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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, overallocating our available underlying resources to a VM isn't a bad thing, in fact it allows it to be scalable". Despite this 2011 was also the year where I lost count of the amount of times I had to point out that sometimes overprovisioning a VM does lead to performance problems - specifically wh... (more)

Exchange Completion Time – Redefining Application & Storage Performance

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)

Cloud Economics – Amazon, Microsoft, Google Compared

Any new technology adoption happens because of one of the three reasons: Capability: It allows us to do something which was not feasible earlier Convenience: It simplifies Cost: It significantly reduces cost of doing something What is our expectation from cloud computing? As I had stated earlier, it is all about cost saving … (1) through elastic capacity and (2) through economy of scale. So, for any CIO who is interested in moving to cloud, it is very important to understand what the cost elements are for different cloud solutions. I am going to look at 3 platforms: Amazon EC2, G... (more)

Application Virtualization SDK for Developers

If you are developer and would like to try out library that provides a set of functions for emulating a file system and a system registry for an application, ckeck out BoxedApp SDK. It is a great way for creating virtual files, fake registry entries, keys and value. With BoxedApp SDK you have following features: Create virtual files Create virtual registry keys API for intercepting functions Embed DLL Embed ActiveX / OCX Launching a virtual file-based process Using virtual file system by several processes simultaneously If you are wondering when to use this SDK see some examples ... (more)

Extreme Storage - EMC’s VPLEX and DDN Takeover Plan

Talk to the average Storage Engineer who manages the growth of your datacenter’s modular system about Petaflops, Exabytes, Petabytes of Archives or 1TB of sustained bandwidth and you’ll probably find them scratching their heads in disbelief. This is the reality that does exist in the world of super computing and what is sometimes referred to as Extreme Storage. While some Storage Managers would feel they are suffering with their exponential data growth and decreasing budgets, their problems can’t be classified as ‘Extreme’ unless they’re dealing with ExaBytes (1018 bytes) of ... (more)