My colleague Rene Jorissen is blogging daily about the Cisco Live convention and the sessions he visits. Check out his blog if your interested in this convention and his findings or any other networking related articles!
News
Update your bookmarks
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.
New Job!
Breaking news:
As of the first of July I will start as a PSO Consultant at VMware! I’m very happy that VMware provided me with this opportunity. I want to thank Ictivity BV for understanding my decision and making this transition possible and easy. So the next couple of weeks I will be extremely busy finishing my house and finishing projects and transferring accounts/customers to colleagues.
What a cool gadget
The current OLPC is an okay gadget, it’s decent and pretty cool. The new design of the second generation isn’t cool… it’s outrages! Take a look at this blog, it’s a combination of a laptop, e-ink and a Nintendo DS. All I can say is, send me a prototype and I’ll be happy to test it and write a review.
Couple of days off…
I will not be online that much the upcoming two weeks, so no regular updates to my blog. We recently bought a new house and are busy painting etc. We are probably going to move first week of June, so gotta put in some extra time and effort to get things ready on time.