I was helping a client in the Wall Street District today with some rather obscure CIFS performance issues (Opportunistic Locks anyone? Berzerk BDCs causing issues? Multi-user Access DBs over WAN?)
IBRIX at EMC World
I’ve known about IBRIX for a while, but it was refreshing to talk to a decent techie that knew the product. They have improved it a lot over the past year.
Ate at Trotter’s Tavern in Bowling Green, OH
I had some great customer meetings in OH this week. One meeting took me to Bowling Green, cute town.
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Data Domain Update
I’m not known for retractions and I’m not posting one. I did however check out the new DD boxes and the really big ones are far more capable than the old ones.
Storage Virtualization – is there a point?
This has been bothering me for a while, and I think I’m not alone.
Hitachi has been making great progress with their virtualization gear, as has IBM, Falconstor before them, etc.
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Ate at Del Frisco’s steakhouse in Orlando
Superb.
Not much fanfare, steaks wet-aged 21 days.
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Should EMC move to more multi-functional devices?
Here’s the deal: EMC has a lot of cool stuff. Lots of it came through acquisitions. Lots of it runs on the x86 platform, believe it or not.
At the moment one needs to buy multiple boxes from EMC to do NAS, SAN, archiving, etc.
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Netbackup best practices for ridiculously busy environments (but not exclusively).
While waiting for another EMC World session to start (this one is at “Guru” level, let’s see) I thought I might share some of my experience regarding running Netbackup on very large setups – nothing like learning through pain.
Just ate at Charley’s steakhouse in Orlando
As has been my idiom lately, I will comment on food.
Went to Charley’s steakhouse while attending EMC World.
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I wonder when dedup will make it to the arrays
Anyone feel that deduplication is not finding its final resting place in backups and WAN accelerators?
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Another windows tuning I forgot to mention
I use my laptop so much that I sometimes forget about some server-type tunings.
I resuscitated my hot-rod AMD box – it’s a grossly overclocked monster but only has 1GB RAM (since it’s hard to find that kind of fast RAM in bigger sizes, and using 4 sticks prohibits me from overclocking it so much). Let’s just say the CPU is running a full GHz faster than stock, and with air, not water or peltier coolers.
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Cisco WAAS benchmarks, and WAN optimizers in general
Lately I’ve been dealing with WAN accelerators a lot, with the emphasis on Cisco’s WAAS (some other, smaller players are Riverbed, Juniper, Bluecoat, Tacit/Packeteer and Silverpeak). The premise is simple and compelling: Instead of having all those servers at your edge locations, move your users’ data to the core and make accessing the data feel almost as fast as having it locally, by deploying appliances that act as proxies. At the same time, you will actually decrease the WAN utilization, enabling you to use cheaper pipes, or at least not have to upgrade, where in the past you were planning to anyway.
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On traveling lately
Been a while since I updated this blog. Too busy running around, evangelizing cool technologies, eating rich food, not exercising and spending WAY too much time in airports delayed due to bad weather. Someone needs to either:
Just ate at Keens Steakhouse in NYC
Well, just finished the meal. Steak was ordered medium-rare, arrived medium, a bit chewy (but still tasty) and not hot. I was too tired to complain and ate military style (i.e. it was gone in a minute).
The 26oz ribeye I had at Wollensky’s a couple years ago was a religious experience, comparatively. That thing needed a butterknife, at most. Sometimes staring at it hard enough was sufficient to lop off a piece.
I admit I don’t have enough of a statistical sample for either joint.
Just thought I’d share this.
D
It’s all about data classification and searching
I don’t know if this has been discussed elsewhere but I felt like I had an epiphany so there…
They way I see it, in a decade or two the most important technology regarding data will be data classification and search technologies.
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