ILM Consulting

This last fortnight there's been a cacophony of hyperbole and at times marketing fluff from vendors and analysts with regards to Reference Architectures and Converged Infrastructures. As IBM launched PureSystems, NetApp & Cisco decided it was also a good time to reiterate their s... (more)

Back in March 2009, when Cisco announced the launch of their UCS platform and subsequent intention to enter the world of server hardware, eyebrows were raised including my own. There was never any disputing that the platform would be adopted by some customers, certainly after see... (more)

vSphere 6.0 - What's Needed? - Webinar 23/2 The new vSphere 5.0 storage features such as VAAI, Storage DRS, Site Recovery Manager 5 and VASA, highlight the fact that whether on a virtualized or non-virtualized platform, application performance is heavily affected by its underlyi... (more)

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 rea... (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 witness... (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 iSC... (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 ap... (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... (more)

On a recent excursion to a tech event I had the pleasure of meeting a well-known ‘VM Guru', (who shall remain nameless). Having read some of this individual's material I was excited and intrigued to know his thoughts on how he was tackling the Storage challenges related to VMware... (more)

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 ha... (more)

VP of Operations concludes, "I get it! We've been investing in hardware worth more than a million pounds to bring the performance latency of our Datawarehouse down by 10 milliseconds when all the time I just needed to replace a cable!" In this last week of customer visits I was ... (more)

There is a common myth that FC SAN is expensive, difficult to manage and troubleshoot. Coupled with this there are heavily marketed agendas to move customers away from FC SAN to new and allegedly more cost-effective solutions. But what if there was a way to... Reduce the amount... (more)

Storage is often automatically pinpointed as the source of all problems. From System Admins, DBAs, Network guys to Application owners, all are quickly ready to point the figure at SAN Storage given the slightest hint of any performance degradation. Not really surprising though, c... (more)

It's falsely assumed that VMware is the source of many performance problems since it is relatively new in the datacenter. Others will claim it's not VMware but the underlying storage. To break this cycle there are now many new acronyms being introduced to the SAN Storage / VMware... (more)

"Why your Storage isn't always to blame" What are they; how do you find them, and how can you proactively avoid them? Wednesday, December 15, 2010 9:30 am PST; 12:30 pm EST; 5:30 pm GMT It's common for Storage Administrators to be blamed from the offset when any performance problem... (more)

Back in 2004 HDS launched the USP, which was then followed by the great but not so radically different USP-V in 2007. Within that same time frame, HDS’ main rival in the Enterprise Storage market EMC, busily went about launching the Symmetrix DMX-3, then the DMX-4 and most recent... (more)

A wise man once told me that if there were a major car crash further up the highway, having a faster car would only get me to the accident quicker. Obvious right? Not so it seems when the wisdom of these words is applied to the analogy of the growing number of SAN infrastructures... (more)

A long time ago (November 2009 to be precise), in a Cloud far far away, the Rebel Alliance of EMC, Cisco and VMware joined forces to form what are now dubbed Acadia and the VCE coalition. Soon after came the launches of VBlocks 0, 1 and 2 each respectively incorporating the EMC C... (more)

It was about three months ago that one of my friends had informed me he was leaving HDS to join a company named Virtual Instruments. ‘Virtual Instruments?’ I asked myself, trying to fathom if I’d have heard of them before only to realize that I had once seen a write up on their ... (more)

It was about three months ago that one of my friends had informed me he was leaving HDS to join a company named Virtual Instruments. ‘Virtual Instruments?’ I asked myself, trying to fathom if I’d have heard of them before only to realize that I had once seen a write up on their S... (more)