Rich Stroffolino

About the Author:

Rich has been a tech enthusiast since he first used the speech simulator on a Magnavox Odyssey². Current areas of interest include ZFS, the false hopes of memristors, and the oral history of Transmeta.

Articles by Rich Stroffolino

Pingdom of Heaven: Monitoring Cloud with SolarWinds

May 31, 2017

If you haven’t followed SolarWinds’ portfolio since 2014, they’ve made some key acquisitions to get up to speed on cloud monitoring, using them to form the backbone of a comprehensive solution. The best part is, though SolarWinds views this as a full stack solution, it’s not inherently bundled so you can use the components as needed. Their oldest acquisition in this span was the Swedish company Pingdom. Let’s take a look at how SolarWinds is using that IP.

It’s Not The Size of Your Conference Community

May 31, 2017

Tom Hollingsworth rightly points out what makes IT conferences relevant: community. In large events like VMworld or Cisco Live, the community are what make these events enjoyable to attend. But for smaller conferences, that are either new or tightly focused, the community is what makes them relevant. It’s an interesting distinction.

Robin Systems Defines Applications

May 26, 2017

Robin Systems does not mess around when it comes to the scope of their mission. Some companies set out to be iterative. They want to create something a little faster, a little more efficient, or a little easier to use. Robin Systems aims to reinvent infrastructure for modern distributed applications. It’s a company mission that certainly doesn’t lack for ambition.

Sans SAN with StorMagic

May 25, 2017

In some ways, StorMagic has an old school approach to software-defined storage. Instead of a hyperconverged infrastructure approach that utilizes some of the same principals, but ultimately locks you into very specific hardware, StorMagic is strictly software only. Their goal is to provide software abstracted storage functions that allow organizations to run on their hardware of choice. They see their market at the edge of the enterprise. These would be remote locations for large organization where installing and deploying specialized hardware isn’t cost effective or physically feasible.

VMware NSX: Going Big with Micro-Segmentation

May 23, 2017

VMware NSX is a powerful multifaceted solution with a lot of dimensions. So much so that it’s actually a little hard to get a single understanding of it. That’s not to say that it is a bloated or convoluted offering, merely ambitious in scope. If you’re going to make a platform for network virtualization and security, it’s kind of go big or go home.

But when talking about NSX, it’s easier to do it in pieces. Once you do, you realize that many of the aspects of the platform are based around some basic guiding principals. In this piece, I’m going to focus particularly on the security aspects. VMware designed NSX security around micro-segmentation. Aside from being a useful buzzword, it’s also a very smart way to keep your VMs and applications secure.

DNA Storage is Weird

May 23, 2017

I’ve heard for a while that DNA storage could be a potential replacement for magnetic tape, at least for archiving. It’s dense and has a long shelf life, which lends itself to the application. But I didn’t have a way to visualize that density. So, against my better judgement, I started doing some math.

NetApp and Open Source

May 23, 2017

Open source is not entirely new to NetApp, they’ve had an OpenStack team in the company since 2011, mainly contributing to the Cinder project. This provided on-demand block storage in OpenStack. In the past 18 months, this has been consciously expanded into an open ecosystem team, organized around thePub.

What is Big Data? The On-Premise IT Roundtable

May 23, 2017

To be clear, the answer to “what is big data?” isn’t the On-Premise IT Roundtable. Nevertheless, our panelists discuss what exactly they mean when they use the term, why it’s the new hotness, and how they’ve seen it impact organizations.

NAS Effect: 10TB Western Digital Red Drives

May 22, 2017

Western Digital is enabling the network attached hoarder in your life. They’ve beefed up their WD Red and Red Pro lines with up to 10TB per helium-filled drive. To hit this capacity, WD is using seven 1.42 TB platters per drive, up from six on last year’s capacity topping 8TB models.

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