Tag Archives: link-o-rama

Storage Field Day 19 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 19.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

This is a quick post to say thanks once again to Stephen and Ben, and the presenters at Storage Field Day 19. I had a super fun and educational time. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the events (they may not match the order of the presentations).

Storage Field Day – I’ll Be at Storage Field Day 19

Storage Field Day 19 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Tiger Technology Is Bridging The Gap

Western Digital, Composable Infrastructure, Hyperscalers, And You

Infrascale Protects Your Infrastructure At Scale

MinIO – Not Your Father’s Object Storage Platform

Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With A Chance Of Scale Out

NetApp And The StorageGRID Evolution

Komprise – Non-Disruptive Data Management

Stellus Is Doing Something With All That Machine Data

Dell EMC PowerOne – Not V(x)block 2.0

WekaIO And A Fresh Approach

Dell EMC, DevOps, And The World Of Infrastructure Automation

Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates (in no particular order). They’re all very smart people, and you should check out their stuff, particularly if you haven’t before. I’ll attempt to keep this updated as more posts are published. But if it gets stale, the Storage Field Day 19 landing page will have updated links.

 

Becky Elliott (@BeckyLElliott)

SFD19: No Komprise on Knowing Thy Data

SFD19: DellEMC Does DevOps

 

Chin-Fah Heoh (@StorageGaga)

Hadoop is truly dead – LOTR version

Zoned Technologies With Western Digital

Is General Purpose Object Storage Disenfranchised?

Tiger Bridge extending NTFS to the cloud

Open Source and Open Standards open the Future

Komprise is a Winner

Rebooting Infrascale

DellEMC Project Nautilus Re-imagine Storage for Streams

Paradigm shift of Dev to Storage Ops

StorageGRID gets gritty

Dell EMC Isilon is an Emmy winner!

 

Chris M Evans (@ChrisMEvans)

Storage Field Day 19 – Vendor Previews

Storage Management and DevOps – Architecting IT

Stellus delivers scale-out storage with NVMe & KV tech – Architecting IT

Can Infrascale Compete in the Enterprise Backup Market?

 

Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi)

097: GreyBeards talk open source S3 object store with AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO

Gaming is driving storage innovation at WDC

 

Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti)

Storage Field Day 19 RoundUp

Tiers, Tiers, and More Storage Tiers

The Hard Disk is Dead! (But Only in Your Datacenter)

Dell EMC PowerOne is Next-Gen Converged Infrastructure

Voices in Data Storage – Episode 35: A Conversation with Krishna Subramanian of Komprise

 

Gina Rosenthal (@GMinks)

Storage Field Day 19: Getting Back to My Roots

Is storage still relevant?

Tiger Technology Brings the Cloud to You

Taming Unstructured Data with Dell EMC Isilon

Project Nautilus emerged as Dell’s Streaming Data Platform

 

Joey D’Antoni (@JDAnton)

Storage Field Day 19–Current State of the Storage Industry #SFD19

Storage Field Day 19–Western Digital #SFD19

Storage Field Day 19 MinIO #SFD19

 

Keiran Shelden (@Keiran_Shelden)

California, Show your teeth… Storage Field Day 19

Western Digital Presents at SFD19

 

Ruairi McBride (@McBride_Ruairi)

 

Arjan Timmerman (@ArjanTim)

TECHunplugged at Storage Field Day 19

TECHunplugged VideoCast SFD19 Part 1

Preview Storage Field Day 19 – Day 1

 

Vuong Pham (@Digital_KungFu)

 

[photo courtesy of Stephen Foskett]

VMware – VMworld 2019 – Wrap-Up And Link-O-Rama

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

A quick post to provide some closing thoughts on VMworld US 2019 and link to the posts I did during the event. Not in that order. I’ll add to this as I come across interesting posts from other people too.

 

Link-o-rama

Here’s my stuff.

Intro

VMware – VMworld 2019 – See you in San Francisco

Session Notes

VMware – VMworld 2019 – Monday General Session Notes

VMware – VMworld 2019 – HCI2888BU – Site Recovery Manager 8.2: What’s New and Demo

VMware – VMworld 2019 – HBI2537PU – Cloud Provider CXO Panel with Cohesity, Cloudian and PhoenixNAP

VMware – VMworld 2019 – HBI3516BUS – Scaling Virtual Infrastructure for the Enterprise: Truths, Beliefs and the Real World

VMware – VMworld 2019 – HBI3487BUS – Rethink Data Protection & Management for VMware

Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2019

NetApp, Workloads, and Pizza

Apstra’s Intent – What Do They Mean?

Disclosure

VMware – VMworld 2019 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

 

Articles From Elsewhere (And Some Press Releases)

VMworld 2019 US – Community Blog Posts

Other Tech Field Day Extra Delegates

A Software First Approach

Is VMware Project Pacific ‘Kubernetes done right’ for the enterprise?

General Session Replays

See the General Session Replays

NSX-T

NSX-T 2.5 – A New Marker on the Innovation Timeline

VMware Announces NSX-T 2.5

VMware Tanzu

Introducing VMware Tanzu Mission Control to Bring Order to Cluster Chaos

VMware Tanzu Completes the Modern Applications Picture

VMware Announces VMware Tanzu Portfolio to Transform the Way Enterprises Build, Run and Manage Software on Kubernetes

Project Pacific

Introducing Project Pacific

Project Pacific – Technical Overview

Project Pacific: Kubernetes to the Core

Workspace ONE

VMware Unveils Innovations Across Its Industry-Leading Workspace ONE Platform to Help Organizations Grow, Expand and Transform Their Business

vRealize

Announcing VMware vRealize Automation 8.0

vRealize Automation 8 – What’s New Overview

Announcing VMware vRealize Operations 8.0

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0 – What’s New

VCPP

VMware Enables Cloud Providers to Deliver the Software-Defined Data Center From any Cloud

VCF

Introducing VMware Cloud Foundation for Cloud Providers

Accelerating Kubernetes Adoption with VMware PKS on Cloud Foundation

Announcing VMware Cloud Foundation and HPE Synergy with HPE GreenLake

Extending Composable Hybrid Cloud for Workload Mobility Use Cases

 

Wrap-up

This was my fourth VMworld US event, and I had a lot of fun. I’d like to thank all the people who helped me out with getting there, the people who stopped and chatted to me at the event, everyone participating in the vCommunity, and VMware for putting on a great show. I’m looking forward to (hopefully) getting along to it again in 2020 (August 30 – September 3).

VMware vSphere and NFS – Some Links

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Most of my experience with vSphere storage has revolved around various block storage technologies, such as DAS, FC and iSCSI. I recently began an evaluation of one of those fresh new storage startups running an NVMe-based system. We didn’t have the infrastructure to support NVMe-oF in our lab, so we’ve used NFS to connect the datastores to our vSphere environment. Obviously, at this point, it is less about maximum performance and more about basic functionality. In any case, I thought it might be useful to include a series of links regarding NFS and vSphere that I’ve been using to both get up and running, and troubleshoot some minor issues we had getting everything running. Note that most of these links cover vSphere 6.5, as our lab is currently running that version.

Basics

Create an NFS Datastore

How to add NFS export to VMware ESXi 6.5

NFS Protocols and ESXi

Best Practice

Best Practices for running VMware vSphere on Network Attached Storage

Troubleshooting

Maximum supported volumes reached (1020652)

Increasing the default value that defines the maximum number of NFS mounts on an ESXi/ESX host (2239)

Troubleshooting connectivity issues to an NFS datastore on ESX and ESXi hosts (1003967)

Storage Field Day 17 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 17.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

This is a quick post to say thanks once again to Stephen and Ben, and the presenters at Storage Field Day 17. I had a super fun and educational time. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the events (they may not match the order of the presentations).

Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 17

Storage Field Day 17 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

I Need Something Like Komprise For My Garage

NGD Systems Are On The Edge Of Glory

Intel’s Form Factor Is A Factor

StarWind Continues To Do It Their Way

 

Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates (in no particular order). They’re all very smart people, and you should check out their stuff, particularly if you haven’t before. I’ll attempt to keep this updated as more posts are published. But if it gets stale, the Storage Field Day 17 landing page will have updated links.

 

Max Mortillaro (@DarkkAvenger)

I will be at Storage Field Day 17! Wait what is a “Storage Field Day”?

The Rise of Computational Storage

Komprise: Data Management Made Easy

What future for Intel Optane?

 

Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi)

Screaming IOP performance with StarWind’s new NVMeoF software & Optane SSDs

GreyBeards talk Computational Storage with Scott Shadley VP Marketing NGD Systems

 

Howard Marks (@DeepStorageNet)

 

Arjan Timmerman (@ArjanTim)

EP10 – Computational Storage: A Paradigm Shift In The Storage Industry with Scott Shadley and NGD Systems

EP11 – Data Management with Komprise: Transformation without Disruption – with Krishna Subramanian

Enable your Data: Komprise

 

Aaron Strong (@TheAaronStrong)

Komprise Systems Overview from #SFD17

NGD Systems from #SFD17

StarWind NVMeoF

 

Jeffrey Powers (@Geekazine)

Komprise Transforming Data Management with Disruption at SFD17

Starwind NVMe Over Fabrics for SMB and ROBO at SFD17

NGD Systems Help Make Cat Searches Go Faster with Better Results at SFD17

 

Joe Houghes (@JHoughes)

 

Luigi Danakos (@NerdBlurt)

Tech Stand UP Episode 8 – SFD17 – Initial Thoughts on Komprise Podcast

Tech Stand Up Episode 9 – SFD17 – Initial thoughts NGD Systems Podcast

 

Mark Carlton (@MCarlton1983)

 

Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti)

Secondary Storage Is The New Primary

The Era of Composable Storage Infrastructures is Coming

The Fascinating World Of Computational Storage

Secondary Data and Komprise with Krishna Subramanian

 

Jon Hudson (@_Desmoden)

 

[photo courtesy of Ramon]

Dell Technologies World 2018 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Dell Technologies World 2018.  My flights, accommodation and conference pass were paid for by Dell Technologies via the Press, Analysts and Influencers program. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here’s a quick post with links to the other posts I did surrounding Dell Technologies World 2018, as well as links to other articles I found interesting.

 

Product Announcements

Here’re the posts I did covering the main product-related announcements from the show.

Dell Technologies World 2018 – Dell EMC Announces PowerMax

Dell Technologies World 2018 – Dell EMC Announces XtremIO Enhancement and PowerEdge Updates

Dell Technologies World 2018 – Dell EMC (H)CI Updates

 

Event-Related

Here’re the posts I did during the show. These were mainly from the media sessions I attended.

Dell Technologies World 2018 – Monday General Session – The Engines Of Human Progress – Rough Notes

Dell Technologies World 2018 – Meet the Chairman – Rough Notes

Dell Technologies World 2018 – Tuesday General Session – Power Up To Make IT Real – Rough Notes

Dell Technologies World 2018 – Wednesday General Session – Technologies & Trends That Are Changing The World – Rough Notes

Dell Technologies World 2018 – storage.13 – XtremIO X2 Native Replication: Use Cases, Architecture and Best Practices Notes

Dell Technologies World 2018 – storage.38 – Dell EMC Unity: Performance Best Practices Notes

Dell Technologies World 2018 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Dell Technologies World 2018 – storage.27 – Isilon: What’s New in 2018 & Future Directions Notes

Dell Technologies World 2018 – storage.12 – XtremIO X2: An Architectural Deep Dive Notes

 

Dell Technologies Announcements

Here are some of the posts from Dell Technologies covering the major product announcements and news.

Michael Dell Kicks Off Dell Technologies World 2018

Dell Technologies Updates VDI Complete Solutions and Unveils its Most Versatile Thin Client Ever

Dell Technologies Makes Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Real

Dell Technologies Accelerates Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Portfolio Growth; Simplifies Path to VMware-based Clouds

Dell Technologies Powers Up Performance and Efficiency for the Modern Data Center

Dell Technologies Powers Up the Modern Data Center and Future of Work

Dell Technologies and Microsoft Collaborate to Help Customers Simplify Delivery of IoT Solutions

 

Conclusion

I had a busy but enjoyable week. I would have liked the get to more of the technical sessions, but being given access to some of the top executives in the company via the Press, Media and Influencers program was invaluable. You might have also noticed that the product announcements weren’t as abundant as in previous years. People inside Dell Technologies tell me this is because there’s been a lot more focus on making sure things are working before they announce (or ship) products. Thanks again to Dell Technologies (particularly Debbie Friez and Konnie) for having me along to the show. Now, please enjoy this picture of my good friend Jon Klaus at the Customer Appreciation Party.

Storage Field Day 15 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 15.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

This is a quick post to say thanks once again to Stephen and Ben, and the presenters at Storage Field Day 15. I had a super fun and educational time. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the events (they may not match the order of the presentations).

Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 15

Storage Field Day 15 – Day 0

Storage Field Day 15 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Has A Nice Focus On Modern Data Protection

Dropbox – It’s Scale Jim, But Not As We Know It

StarWind VTL? What? Yes, And It’s Great!

WekaIO – Not The Matrix You’re Thinking Of

Cohesity Understands The Value Of What Lies Beneath

Western Digital – The A Is For Active, The S Is For Scale

Come And Splash Around In NetApp’s Data Lake

Huawei – Probably Not What You Expected

Datrium Cloud DVX – Not Your Father’s Cloud Data Protection Solution

Hedvig’s Evolution

 

Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates (in no particular order). They’re all very smart people, and you should check out their stuff, particularly if you haven’t before. I’ll attempt to keep this updated as more posts are published. But if it gets stale, the Storage Field Day 15 landing page will have updated links.

 

Josh De Jong (@EuroBrew)

The Challenge Of Scale

Convergence Without Compromise

 

Glenn Dekhayser (@GDekhayser)

#SFD15: Datrium impresses

 

Chan Ekanayake (@ChanEk81)

Storage Field Day 15 – Introduction

Dropbox’s Magic Pocket: Power Of Software Defined Storage

A Look At The Hedvig Distributed Hybrid Cloud Storage Solution

Cohesity: A Secondary Storage Solution For The Hybrid Cloud?

NetApp’s & Next Generation Storage Technologies

 

Chin-Fah Heoh (@StorageGaga)

Always serendipitous Storage Field Days

Storage dinosaurs evolving too

Magic happening

Cohesity SpanFS – a foundational shift

NetApp and IBM gotta take risks

Own the Data Pipeline

Huawei Dorado – All about Speed

 

Mariusz Kaczorek (@Settlersoman)

 

Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi)

Western Digital at SFD15: ActiveScale object storage

Huawei presents OceanStor architecture at SFD15

 

Dukagjin Maloku (@DugiDM)

Storage Field Day 15 … #SFD15

 

Michael Stanclift (@VMStan)

 

Lino Telera (@LinoTelera)

Back to Silicon Valley for Storage Field Day 15

Storage Field Day 15: Dropbox the high availability in a pocket

Storage Field Day 15: Cohesity the solution for secondary data

Storage Field Day 15: Weka.io

Storage Field Day 15: The open convergence by Datrium

 

Arjan Timmerman (@ArjanTim)

Starwind software: SFD15 preview

 

Dr Rachel Traylor (@Mathpocalypse)

Commentary: White Papers Dont Impress Me Much

Dialogue: What Do We Mean By Predictive Analytics?

Little’s Law: For Estimation Only

 

Vendor Posts

Datrium @ Storage TechFieldDay

Storage Field Day Wrap-up: How Cohesity is Disrupting Legacy Backup

 

Thanks.

VMware – VMworld 2017 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US.  My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

A quick post to provide some closing thoughts on VMworld 2017 and link to the posts I did during the event. Not in that order. I’ll add to this as I come across interesting posts from other people too.

 

Link-o-rama

Here’s my stuff.

 

Intro

VMware – VMworld 2017 – See you in Vegas

 

Session Notes

VMware – VMworld 2017 – Monday General Session Notes

VMware – VMworld 2017 – MGT3342BUS – Architecting Data Protection with Rubrik

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO1179BU – Understanding the Availability Features of vSAN

VMware – VMworld 2017 – LHC3371BUC – VMware Cloud on AWS – The Painless Path to Hybrid Cloud

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO2063BU – Architecting Site Recovery Manager to Meet Your Recovery Goals

VMware – VMworld 2017 – SER1166BU – Housekeeping Strategies for Platform Services Controller-Expert Talk

VMware – VMworld 2017 – PBO3334BUS – State of the Union: Everything multi-cloud, converged, hyper-converged and more!

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO3331BUS – Cohesity Hyperconverged Secondary Storage: Simple Data Protection for VMware and vSAN

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO3194BU – Protecting Virtual Machines in VMware Cloud on AWS

 

Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2017

Tech Field Day – I’ll Be At TFD Extra at VMworld US 2017

The Thing About NetApp HCI Is …

Druva Is Useful, And Modern

Kingston’s NVMe Line-up Is The Life Of The Party

 

Other Posts From Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2017

NetApp SolidFire HCI – Scale what you want, when you want

Highlights from My First VMworld

Tech Field Day Extra – Kingston Technologies

Netapp‘s SolidFire HCI Overview

NVMe to enable truly composable infrastructure?

Join me at VMworld with Tech Field Day Extra!

 

Disclosure

VMware – VMworld 2017 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

 

Video

And here’s my inaugural appearance on theCUBE.

 

VMware Press Releases

VMware made a number of announcements, and you can find them here:

VMware Delivers Industry-First Unified End User Experience, Management and Security Solution for All Endpoint Platforms

VMware and Pivotal Launch Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Collaborate with Google Cloud to Bring Kubernetes to Enterprise Customers

VMware and AWS Announce Initial Availability of VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Advances Software to Help Customers Modernize Data Centers

VMware and Dell EMC Partner to Deliver First Data Protection Solution for VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Helps Enterprises Succeed in the Multi-Cloud Era

 

Other Useful Sources

Here are a few event-related articles I found interesting. You should also get along to the newly launched Blog Beat for some great coverage by a range of bloggers.

 

You should also check out everything written by Chad, as well as these posts:

VMware Gets Its Mojo Back At VMworld 2017

VMworld2017’s forecast, cloudy with a high chance of containers

VMworld 2017 Thursday Keynote

 

Wrap-up

This was my third VMworld US event, and I had a lot of fun. I’d like to thank all the people who helped me out with getting there, the people who stopped and chatted to me at the event, and VMware for putting on a great show. I’m looking forward to (hopefully) getting along to it next year (August 26 – 30).

Storage Field Day 12 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 12.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

This is a quick post to say thanks once again to Stephen, Richard and Kat and the presenters at Storage Field Day 12. I had a super fun and educational time. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the event (they may not match the order of the presentations).

Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 12

Storage Field Day 12 – Day 0

Storage Field Day 12 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Excelero are doing what? For how much?

Ryussi – Or Why Another SMB Stack Is Handy

Nimble Storage Gets Cloudy

NetApp Aren’t Just a Pretty FAS

Intel Are Putting Technology To Good Use

There’s A Whole Lot More To StarWind Than Free Stuff

Elastifile Are Doing It For All The Right Reasons

Datera – Hybrid Is The New Black

SNIA Know What Time It Is

 

Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates (in no particular order). They’re all very smart people, and you should check out their stuff, particularly if you haven’t before. I’ll attempt to keep this updated as more posts are published. But if it gets stale, the Storage Field Day 12 landing page has updated links.

 

Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi)

4.5M IO/[email protected]µsec 4KB Read on 100GBE with 24 NVMe cards #SFD12

There’s a new cluster filesystem on the block, Elastifile

 

Jon Klaus (@JonKlaus)

Storage Field Day 12: storage drop bears reunited!

Intel SPDK and NVMe-oF will accelerate NVMe adoption rates

SNIA: Avoiding tail latency by failing IO operations on purpose

Moving to and between clouds made simple with Elastifile Cloud File System

Excelero NVMesh: lightning fast software-defined storage using commodity servers & NVMe drives

 

Arjan Timmerman (@ArjanTim)

The Datera Company overview

 

Adam Bergh (@AJBergh)

Storage Field Day 12!

Storage Field Day 12 Day 1 Recap and Day 2 Preview

Storage Field Day 12  Day 2 Recap

Storage Field Day 12  Day 3 Recap

 

Chan Ekanayake (@S_Chan_Ek)

Storage Field Day (#SFD12) – A quick intro!

Storage Field Day 12 (#SFD12) – Vendor line up

Excelero – The Latest Software Defined Storage Startup

Intel Storage Futures From #SFD12

Impact from Public Cloud on the storage industry – An insight from SNIA at #SFD12

 

Chin-Fah Heoh (@StorageGaga)

Ryussi MoSMB – High performance SMB

The engineering of Elastifile

Can NetApp do a bit better?

 

Dave Henry (@DaveMHenry)

Confirmed: I’ll be a Delegate at Storage Field Day 12

 

Glenn Dekhayser (@GDekhayser)

Intel Storage – Storage Field Day 12

 

Howard Marks (@DeepStorageNet)

Visiting Intel with SFD 12

 

Matthew Leib (@MBLeib)

Open19 Brings a new build paradigm to HyperScale Buildouts

Excelero achieves amazing stats at #SFD12

Netapp – an #SFD12 Update

Nimble’s InfoSight – An #SFD12 Follow-up

 

Finally, thanks again to Stephen and the team at Gestalt IT. It was an educational and enjoyable few days and I really valued the opportunity I was given to attend.

[image courtesy of Tech Field Day]

VMware – Deploying vSphere Replication 5.8

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As part of a recent vSphere 5.5 deployment, I installed a small vSphere Replication 5.8 proof-of-concept for the customer to trial site-to-site replication and get their minds around how they can do some simple DR activities. The appliance is fairly simple to deploy, so I thought I’d just provide a few links to articles that I found useful. Firstly, esxi-guy has a very useful soup-to-nuts post on the steps required to deploy a replication environment, and the steps to recover a VM. You can check it out here. Secondly, here’s a link to the official vSphere Replication documentation in PDF and eBook formats – just the sort of thing you’ll want to read while on the treadmill or sitting on the bus on the way home from the salt mines. Finally, if you’re working in an environment that has a number of firewalls in play, this list of ports you need to open is pretty handy.

One problem we did have was that we’d forgotten what the password was on the appliance we’d deployed at each site. I’m not the greatest cracker in any case, and so we agreed that re-deploying the appliance would be the simplest course of action. So I deleted the VM at each site and went through the “Deploy from OVF” thing again. The only thing of note that happened was that it warned me I had previously deployed a vSphere Replication instance with that name and IP address previously, and that I should get rid of the stale version. I did that at each site and then joined them together again and was good to go. I’m now trying to convince the customer that SRM might be of some use to them too. But baby steps, right?

Note also that, if you want to deploy additional vSphere Replication VMs to assist with load-balancing in your environment, you need to use the vSphere_Replication_AddOn_OVF10.ovf file for the additional appliances.

Storage – Erasure Coding and RAID – A Few Good Links

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Erasure coding has been around for a little while now, and if you’ve ever sat through a presentation from a cloud storage provider talking about resiliency of data at scale, you may have heard it mentioned. It occurred to me that I’ve just assumed that people know what it is, and that’s not fair. I was going to do a post explaining what it is, but figured a quick post with some links to some articles I found of use would be more useful. Because what’s the point of the internet if I can’t be lazy and link to things on it?

Here’re some useful research papers to start with:

The “press” also has some useful articles on the topic. I recommend you have a look at these two:

Some of my preferred analysts have written a bit on the topic:

Josh has also done a great deep-dive on the Nutanix version of erasure coding (EC-X) that you can see here.

My favourite post, though, is this one: Dummies Guide to Erasure Coding.