File Virtualization
There are 17 entries for the tag File Virtualization
Lori and I’s youngest daughter graduated from High School this year, and her class chose one of the many good Vince Lombardi quotes for the theme of their graduation – “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.” Those who know me well know that I’m not a huge football fan (don’t tell my friends here in Green Bay that… The stadium can hold roughly half the city’s population, and they aren’t real friendly to those who don’t join in the frenzy), but Vince Lombardi certainly had a lot of great quotes over...
While plenty of people have had a mouthful (or page full, or pipe full) of things to say about the Amazon outage, the one thing that it brings to the fore is not a problem with cloud, but a problem with storage. Long ago, the default mechanism for “High Availability” was to have two complete copies of something (say a network switch) and when one went down, the other was brought up with the same IP. It is sad to say that even this is far-and-away better than the level of redundancy that most of us place in our...
After a short break to get some major dental rework done, I return to you with my new, sore mouth for a round of “Maybe we should have…” discussions. In the nineties and early 21st century, positions were created in may organizations with titles like “chief architect” and often there was a group whose title were something like “IT Architect”. These people made decisions that impacted one or all subsidiaries of an organization, trying to bring standardization to systems that had grown organically and were terribly complex. They ushered in standards, shared code between disparate groups, made sure that...
Since I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, I thought I’d offer you all a link to my article in Computer Technology Review about The Cloud Tier. The point was to delve into how/when/where/why of cloud storage usage. While there is a lot to say on that topic and the article was of limited word count, I think the idea that it can fit into your existing architecture with minimal changes and then be utilized to service the needs of the business in a better/faster/more agile manner is the key point. Normally I keep my blogs relatively vendor-independent....
My older children, like most kids in their age group, all played with or collected Pokemon cards. Just like I and all of my friends had GI Joes and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Kung-fu grip versus hard hands, they and all of their friends sat around talking about how much cooler their current favorite Pokemon card was compared to all of the others. We let them play and kept an eye on how cards were being passed about the group (they’re small and tend to walk off, so we patrolled a bit, but otherwise stayed out of...
The limiting factor in adoption of file virtualization has been, in my opinion, twofold. First is the FUD created by the confusion with block-level virtualization and proprietary vendors wanting to sell you more of their gear – both of which are rapidly disappearing – and second is the unknown element. The simple “how does this set of products improve my environment, save me money, or cut manhours?” Well now this issue is going to rapidly go away also, because you can find out easily enough. Those of you who follow my writing know that I was a hard...
There is one little thing you’re missing from your IT budget. While it impacts manpower most of all, you’ll be feeling it throughout your budget, and see signs of it in other departments as well. You should plan for it, because it is nearly a guarantee that it will continue to impact your budgeting for the next year or so. It’s not SOA. SOA had its day in the sun, and though Cloud will give it a little bit more, it is pretty much baked into the budgets of those organizations using it, and not even on the radar...
When you’re going through your basement, attic, or garage and reorganizing, you move things from box to box, shuffle locations of boxes, buy better boxes to hold things that are more precious, take steps to see to their safety by keeping boxes off the floor… There is an entire sorting mechanic going on that you are likely hardly even thinking about. THE BIGGER THE MESS… I recently swept through our basement – boxes had been dumped down there when we moved into the house (seven years ago), and two of our children have...
So I’m jealous that Lori works D&D references into her posts regularly and I never have… Until today! For those who aren’t gamers or literary buffs, a Hydra is a big serpent or lizard with a variable number of heads (normally five to nine in both literature and gaming). They’re very powerful and very dangerous, and running into one unprepared is likely to get you p0wned. The worst part about them is that mythologically speaking, if you cut one of the heads off, two grow in its place. Ugly stuff if you’re determined to defeat it. That’s...
One thing that some companies seem to have grabbed onto and run with while others don’t seem to have made the correct connections to fully utilize is testing in a highly virtualized or cloud environment. Of all the things these environments can do well, testing is one of the best possible use cases to deploy them. For some of you, this isn’t news. I know some testing people who have this down to a science, and no doubt their wisdom is palely reflected in this post. VIRTUAL OR CLOUD? In this case, cloud...
For those who don’t know, according to the Meyers & Briggs Foundation, part of the Meyers-Briggs Assessment is defined as: The essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent… The same can be said about your data. Much that is seemingly random is consistent and predictable. One of the problems currently facing the enterprise is to properly categorize that data so that its “personality” is well known. You cannot sort (or tier) what you don’t know, and this is a simple proposal for how you might begin such a...
In the rush to cloud, there are many tools and technologies out there that are brand new. I’ve covered a few, but that’s nowhere near a complete list, but it’s interesting to see what is going on out there from a broad-spectrum view. I have talked a bit about Cloud Storage Gateways here. And I’m slowly becoming a fan of this technology for those who are considering storing in the cloud tier. There are a couple of good reasons to consider these products, and I was thinking about the reasons and their standing validity. Thought I’d share with...
I’ve had a couple of blog posts talking about how there is a disconnect between “the market” and “the majority of customers” where things like cloud (and less so storage) are concerned. So I thought I’d try this out as a follow on. If I were running your average medium to large IT shop (not talking extremely huge, just medium to large), what would I be focused on right now. By way of introduction, for those who don’t know, I’m relatively conservative in my use of IT, I’ve been around the block, been burned a few times (OS/2 Beta...
If you’re just joining this series, there is a complete list of the Reasons to date on my team member page.
Are we at reason #5 already? Wow. Okay, this is another one that salesmen will tell you because it is truly compelling, but it is truly a good reason, one of the best.
It is also one of the ones that I eschewed before getting to see real numbers that I could quantify were not marketing material.
The disk savings are real.
Yeah, I said it, and it’s true. Sure, you could argue that they’re only disk purchase deferments, I would disagree....
I took the easy topic this week, and things are so crazy it’s still late in the day that I’m posting this. My apologies. This one also focuses more on ARX than previous ones – this is because replication is a differentiator for many vendors’ products, so I’m being careful to talk about what most can do, then give details for the one I know the best. If you’re just joining this series, there is a complete list of the Reasons to date on my team member page. Replication is of growing importance in the enterprise, be it...
If you’re just joining this series, check out Reason #1 and Reason #2 That You Need File Virtualization Tiering is the one benefit that a sales person will tell you about, so I was putting it off a bit, but it is the one thing I’ve had requests for, and it’s a benefit most enterprises can relate to. I’ll tell you up-front that even though it does offer a huge savings, for reasons I’ll mention below, this isn’t one of the big drivers for me – I knew about the benefits of tiering before I decided that File Virtualization...
So I’ve been going to start this series forever, and things just kept piling up. Today I have decided to embark upon it, and worry later about other commitments, because I think it is an important topic. I wasn’t a fan of File/NAS Virtualization at first – it seemed like an added layer to the very clean (if chatty) NAS hierarchy. I’ve grown to understand that the addition of the layer is nothing compared to the adaptability that layer provides, so I want to share. This series will start with the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that anyone who’s...
