I’m catching up on my reading and ran into David Linthicum’s ‘Why you’re not ready to create a private cloud’ (http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/why-youre-not-ready-create-private-cloud-458.) It’s a great article and points out a major issue with private-cloud adoption – internal expertise. The majority of data center teams don’t have the internal expertise required to…
Year: 2010
Networking Showdown: UCS vs. HP Virtual Connect (Updated)
Note: I have made updates to reflect that Virtual Connect is two words, and technical changes to explain another method of network configuration within Virtual Connect that prevents the port blocking described below. Many thanks to the Ken Henault at HP who graciously walked me through the corrections, and beat them…
10 Things to Know About Cisco UCS
Bob Olwig VP of Corporate Business Development for World Wide Technologies (www.wwt.com) asked me to provide 10 things to know about UCS for his blog http://bobolwig.wordpress.com. See the post 10 Things to Know About Cisco UCS here: http://bobolwig.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/10-things-to-know-about-cisco-ucs/. Related posts: Cisco unified Computing System (UCS) High-Level Overview Why Cisco UCS…
FlexFabric – Small Step, Right Direction
Note: I’ve added a couple of corrections below thanks to Stuart Miniman at Wikibon (http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/FCoE_Standards) See the comments for more. I’ve been digging a little more into the HP FlexFabric announcements in order to wrap my head around the benefits and positioning. I’m a big endorser of a single network…
Why Oracle’s 72 port 10GE switch doesn’t matter
I recently ran into some internal buzz about Oracle’s 72 port ‘top-of-rack’ switch announcement and it peeked my interest, so I started taking a look. Oracle selling a switch is definitely interesting on the surface but then again they did just purchase Sun for a bargain basement price and Sun…
Data Center 101: Local Area Network Switching
Interestingly enough 2 years ago I couldn’t even begin to post an intelligent blog on Local Area Networking 101, funny how things change. That being said I make no guarantees that this post will be intelligent in any way. Without further ado let’s get into the second part of the…
How Emulex Broke Out of the ‘Card Pusher’ Box
A few years back when my primary responsibility was architecting server, blade, SAN, and virtualization solutions for customers I selected the appropriate HBA based on the following rule: Whichever (Qlogic or Emulex) is less expensive today through the server OEM I’m using. I had no technical or personal preference for…
FCoTR a Storage Revolution
As the industry has rapidly standardized and pushed adoption of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) there continue to be many skeptics. Many Fibre Channel gurus balk at the idea of Ethernet being capable of guaranteeing the right level of lossless delivery and performance required for the SCSI data their disks…
Concepts
The Art of Pre-Sales
On a recent customer call being led by a vendor account manager and engineer I witnessed some key mistakes by the engineer as he presented the technology to the customer. None of the mistakes were glaring or show stopping but they definitely kept the conversation from having the value that…
Data Center 101: Server Systems
As the industry moves deeper and deeper into virtualization, automation, and cloud architectures it forces us as engineers to break free of our traditional silos. For years many of us were able to do quite well being experts in one discipline with little to no knowledge in another. Cloud computing,…