One of, if not the, most popular of my blog posts to date has been ‘Why Cisco UCS is my ‘A-Game’ Server Architecture (http://www.definethecloud.net/why-cisco-ucs-is-my-a-game-server-architecture.) In that post I describe why I lead with Cisco UCS for most consultative engagements. This follow up for storage has been a long time coming,…
Year: 2011
Redundancy in Data Storage: Part 2: Geographical Replication
This is a followup to my previous article, Redundancy in Data Storage: Part 1: RAID Levels, where I discussed various site-local data redundancy technologies. Here, I will attempt to detail many of the choices available to provide redundancy beyond the data center that organizations use to solve disaster recovery, business…
OTV and Vplex: Plumbing for Disaster Avoidance
High availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, etc. are all key concerns of any data center design. They all describe separate components of the big concept: ‘When something does go wrong how do I keep doing business.’ Very public real world disasters have taught us as an industry valuable lessons in…
World Wide Technology’s Upcoming Geek Day
Coming up very quickly is World Wide Technology’s (www.wwt.com) annual Geek Day, March 10th 2011 (http://www.wwt.com/geekday/.) I’m very much looking forward to the event for two reasons: It’s free to customers It’s totally focused on geeks interacting with geeks. The event is focused around live interactive demo’s from sponsor technology…
Cisco unified Computing System (UCS) High-Level Overview
I’ve been looking for tools to supplement Power Point, Whiteboard, etc. and Brian Gracely (@bgracely) suggested I try Prezi (www.prezi.com.) Prezi is a very slick tool for non-slide based presentations.  I don’t think it will replace slides or white board for me, but it’s a great supplement. It’s got a…
Inter-Fabric Traffic in UCS–Part II
In the first part of this post (http://www.definethecloud.net/inter-fabric-traffic-in-ucs) I discuss server traffic flows within a UCS system focusing on End-Host mode (EH mode.) EH mode is the default and recommended mode for the majority of UCS implementations, but the system can also be used in ‘Switch mode’ which causes the…