Chris

Chris Evans

About the Author:

Chris M Evans is an independent consultant with over 20 years' experience, specialising in storage infrastructure design and deployment.

Articles by Chris Evans

Enterprise Computing: Is There Any Point Buying From EMC?

December 9, 2009

Yesterday, EMC announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), their much hyped and much anticipated storage feature enabling the automated moving of data between tiers of storage on a policy basis. However the most notable missing feature in the EMC announcement was the lack of support for legacy DMX-3 and DMX-4 platforms. This to me sends […]

Review: DroboPro — Part II

December 7, 2009

This is the second in a series of posts looking at the DroboPro from Data Robotics Inc. Previous post(s):
Review: DroboPro – Part I
Previously I discussed a few frustrations with connecting my new DroboPro to ESXi, the target environment for my new device. I’ve now managed to get the ‘Pro connected and visible within ESXi. See […]

Review: DroboPro — Part I

December 1, 2009

My new DroboPro arrived this week and so far I’m less than impressed. As you know, I already havehad ageneration 1Droboforsome time. It has been a great device, doing exactly what I wanted. After winning a second standard Drobo at Tech Field Day, I paid for the upgrade to the DroboPro in anticipation of a […]

Enterprise Computing: Is iSCSI The New Home Protocol?

November 26, 2009

I’d like to think I’ve visited a lot of customer sites over the years. Admittedly most of these are “enterprise” class with multi-terabyte if not petabyte quantities of storage. None of those customers have ever bothered deploying iSCSI as their storage protocol. Invariably block storage has been implemented using fibre channel and file using CFS […]

Enterprise Computing: LUN Sizing and Standards

November 24, 2009

IanHF talked recently about LUN sizes and establishing standards across the enterprise. The choice of LUN size is a subject I’ve bored people with ad nauseum over the years and this is a good opportunity to go over it again.
Why Bother?
Ian’s post goes into more detail than the scope I intend to cover here. In […]

Enterprise Computing: Thin Provisioning and The Cookie Monster!

November 17, 2009

The Gestalt IT Field Day was a great success in bringing together a mixture of delegates from varying discplines. Following the presentations from 3Par and Symantec, there was heated debate about the implementation of Thin Provisioning and the ability to reclaim released storage resources. This post covers the basic concepts of Thin Provisioning and more […]

GestaltIT Tech Field Day — Day 2: Ocarina, Nirvanix and Data Robotics

November 16, 2009

Day 2 of the Tech Field Day kicked off with a trip to Ocarina Networks. For those who don’t know (a) Ocarinaoffer a “data reduction” appliance (b) an ocarina is a small oval, china flute. I say data reduction as the Ocarina appliance uses a variety of methods for reducing data size, including […]

Enterprise Computing: Is the Solid State Drive Hype Over?

November 5, 2009

Have a look at this news report from Barrons.com on their Tech Trader site. STEC shares lost a whopping 36% as quoted in the article and in fact were down almost 39% for the day. So have solid state drives lost their sparkle?
Barrons alsowrote the day before on the STEC earnings call. The interesting parts […]

Enterprise Computing: VMware, Cisco and EMC Join Forces to Create Acadia

November 3, 2009

Finally all the speculation is put to rest as VMware, Cisco and EMC announce their joint venture: Acadia. The “coalition” of the three companies will work together to deliver private cloud infrastructure which utilises Cisco UCS, VMware vSphere and EMC storage hardware. All of this will be delivered in something called the Virtual Computing Environment […]

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