Update your bookmarks, EMC’s Chad Sakac recently started blogging and already wrote some cool article. Check out his blog and add it to your RSS reader and/or bookmarks.
A couple of outtakes:
I’ve been working with 10 joint VMware/EMC customers this week in NY, NJ and Houston (phew!), and was in Australia the week before last where there were 2 more. Out of those 12, 4 asked me questions about the applicability of “stretching” their ESX clusters across geographic distances – that’s 33%, and absolutely above the “man, I should write a blog on the topic” threshold.
So, what are we talking about?
A stretched cluster is the practice of having ESX member servers in a cluster that are geographically separated. The reason this is generally done is to provide the ability to dynamically move workloads from one datacenter to another. Often, the customer is also considering it for disaster recovery purposes (”I’ll just VMotion in case of a disaster”). Can this be done – ABSOLUTELY – but not considered lightly.
I guess it was inevitable, but it’s still depressing. Traveling around the world means I read a LOT of magazines – there’s that 15 minutes of airplane ascent and decent where my usual toys (PSP, iPod, DS) are verboten. Some stuff (like the Economist) I read to expand my horizons, some stuff (like Maximum PC) I read as the nerd equivalent of Maxim (completely vacuous brain mush).
I couldn’t resist the headline of this month’s Windows IT Pro: “Virtualization Wars: Hyper-V vs. ESX Server ”
I am so not into protocol and transport wars – BUT that still doesn’t change the fact that the future is Ethernet-connected. So, then what about protocol? iSCSI, NFS, or FCoE? Well – NFS will continue to do well – it works well, there’s nothing wrong with it – and it will always have the strengths that it has in the VMware context (so easy to create massive datastores that span ESX clusters or even sites). iSCSI will continue to grow wildly (it is the fastest growing in the market at large, and in EMC’s portfolio) and is (IMHO – I’m still in love) the future of the block storage market en masse. BUT, I’m starting to come around on FCoE.
Is there a downside of disabling the last access time atrribute? In what cases would you need it? Makes me wonder why it is “on” by default.