I recently had the privilege to attend and participate in a global technology leadership forum. The forum consisted of technology investors, vendors and thought leaders and was an excellent event. The tracks I focused on were VDI, Big Data, Data Center Infrastructure, Data Center Networks, Cloud and Collaboration. The following…
Tag: FCoE
Why FCoE Standards Matter
Mike Fratto at Network Computing recently wrote an article titled ‘FCoE: Standards Don’t Matter; Vendor Choice Does’ (http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/231002706.) I definitely differ from Mike’s opinion on the subject. While I’m no fan of the process of making standards (puts sausage making to shame), or the idea of slowing progress to wait…
Technical Deep Dive
Why NetApp is my ‘A-Game’ Storage Architecture
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,…
Intel’s Betting the Storage I/O Farm on the CPU
I had the privilege of attending Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week as a delegate thanks to Stephen Foskett and Gestalt IT. It was a great event and a lot of information was covered in two days of presentations. I’ll be discussing the products and vendors…
The Brocade FCoE Proposition
I recently realized that I, like a lot of the data center industry, have completely forgotten about Brocade recently. There has been little talked about on their FCoE front, Fibre Channel Front, or CNAs. Cisco and HP have been dominating social media with blade and FCoE battles, but I haven’t…
What’s the deal with Quantized Congestion Notification (QCN)
For the last several months there has been a lot of chatter in the blogosphere and Twitter about FCoE and whether full scale deployment requires QCN. There are two camps on this: FCoE does not require QCN for proper operation with scale. FCoE does require QCN for proper operation and…
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…
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…
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…