Yearly prediction blogs are so clichéd hence why I've always tried to avoid
writing one. Despite this I've always made a mental note of technology,
products or companies that I thought were going to really do well in the
upcoming year. Back in 2008 I felt VMware were going to really take off after
the release of 3.5. In 2009 I had a gut feeling DataDomain would explode just
before they were bought by EMC. In 2010 I spoke to a friend about how 3PAR's
technology could no longer be ignored and in 2011 I still wasn't convinced
that FCoE would overtake FC in revenue despite all the analysts' claims. But
why believe me when I'd never put these thoughts on paper? So now at the
beginning of 2012, I've decided to put my money where my mouth is, pull out
my crystal ball and document my predictions.
First off I'm going with VCE's Vblock and their new FastPath feature. VCE
(o... (more)
Generally IT folk, whether in Storage, Virtualization, Change Management or
Project Management love the use of acronyms and synonyms to express key
concepts amongst each other. What other industry would allow an individual to
spurt a line such as "Have SOX seen the BCP and CAB approval for our VDC's DR
SAN and will this then be added to the CMDB by CoB today?" without
immediately flinching or bringing in a logopaedics specialist for help. More
often than not, IT folk have also used these synonyms and acronyms as
smokescreens to prevent outsiders from realizing "well this IT stuff... (more)
2011 was a year where despite the economic constraints everything Big was
seemingly good: Big Data, Big Clouds, Big VMs, etc. Caught in the industry's
lust for this excess, 2011 was also the year I lost count of how many
overprovisioned resources to ‘Big' Production VMs I witnessed. More often
than not this was a typical reaction from System Admins trying to alleviate
their fears of potential performance problems to important VMs. It was the
year where I began to hear justifications such as "yes we are
overprovisioning our production VMs..but apart from the cost savings,
overal... (more)
The launch of vSphere 5 and its new storage related features will set the
precedent for a complete rethink on how a new datacenter's storage
infrastructure should be designed and deployed. vSphere 5's launch is not
only an unabashed attempt at cornering every single aspect of the server
market but is also a result for the growing need for methodical scalability
that merges the I.T. silos and consequently combines the information of
applications, servers, SANs and storage into a single comprehensive stack. In
an almost ironic shift back towards the original principles of mainframe... (more)
Roll back several years and certain vendors had you believe that Fibre
Channel was dead and that the future would be iSCSI. A few years later and
certain vendors were then declaring that Fibre Channel was dead again and
that the future was FCoE. So while this article is not a iSCSI vs FC or FC vs
FCoE comparison list (there's plenty of good ones out there and both iSCSI or
FCoE each have immense merit), the point being made here is that Fibre
Channel unlike Elvis really is alive and well. Moreover Fibre Channel still
remains the protocol of choice for most mission-critical applic... (more)