Storage is kind of expensive, so oversubscribing where possible is a good way for you to get the bang for your buck, but there are some additional challenges that come…
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Datacenter migrations are challenging in their own right. Not only do all of the concerns in my previous blog, Planning a Datacenter, play in, but logistics also have to be…
A datacenter on its face seems like a very simple thing. You take a room, you stick some servers in it, add some cooling and UPS and it’s good to…
In a previous post we talked about the death of QLogic switches. At the time, there was not a cost competitive replacement for those little switches. Additionally, a year ago…
Hardware Compatibility Lists (HCL) are an often overlooked, yet they are a very important part of any new deployment that you are attempting. There seems to be an erroneous pervasive…
UPDATE: VMware 6.5 (and VMFS 6.0) supports 512e drives as direct attached drives. vSphere & vSAN will expose 512 to Guest OS. However, VMware still does not support 4K. Read…
As you may have heard, with the recent purchase of QLogic by Cavium, QLogic’s 8 Gbit Fibre Channel (FC) switches were discontinued in short notice. On first blush, that may…
DataCore’s recent SPC-1 published numbers have been making quite the splash in the industry. If you missed them, here’s a link to their article about them. The reactions from the storage…
Making storage highly redundant has been arguably the single largest challenge for storage engineers for years. Keeping data in multiple places to allow it to survive unscathed if things go badly…
Storage Spaces has been around for many years in one form or another. The primitives for it started with Windows Home Server, which was built on SBS 2003. Since then,…
For a few years, jumbo frames have been all the rage for storage and network people. However, a lot of people don’t understand what exactly jumbo frames are and when/why…
When was the last time you really had to care about the geometry of a hard disk? I would wager it’s been at LEAST 25 years. Well, worry not! We’re…