EMC recently announced VSPEX (http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2012/20120412-01.htm)which is a series of reference architectures designed with: Cisco, Brocade, Citrix, Intel, Microsoft, and VMware. The intent of these architectures is to provide proven designs for cloud computing while providing customer choice and flexibility. Overall the intent is to provide flexible architectures of best-of-breed components…
Tag: Storage
Choosing The Right Private Cloud Storage
One of the key decisions in architecting an infrastructure for private cloud is selecting a storage platform for the deployment. Storage is a key component of the infrastructure and will play a major role in the overall performance of the private cloud. The storage decision carries additional weight due to…
Innovative Versus Integration Cloud Stacks
The Live Webcast with NetApp and Kingman Tang went quite well with good discussion on private cloud and data center stacks. Check out the recording below. A BrightTALK Channel Related posts: The Power of Innovative Datacenter Stacks Choosing The Right Private Cloud Storage Hybrid Cloud’s Burst Bubble The Difference Between…
Technical Deep Dive
Why NetApp is my ‘A-Game’ Storage Architecture
One of, if not the, most popular of my blog posts to date has been ‘Why Cisco UCS is my ‘A-Game’ Server Architecture (http://www.definethecloud.net/why-cisco-ucs-is-my-a-game-server-architecture.) In that post I describe why I lead with Cisco UCS for most consultative engagements. This follow up for storage has been a long time coming,…
Have We Taken Data Redundancy too Far?
During a recent conversation about disk configuration and data redundancy on a storage array I began to think about everything we put into data redundancy. The question that came to mind is the title of this post ‘Have we taken data redundancy too far?’ Now don’t get me wrong, I…
FCoE multi-hop; Do you Care?
There is a lot of discussion in the industry around FCoE’s current capabilities, and specifically around the ability to perform multi-hop transmission of FCoE frames and the standards required to do so. A recent discussion between Brad Hedlund at Cisco and Ken Henault at HP (http://bit.ly/9Kj7zP) prompted me to write…
The Cloud Storage Argument
The argument over the right type of storage for data center applications is an ongoing battle. This argument gets amplified when discussing cloud architectures both private and public. Part of the reason for this disparity in thinking is that there is no ‘one size fits all solution.’ The other part…
Storage Protocols
Storage is a major consideration for cloud initiatives; what type of disk, which vendor, and as importantly which protocol? Experts will tout one over the other based on cost, performance, throughput, etc. Let’s take a look at the major storage protocols at play in the data center: Small Computer System…
Virtualization
While not a new concept virtualization has hit the main stream over the last few years and become a uncontrollable buzz word driven by VMware, and other server virtualization platforms. Virtualization has been around in many forms for much longer than some realizes, things like Logical partitions (LPAR) on IBM…
Consolidated I/O
Consolidated I/O (input/output) is a hot topic and has been for the last two years, but it’s not a new concept. We’ve already consolidated I/O once in the data center and forgotten about it, remember those phone PBXs before we replaced them with IP Telephony? The next step in consolidating…