Category Archives: Storage & Virtualization

Marketing masquerading as “Tech Journalism”, Or how not to write a stealth press release

Let me preface this by saying that this may come across as snarky and malicious, but that’s not the full intent. I’m using this as a simple illustration of what bothers me about tech journalism. There is a trend I … Continue reading

Posted in Storage, Storage & Virtualization, Tech Marketing, VMWare | 1 Comment

VSPEX – The rebirth of the Mainframe/Mini in x86 form?

EMC has trademarked a new product name: VSPeX. So what the heck is it? Alternative: slow news day at El Reg. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that with EMC’s hardware and coding chops, and direct line into VMware … Continue reading

Posted in Storage & Virtualization, Tech Marketing, Virtualization, VMWare | 1 Comment

IO Analyzer 56k no way!

Install and configure VMware IO Analyzer: Quick note, in case you missed the Brown Bag last night, the Video is here. I go over the install process as well as some general QA about IO Analyzer there.   ProfessionalVMware BrownBag – … Continue reading

Posted in Storage, Storage & Virtualization, VMWare | 2 Comments

Price per VM calculations, an exercise in crazy

First let me preface that the pricing involved here is generalized at best, and should in no way be a true 100% accurate reflection of any named Vendors pricing. I’ve tried to provide a true cost of ownership for the … Continue reading

Posted in Storage & Virtualization, VMWare | 2 Comments

Some more benchmark results with IO Analyzer

Ok so digging a little deeper into how I had my config setup and running some more tests today. Wanted to see peaks for a single VM instead of several, even though I believe that multiple machines running multiple types … Continue reading

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Playing around with VMware IO Analyzer

About a year ago I was at an EMC event in Orange County, I think it was one of the traveling roadshow type events and they had some hands on labs for a bunch of their different product lines. The … Continue reading

Posted in Storage & Virtualization, VMWare, XIV Storage | 8 Comments

On array auto-tiering

A good discussion about auto-tiering popped up at ARS. That said, I responded as such: I’m honestly not sold on the on array tiering, at least right now though I can see its usfullness for certain types of workloads. With … Continue reading

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Speaking of Steve Foskett

Excited to see him speak as the keynote at Storage Decisions “Storage for Virtual Environments” one day seminar in San Diego on Dec, 13th.  I like to attend these events when I can because it’s usually a good place to … Continue reading

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VAAI Primitives List

Stephen Foskett put together a nice list of all the VAAI Primitives here. VMware’s introduced the “vStorage APIs for Array Integration” (VAAI) in vSphere 4.1, and block-heads like me went nuts. We’ve been trying to integrate storage and servers for … Continue reading

Posted in Storage & Virtualization, VMWare, vSphere 5 | Leave a comment

XIV Gen3 SPC-2 Results Posted

Nate over at TechOpsGuys brought my attention to the SPC-2 results from the Gen3 XIV. The results are what I would expect from the Gen 3 system, and SPC-2 benchmarks do play up on the strengths of the XIV architecture. … Continue reading

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