Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
Well, aside from visiting Flames and helping fix a severe customer problem. Those were rewarding. I still haven’t pooped that steak, BTW.
I was supposed to only stay for 1 day in Manhattan, fix the issue, ba da bing. I ended up staying an extra day – had no extra clothes and no time to get anything. Washed my undies on my own and used the hair dryer over a period of hours to dry them. I learned my lesson now and will always have extra stuff with me.
Not amazing news but an official announcement nonetheless: Saw this (www.macnn.com/articles/07/06/06/zfs.in.leopard/) and I couldn’t resist posting. This means a few things:
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?)
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.
I had some great customer meetings in OH this week. One meeting took me to Bowling Green, cute town.
Continue reading “Ate at Trotter’s Tavern in Bowling Green, OH”
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.
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.
Continue reading “Storage Virtualization – is there a point?”
Superb.
Not much fanfare, steaks wet-aged 21 days.
Continue reading “Ate at Del Frisco’s steakhouse in Orlando”
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.
Continue reading “Should EMC move to more multi-functional devices?”
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.
As has been my idiom lately, I will comment on food.
Went to Charley’s steakhouse while attending EMC World.
Continue reading “Just ate at Charley’s steakhouse in Orlando”
Anyone feel that deduplication is not finding its final resting place in backups and WAN accelerators?
Continue reading “I wonder when dedup will make it to the arrays”
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.
Continue reading “Another windows tuning I forgot to mention”
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.
Continue reading “Cisco WAAS benchmarks, and WAN optimizers in general”
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: