A colleague of mine approached me today with a question on our vCloud Director environment. He tried to log in to the vCloud Director portal, and was unable to log in, because there was no page being displayed at all. After checking if I was able to ping the interface, I logged on to the […]
I spent some days in Cork, Ireland this week presenting to a customer. Besides the fact that I’m now almost two months in to my new job, and I’m loving every part of it, there is one part that is extremely cool about my job.
So folks, I helped a colleague install the VMware vCloud Director. In case you are not aware of what the vCloud Director is I can give you a very rough description.
When you come to think about it, people who work in the IT sector are all slightly nuts. We all work in an area that is notorious for trying to make itself not needed. When we find repetitive tasks, we try to automate them. When we have a feeling that we can improve something, we do just that. And by doing that, we try to remove ourselves from the equation where we possibly can. In a sense, we try to make ourselves invisible to the people working with our infrastructure, because a happy customer is one that doesn’t even notice that we are there or did something to allow him to work.
A while back I was on a call with someone who asked me the difference between high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR), saying that there are so many different solutions out there and that a lot of people seem to use the terminology but are unable to explain anything more about these two descriptions. So, here’s an attempt to demystify things.
When you think about it, we all are subject to vendor lock-in all of the time. As soon as I decide to purchase my new mobile phone, I am usually tied to either the phone manufacturer or the carrier that is use. Sometimes I am even tied to both, you just need to think about the iPhone as an example for this kind of lock-in.
As some of you might have read, the stack wars have started. One of the bigger coalitions announced in November 2009 was that between VMware, Cisco and EMC, aptly named VCE. Hitachi Data Systems announced something similar and partnered up with Microsoft, but left everyone puzzled about the partner that will be providing the networking technology.
The Cisco Unified Computing System or “UCS†builds on the notion that we are currently viewing a server as being tied to the application, instead of seeing the server as a resource that allows us to run that application.
In November 2003, Data Robotics Inc. released two new products, the Drobo S and the Drobo Elite. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited to a closed session with the folks from Data Robotics as they had some interesting news about a new product they are announcing today called the Drobo FS.
NetApp CEO Tom Georgens is quoted as dismissive of multi-level tiering, saying: “The simple fact of the matter is, tiering is a way to manage migration of data between Fibre Channel-based systems and serial ATA based systems.”
