Cloud computing environments provide enhanced scalability and flexibility to IT organizations. Many options exist for building cloud strategies, public, private etc. For many companies private cloud is an attractive option because it allows them to maintain full visibility and control of their IT systems. Private clouds can also be further…
Category: Concepts
Why You’re Ready to Create a Private Cloud
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Have We Taken Data Redundancy too Far?
During a recent conversation about disk configuration and data redundancy on a storage array I began to think about everything we put into data redundancy. The question that came to mind is the title of this post ‘Have we taken data redundancy too far?’ Now don’t get me wrong, I…
HP’s FlexFabric
There were quite a few announcements this week at the HP Technology Forum in Vegas. Several of these announcements were extremely interesting, of these the ones that resonated the most with me were: Superdome 2: I’m not familiar with the Superdome 1 nor am I in any way an expert…
Collapsing Server Management Points with UCS
I was invited to post a blog on the WWT virtualization blog, I chose to discuss Cisco Pass-Through switching with UCS. See the blog there at: http://vblog.wwtlab.com/2010/06/22/collapsing-server-management-points-with-ucs/. There are several other great posts there you should take a look at. Related posts: UCS Server Failover Why Cisco UCS is my…
Building a Hybrid Cloud
At a recent Data Center Architect summit I attended cloud computing was a key focus. Of the concepts that were discussed one that was a recurring theme was Hybrid Clouds. Conceptually a Hybird-Cloud is a mix of any two cloud types, typically thought of as a mix of a Private…