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

NTAPInsight with Clarence the Horse

Those who follow me on Twitter were treated to the perspective of my new travelling companion, Blue Cow, during my trip to VeeamON. This week, I continue the tradition. Alas, Blue Cow was not allowed to join me, so Clarence the horse has come with me instead. Clarence is a… Read More

Tech Company Breakups

Multiple tech companies are in the news lately because they’re splitting off parts of themselves. HP, Symantec, and eBay are all splitting off major sections, and there’s speculation about EMC splitting off VMware, and maybe Cisco doing something similar. There was also a conversation about the topic on this week’s… Read More

Cisco ACI and Lossy Control

The centralised command-and-control method doesn’t work at scale. Many people have discovered this independently, from the Romans to the Chinese. It’s just not humanly- (or even computerly-) possible to track that many interdependent variables and make smart decisions. To manage a vast array of components, a central apparatus needs to… Read More

Coming Soon: Oracle Data Appliance

I won’t be the least surprised to see that headline sometime in the next couple of years. Let’s take a look at recent trends in tech to see why: VMware Prior to VMware, no one knew what a hypervisor was outside of banking folk who deal with IBM AS/400 and… Read More