Deduplication is entering the IT industry very quickly. Understanding the different techniques for deduplication may prove to be useful in evaluating any solution you may be looking at. Read on for an explaination of fixed block versus variable block deduplication.
Growing up, my parents have always told me “Everyone is special in their own way!†Those words of wisdom are very true and something I plan to impart upon my daughter as she grows up. They help explain to children why someone is taller, shorter, larger, smaller, better at basketball, or sucks at singing. But, sometimes being special is not a good thing.
IBM is teaming up with Jeopardy to exhibit their new Watson computing environment. While we commonly think of the “next hop” technologies as the future of computing, this showcase truely exhibits what is coming in the future of computing and is something we can all get excited about.
I feel like I am at a crossroads… and trying to figure out which direction to go. In my life, I strive to know about all kinds of things. Heck, in college, I went through 4-5 different majors because I was so interested in all of them. Computer Science and a Biology minor won out. So, when I come to this crossroad, I am torn… Which Cloud to go with?
Apple OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) includes a baked in version of the Cisco VPN Client. However, in some split-horizon configurations, a different directive is needed for the client to function properly. Read on for more information on the configuration changes necessary to make it work.
The traditional datacenter is comprised of servers, network, and storage. We have all seen major changes in server architectures (including newer processors, new instruction sets, faster RAM, PCIe, and Blade architecture) and storage architecture (SAN/NAS functionality, SSDs/EFDs, caching improvements, replication, and storage tiering). These improvements have shown major benefits to the users of these systems and have kept capital investments in IT moving along as IT departments have been able to improve stability and performance due to them.
10Gb datacenter Ethernet is slowly coming into the enterprise market right now. Adoption of a new datacenter technology requires acknowledgement, adoption, and embracing the new technology for it to be successful. Intel appears to have identified this and is positioning itself to push the adoption of 10Gb Ethernet by pushing their integrated LAN On Motherboard modules. Read on for more information on how Intel is making their move. 
Startup companies play an integral role in the technology industry regardless of failure and success. Read ahead for more information as well as a look at what startups Avere and Aprius are doing and what I believe to be their outlook. Regardless of what startup companies do, consumers will always end up on top. 
Aprius, like many startups, have identified what they believe is a niche market based on the overall concepts of virtualization (not so much server virtualization, ala VMware, but the abstractions that virtualization requires) and the I/O bandwidth capacity increases as 10Gb datacenter Ethernet emerges more and more.
Occasionally, virtualization administrators and/or storage administrators may find it necessary to expand a live VMFS datastore in a vSphere environment. With the use of the new EMC Unisphere client and the vSphere Client, the procedure is extremely easy. Read on for a how-to on extending VMFS datastores in a live environment using the Unisphere client. 
