Backing up VMs seems to be one of the topics nobody can seem to be able to agree on despite a plethora of reading material on the subject – and maybe because of said plethora.
The true XIV fail condition finally revealed (?)
I just got this information:
For XIV to be in jeopardy you need to lose 1 drive from one of the host-facing ingest nodes AND 1 drive from the normal data nodes within a few minutes (so there’s no time to rebuild) while writing to the thing.
Have no way of confirming this but it did come from a reliable source.
A customer recently tried pulling random drives and XIV didn’t shut down and was working fine, but they were from the data nodes.
Why can’t anyone post something concrete here? I’m sure IBM won’t post since the confusion serves them well.
For what it’s worth, the customer is really happy with the simplicity of the XIV GUI.
D
So what exactly is IBM trying to do with the XIV?
By now most people dealing with storage know that IBM acquired the XIV technology. What IBM is doing now is trying to push the technology to everyone and their dog, for reasons we’ll get into…
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On current smartphones
The time has come for me to get a new phone (my current one can’t keep up with the demands and the speed or lack thereof ends up frustrating me).
So I’ve been looking at the plethora of devices out there – Berries, Windows Mobile, iPhone, etc (disclaimer: I’ve been a Blackberry user for many years now).
So, how frequently do you really test DR?
It’s after 4AM, I can’t sleep since I’m in pain after a car accident and I’ve had altogether too much caffeine. I’ve already watched 3 movies. BTW, “I am Legend” – WTF! Never have I seen a decent book butchered so much! The ideas in the book were so much stronger. Seriously, go get the book and forget the movie. Sorry, Will.
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My frustration with the quality and education of CIOs, CTOs, IT Directors, what have you… what caliber IT manager should you choose?
As a matter of course, I deal with all kinds of IT manager types during the course of a campaign.
Sometimes said managers are well-versed in technology. Other times they have biases, are bigoted, and so on. Which is fine, I’m more opinionated, cranky and obnoxious than most.
Cinebench benchmarks – performance comparison between Vista 64 and Mac OS X
Been a while since I posted anything – there’s a TON of material but some of us actually do more than blog, it’s quarter/year end, and I barely have time to go to the bathroom…
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Postmark on late 2008 Macbook Pro
So I’m now the proud owner of a tricked-out 2.8GHz MBP.
Naturally I’ve been tinkering with it already (only had it for 2 days). I’ve disabled swapfile encryption, for instance, and I think it makes it have teh snappy.
A word of caution when setting up a deduplicating VTL
Based on some recent experiences I wanted to make people aware of some caveats with setting up a VTL with deduplication. This is specifically regarding the EMC DL3D (AKA Quantum DXi) but applies to all of them. This will be a mercifully short and to the point post. Here’s the rub:
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What is the value of your data? Do you have the money to implement proper DR that works? How are you deciding what kind of storage and DR strategy you’ll follow? And how does Continuous Data Protection like EMC’s RecoverPoint help?
Maybe the longest title for a post ever. And one of my longest, most rambling posts ever, it seems.
Recently we did a demo for a customer that I thought opened an interesting can of worms. Let’s set the stage – and, BTW, let it be known that I lost my train of thought multiple times writing this over multiple days so it may seem a bit incoherent (unusually, it wasn’t written in one shot).
Massive benchmark comparison between Windows XP, Vista and 2008 Server, 32- and 64-bit
Found this while surfing and couldn’t resist posting the link. This guy did a massive array of tests on pretty much all versions of Windows that matter at the moment. The short version? If it’s performance you’re after, there’s no clear winner, since they all have their strengths. Overall, of the currently-supported OSes 2008 server seems to have the edge, as indicated by my own experiences. Attaching the results below, but here’s a link, too.
Virtualized Windows I/O performance on Xen with and without the optimized PV drivers, and versus the Linux host
One of my readers, Randall Ehren, was kind enough to provide benchmarks for Xen-virtualized Windows 2003 and XP with and without the optimized PV driver, and also compare to the underlying host. Most of the text below is copied verbatim from his correspondence with me, I just added some clarification in places.
Finally, some postmark results for OSX! And how does it do versus Windows?
My colleague Ian (last name withheld to save him from the Mac zealots) compiled the postmark code on his beloved Mac and ran it with the same settings I use in general (see older blog posts, just search for postmark).
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Lowest-impact antivirus tool I’ve ever tried
I’ve been trying out ESET’s NOD32 on my 64-bit 2008 Server box. Before that I’d tried Avast! – which has great detection but noticeably slows down my computer, even when it’s loading pre-cached and pre-checked content (easy test: load Firefox with and without Avast! several times. It’s ALWAYS much slower to load with antivirus on than without. Without Avast! it loads instantly).
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Windows Server 2008 RTM 64-bit performance versus Vista SP1 64-bit, and using 2008 as a workstation
I’ve been using Vista x64 for a while now, just so I can make use of all the memory on my machine (an über-thinkpad), and because I like shiny new things and 64-bitness and don’t want to be one-upped by smug Mac users with their feline-named OSes, mock turtlenecks and their newfound 64-bit capabilities. Of course, with the good comes some bad – Vista, while in my opinion a step forward in many ways, does take a step backward when it comes to some areas of performance and sheer resource requirements. A lot of it can be attributed to poorly-written drivers, especially any Aero GUI slowdowns with nVidia cards.