Archive for the ‘Virtualisation’ Category

Enterprise Computing: Storage Arrays – Where Data Goes to Die

Enterprise Computing: Storage Arrays – Where Data Goes to Die
Last week’s news reports that COPAN Systems are back from the dead after their purchase by SGI.  The newly branded arrays have been tweaked (for example 50% of drives can be spinning on the SGI incarnation) but essentially the concept is the same; store shedloads of inactive data. HP Blades Day...
June 17th, 2010 | Enterprise Storage, Virtualisation | Read More

Enterprise Computing: VPLEX – Write Back or Write Through?

Enterprise Computing: VPLEX – Write Back or Write Through?
A little discussion on Twitter between myself, @BasRaayman, @UltraSub and @esignoretti got me thinking about the evolution of VPLEX and the whole caching thing.  It’s something I mentioned on one of my previous VPLEX posts and it could have significant impact on designing and implementing VPLEX...
May 18th, 2010 | Enterprise Storage, Featured, Virtualisation | Read More

Virtualisation: DroboPro – Hyper-V’s Best Friend!

Virtualisation: DroboPro – Hyper-V’s Best Friend!
I’ve had my DroboPro for some time now and initially I had mixed results with it.  Although I was aware of the single connection to an iSCSI target restriction, I was slightly disappointed with the lack of vmfs support within the Drobo operating system, especially as the product sells itself...
March 25th, 2010 | Featured, GestaltIT, Virtualisation | Read More

Virtualisation: Home Lab Update

Virtualisation: Home Lab Update
Home lab storage I’ve just about got my home lab fully organised; here’s a quick summary of what I have in place. Storage I’ve four main storage devices, DroboPro, Iomega ix4-200D (two) and an EMC CLARiiON CX-700.  This gives me NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity options...
March 9th, 2010 | Featured, Virtualisation | Read More

Virtualisation: Learning The Hard Way

Virtualisation: Learning The Hard Way
They say that you learn the most when you make mistakes and things go wrong.  Well, last night I certainly must have learned a lot.  What started as a simple physical re-organisation of my hardware turned into a rebuild of my production VMware ESXi server – finishing at 1am.  Here’s what...
January 20th, 2010 | Featured, GestaltIT, Virtualisation | Read More

Virtualisation: How To – Accessing DroboPro Dashboard With iSCSI

Virtualisation: How To – Accessing DroboPro Dashboard With iSCSI
In my first review of the DroboPro, I was somewhat disappointed that I couldn’t access the ‘Pro from the Drobo Dashboard when the device is serving out iSCSI LUNs across the IP connection.  This restriction is a serious flaw, as it requires taking the DroboPro down and off the network in...
January 6th, 2010 | Featured, GestaltIT, Virtualisation | Read More

Enterprise Computing: The Wide Striping Debate

Enterprise Computing: The Wide Striping Debate
I’ve read with interest this week the posts on wide striping and the consequent expansion to thin provisioning.  Here are some of the highlights: First there’s Martin Glasborow’s post, which discusses whether wide striping and thin provisioning should be chargeable items.  I’d...
July 12th, 2009 | Enterprise Storage, GestaltIT, Virtualisation | Read More

Enterprise Computing: VMware Announce vSphere 4

In case you haven’t noticed, the next chapter in the story of the unstoppable juggernaut that is VMware is here.  It’s called VMware vSphere 4 (dropping the Virtual Infrastructure moniker) but is still essentially the same as the previous VMware with incremental improvements.  The full...
April 21st, 2009 | Virtualisation | Read More