give an actual presentation to the class. I don’t remember the topic at all, but what I do remember was being filled with anxiety at the seemingly daunting task in front of me. Everyone is looking at you, judging you, waiting for you to fail. Ok, so maybe theyRead More →

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In: Business, Speaking

At VMworld this year I attended Tech Field Day Extra event as a delegate. Once of the more interesting presentations came from DataGravity. One of the reasons I found them so interesting is they are attempting to add a new dimension to the storage array market. Since the storage array market was created people have cared about three things: data resiliency, speed, and capacity. These three metrics should not come as a surprise since the intent was to leverage a larger pool of capacity for reduced cost and improved performance. Fast forward to now and these three things have not fundamentally changed much. We still care about protection our data, making it perform well, and how much data we can store. DataGravity is trying to change this by building new Data Analytics capabilities into their storage array. If you’ve every worked in a large enterprise, you have most likely dealt with legal and security teams. They alwaysRead More →

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In: Storage, Tech Field Day
Maxta Logo

Earlier this year I attended Storage Field Day 7 and a hot topic was, of course, hyperconvergence. The simplicity of all-in-one convergence is helping lead a transformation in the datacenter market – no wonder that we had three sessions on the topic. The session from Maxta was interesting because their offering helps overcome a preconception many in the enterprise space have about hyperconvergence. The issue is that of linear scaling whereby when you need storage you must add compute and vice versa. By eliminating the need to add compute power and storage simultaneously Maxta provides huge benefits when compared to others.   A Maxta solution consists of a minimum of three nodes. All virtual machines are protected in a RAID-1 style by keeping a second copy of the VM on another host. The 3nd node serves as a witness to ensure data integrity. Each node consists of compute, storage, and a hypervisor. The storage is designed asRead More →

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In: Converged, Tech Field Day

I recently attended Storage Field Day 7 and spent some time talking about the concept of data virtualization.  Data virtualization seeks to add a layer of        abstraction between the storage type and the client. Data virtualization, similar to what server virtualization did for compute resource, seeks to free the data from the underlying physical resources. Primary Data seeks to make data virtualization the cornerstone of software-defined storage. In November of last year Primary Data came out of stealth to address the problem of data mobility using data virtualization.  Today data is locked up in storage arrays, public cloud providers, and local server storage.  Each of these types of data repositories had different data service offerings ranging from rich to extremely limited. The metadata and data are locked away of the silo of the repository. A few solutions exist in the market today for data virtualization, but they rely on the data capabilities of theRead More →

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In: Storage, Tech Field Day

This week I’ve been busying working on my post Storage Field Day 7 content.  I’ve got a few blog posts in the pipeline for some of the presenters.  I think I give a unique perspective, given I’m currently in the enterprise space in the day-to-day trenches.   In the meantime all of the recorded content from SFD7 is available on YouTube.  I encourage everyone to check them all out and draw your own conclusion about the presenters.  Share what you learn with the community!Read More →

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In: Tech Field Day