DFD1: The Journey Begins

My journey to DFD1 begins today at dark o’clock Melbourne time. I’m travelling MEL->SYD->SFO, with a short break in SYD while I transfer from domestic to international. I’ve had a bit of practice at this international travel lark over the past few years, so my routine is pretty well established.… Read More

StorMagic and Enterprise SMB

Quite a lot has happened for StorMagic since presenting at Virtualization Field Day 4. They’ve had plenty of good coverage from my fellow VFD4 delegates, and I highly recommend you go and read their perspectives: Jeff Wilson has a conversation with himself about StorMagic. Marco Broeken compares VMware VSAN to… Read More

VFD4 Prep: Scale Computing

I first met Scale Computing at Storage Field Day 5, and I was impressed. Their gear is ideally suited for small- to mid-size companies, often without oodles of bandwidth to the Internet to use cloud based services, and with on-site systems that need to be controlled, like manufacturers. The HC3x… Read More

VFD4 Prep: SimpliVity

SimpliVity make a series of “hyper-convered” arrays. The devices are a mix of commodity CPU, RAM, and storage in a single OmniCube with a special bit of custom hardware: a PCIe card dubbed the OmniCube Accelerator. This custom hardware offloads the high-overhead calculations required for things like compression and de-duplication… Read More