Posts by M. B.

It makes sense from certain perspectives. I think when you are a Nutanix and trying to break into HPEs customer base, it's a lot easier to break in on a standing vendor-of-record agreement than it is to try and break in some other way. HPE sees an opportunity to bring in a much larger and more complete HCI offering than their own which DOESN't translate to more licensing revenue for the DellEMC machine through VMware.

My biggest problem is I have customers running Nutanix on Lenovo and Dell hardware now and the support is kinda crap compared to my customers running on Nutanix-branded appliances. First and second level go through OEM before it goes to Nutanix, and they're the experts at fixing their own stuff.

I would think Simplivity customers should be on notice though, if this partnership results in significant market gains for HPE I think that will be the end of that experiment.

My understanding based on the preso Cisco gave yesterday is that the hardware compression card is the "add-in card" they are referring to since they said it was coming in 4.0, and eventually it will do hardware encryption as well.

It's kinda funny, because my parents, now into their 70's, were worried about their online security (a good thing) after hearing that they shouldn't write all their passwords down on a piece of paper from a number of news articles.

Except that piece of paper is in their house, in their basement, in their office area, in a drawer near their iMac. Literally no one other then them or I will ever look in that drawer and see that piece of paper, and they never have to worry about forgetting a password. But the media sure did a good job of scaring them into thinking they were doing something wrong, even though their attack footprint was impossibly tiny.

Anyways, only mentioning this because it inconveniences me, and that's the worst inconvenience of all.

Potential

“potential business opportunities”

“potential public offering of shares“

“potential business combination between Dell and VMware”

“potential conversion of shares of Class V Common Stock”

“potential business opportunity to pursue”

“potential business opportunity will be pursued”

“potential business opportunities currently being evaluated by Dell do not include the sale to a third party of Dell or VMware.”

So full of potential. Well, full of something, anyways.

The funny thing is they try and sell IT security solutions as part of their portfolio. They have a number of smaller, similarly incompetent IT companies they've acquired trying to sell security solutions and there are individual consultants and larger firms making bank off the cleanup work that's been needed afterwards.

I'd really like an electric Fusion (Mondeo on the other side of the pond from me) driving all four wheels. After working as a vendor SE for a few years for a large territory, I can honestly say the most comfortable of all of the rentals I've ever taken was the Fusion. It was a great fit with good overall proportions for the family and doing "work stuff". If I'm going to spend Sport money to get the 2.7l Ecoboost AWD, I might as well just get all electric for probably the same money.

So was it MS-AI that told them to leave the Hulk out an extra lap so the grid could bunch up behind the safety car instead of boxing when Ricciardo did to maintain track position?

Sales speak for "he missed his number and would rather leave on his own than be sent packing". At least this way when the company misses plan for the year, he isn't there to take the fall. When they backfill, the FNG will be viewed as their saviour for a few quarters as well, unless they also fail to perform.

Welcome to sales, here's your quota and your pink slip. Miss the first, sign and date the second.

4.5b/year is more than their competitors and one of the more exciting pieces of the acquisition.

Your picture of the "M640 blade server" is actually just the back of the M1000e blade chassis. Blades go in the front :)

"SimpliVity’s industry-leading software-defined data management platform"

You can't call yourself software-defined when your solution is dependent on a piece of proprietary hardware.

Slow and steady...

...seems to be Brocade's strategy. I've been working with their non-FC gear for a year and a half, some of the stuff I inherited was a bit flaky on earlier code revisions but the ICX and VDX lines are both quite stable now. I typically lead with Cisco since our bench is stronger there (not a ton of difference though), and I do find more and more Brocade PoCs going on inside customer environments. I've seen a lot of BNA licenses go out at close to 0 dollars as well.

Also seeing a bit of uptake with their NFV stuff, some vADX here and some vRouter there. Nothing crazy but I think its easily digestible for customers looking to add to their existing environments.

They need a acquisition or something to get a bit more buzz going.

InfoSight...

...is the reason we like using Nimble with our managed services customers. The supports teams don't worry much about the arrays themselves, they simply consume and occasionally troubleshoot.

But they are not "storage people", typically they are generalists who only care that 1) it's fast enough; 2) there's enough capacity; and 3) it has no single point of failure. The nice thing about InfoSight is that when they start running into issues, it's dead simple for our storage specialists to analyse the data and make informed decisions as to how to proceed.

That keeps our managed services support teams busy supporting customers and their apps, and our storage specialists busy doing storagey things.

So they've "announced" something which is going to kill DSSD outright... Cool story bro, but if you don't have anything to SHIP to customers, you are just spewing hot air. I saw DSSD in the metal and customers are running it in beta deployments.

Yes, this technology will be very cool in the hyperconverged space. I suspect Nutanix and Simplivity will get more traction with this sort of thing since they are actual leaders in Hyperconverged systems.

I wouldn't mind seeing a Surface 4 (not Pro 4) with the Core-Y processor. The 3 with the Atom is almost enough for my day-to-day stuff but it really chugs when doing complex Visio diagrams with a couple other apps open, while the Pro 3 i5 trucks along just fine.

Max RAM...

...would be nice to know, I see 8GB listed but will it do 16? Also, is the SD card bootable? The SSD would make a fine flash read cache device to accelerate the VMs running on disks while booting vSphere from the SD card.

MAXIMUM I.T.

It's not groundbreaking but the feature list looks good, Family subscription option for 6 people is good. Radio stations with unlimited skipping is good.Unlimited listening from the Apple Music library (which I hope means ad-hoc selection from the iTunes catalog), with the ability to save for offline listening. Adding Android devices is icing on the cake for my One M7 and my sons' Tab 4.

Been testing ScaleIO...

...on a trio of decommissioned servers. Nifty so far. I love the management GUI. Performance is good enough for a bunch of old 146GB disks.

Haven't simulated any failures yet and only used a single host for testing but it's pretty cool and will be a thing to watch as it matures.

As an infrastructure guy...

...I loved the Oracle Database Appliances. I sat down with our lead apps guy, went over the configuration worksheet with an Oracle engineer on the phone, then spent a couple hours doing the rack and stack and networking configuration. After that it was a complete hand off. Old servers powered down and unracked, several TB recovered from production NetApp storage, a lot of finger pointing removed, and more importantly from my perspective was containing the apps team to a small footprint of hardware which was still more than enough to meet their needs and came bundled with it's own support AND hypervisor to screw up. Really all I needed to do from that point on was give them access to a Data Domain for RMAN backups and make sure no one unplugged anything. Easy breezy, lemon squeezy.

Misleading, but not incorrect

The EF system is one of the most proven *platforms*...

The EF system "platform" is the same as the old Engenio product, so technically he may be correct but highly misleading.

There are more than 750,000 LSI Engenio arrays, IBM DS-series, Dell PowerVault systems, NetApp E and EF series, I think even Cray used the "platform" for some of their storage products. I don't see THAT as a stretch as a lot of folks bought into that platform in one form or another.

But as far as actual EF-series specific arrays shipped? I doubt they've hit 10,000. Didn't they only just recently offer dual-controller systems?

What is...

...the difference between an "application delivery controller" and an "application delivery switch" like Brocade's own ADX (which I've always referred to as a load balancer because that's what it is, and virtual editions are available for use)?

Delayering

I can only hope this means tossing some unneeded management and fat-cat sales types out the window and not hacking away your top developers, big thinkers, or good hunters. That's not often the case, sadly. I like Citrix products myself, I've had good luck with VDI-in-a-box, XenDesktop, XenApp, and NetScaler. XenServer is what I use in my lab and it's been rock solid.

You could have...

...taken the last two paragraphs, made them into a single paragraph, and skipped the rest of the article entirely. It's what we do - capture statistics with vendor sizing tools, determine requirements as far as features go, and build out a couple BoMs for different vendors products. Then we discuss with the client regarding performance, features, and cost comparisons. At the end of the exercise they end up with a properly sized array that performs well and does what they need it to regardless if its all-flash, hybrid, or even all-disk (yes, I'm not going to recommend flash to a cost-sensitive SMB who needs 10TB but only 200 IOPS). We sleep well knowing they are going to be satisfied with the product, and we make money off the implementation and training services. Happy customers.

Missed as part of the announcement...

...but worth mentioning is they also now support:

- 4TB nearline drives;

- up to 6 expansion shelves;

- 25.6TB of SSD (16x 1.6TB) in the flash shelf.

(old: 3TB NL-SAS, 3 expansion shelves, 12 TB of SSD in the flash shelf)

I'm really liking the Yoga and X1 Carbon laptops my co-workers have. They love them, too. Seems to be a case of "make good products and watch them sell well". And the price points for decent desktops is getting us into all kinds of price-sensitive places where we weren't competitive before.

I got stuck with an HP Elitebook just as we started the Lenovo partnership :( Bad keyboard, even worse screen, thicker, heavier, way too much flex in the chassis, and flaky USB connectivity. No X1, this.

CNA...

...was the first industry certification I ever achieved (NetWare 4.11). Unfortunately I was not able to secure work as I had just graduated from college at the time and no one wanted a 0 experience admin. Shortly thereafter, Windows NT 4.0 took over the marketplace in my area and it was easier to find work as an MCP supporting Windows Server after a few months of desktop experience than it was to find anyone looking to hire untried CNAs, but I did certainly prefer NetWare.