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Vaughn Stewart
RTP, NC, USA
Director & Virtualization Evangelist for NetApp
Recent Activity
Kudos buddy! Looking forward to Chad 2.0.
It’s time for change, and change = renewed invention, renewed vigor, renewed discovery.
I’m going to make this a two-part post. Part 1 = what is in the rear-view window? Part 2 = what’s out the front windshield? Part 1: CPSD and Dell EMC are in my rear-view window. First, while want to close the chapter behind me - it’s a flawed analogy, because it suggests some sort of “finality”....
http://virtualgeek.io
It’s time for change, and change = renewed invention, renewed vigor, renewed discovery.
I’m going to make this a two-part post. Part 1 = what is in the rear-view window? Part 2 = what’s out the front windshield? Part 1: CPSD and Dell EMC are in my rear-view window. First, while want to close the chapter behind me - it’s a flawed analogy, because it suggests some sort of “finality”....
Chuck,
I agree we view the world with different lens... which is a good thing. Diverse perspectives are required to address diverse needs.
Thanks for posting my comments and sharing your perspective.
-- cheers,
v
Why I Think VSAN Is So Disruptive
Looking for a great disruption story in enterprise IT tech? I think what VSAN is doing to the established storage industry deserves to be a strong candidate. I've seen disruptions -- small and large -- come and go. If you're into IT infrastructure, this is one worth watching. A few years ag...
== Disclaimer: Pure Storage Employee ==
Chuck,
Hyper-converged infrastructures like VSAN (and the prepackaged version EVO:RAIL) seem ideal in addressing market needs where even the smallest storage array is a finanical burden - ala branch offices, retail locations, militarized vehicles, etc.
As hyper-converged systems are comprised of a shared-nothing storage architecture they inherently laden by low storage utilization. How can you position VSAN or EVO:RAIL for enterprise-scale deployments? Doesn't their ~20% storage utilization disqualify them from AFAs that deliver greater than 300% storage utilization?
I graphed out the utilization of the EMC VSPEX BLUE solution here: http://virtualstorageguy.com/2015/03/12/hyper-converged-infrastructures-are-not-storage-arrays/
To reiterate, I think HCI addresses significant market needs - I just disagree with the notion that HCI can address enterprise storage needs. Customers wrestle with data center resource scarcity as much as they do with storage challenges.
I look forward to your reply.
-- cheer,
v
Why I Think VSAN Is So Disruptive
Looking for a great disruption story in enterprise IT tech? I think what VSAN is doing to the established storage industry deserves to be a strong candidate. I've seen disruptions -- small and large -- come and go. If you're into IT infrastructure, this is one worth watching. A few years ag...
While I have no insight in to the situation that led to this post, I do believe competition can bring out the worst in some individuals.
You wrote, "distrust anyone who starts talking negative about the other guy" yet I just finished reading the EMC produced document titled, "Pure's Top Ten Lies: 10 things Pure will tell you that are not true"
See the irony? You are calling out the behavior of an individual who is following in the footsteps of the EMC corporate culture. Is it only OK if EMC slings the FUD?
How about publicly challenging the EMC marketing and competitive teams to act like an industry leader. Ask them to fulfill your vision and lead by example.
- cheers,
v
XtremIO 4.0… and don’t trust people who go negative.
[UDPATE: 1/28/2015: 8:13pm PT - Some people have taken some erroneous impressions from this post, so I want to make a couple things clear: Poop flinging is bad whoever does it. I'm not claiming EMC is innocent (I thought this was clear, but some clearly missed it - see comments - so I'm callin...
Simply a fantastic post - well said Chuck
-v
Don’t Call It Software-Defined Storage, Unless …
Anytime a new concept enters the marketplace, the inevitable Definition Wars begin. Understandably, it takes a while for the industry to collectively wrap its head around a consensus perspective regarding a new subject. When it comes to one of my personal hot topics (software-defined storage), ...
Well said Chuck. Innovation and Disruption being developed and released at an unprecedented pace. You have to love what's occurring in the industry.
Software-Defined Storage And The Potential For Disruption
Last weekend, two weather systems merged off the coast of New England, creating a blizzard of "historic proportions". Each weather system wasn't particularly important by itself; but somewhat disruptive when combined. And it took a while to dig out :) I believe a similar pattern is brewing...
Great write up and supporting documents.
A few points of note. If you are a NFS customer, remember your medium is Ethernet and as such you can easily add iSCSI or FCoE RDMs to enable this solution.
Customers interested in deploying Exchange Server on datastores connected via NFS should contact their Microsoft account team and request support. Like all vendors, Microsoft ants to take care of their customers.
Lastly, with Microsoft announcing support for SMB2.2 with the forth-coming release of Hyper-V 3.0 I think it's fair to speculate that NAS is becoming more prominent and hopefully support statements will be revised sooner rather than later.
http://virtualstorageguy.com/2011/09/20/microsoft-announces-smb-2-2-and-nas-support-for-hyper-v-3-0-in-windows-8/
Virtualized Exchange Storage: VMDK or RDM or…?
One of the hottest topics I get into when talking to customers about virtualizing Exchange is storage. Not surprising considering the number of options available when we virtualize Exchange on vSphere. If you are not familiar with the common methods for provisioning storage in vSphere a brief de...
Storage Efficiency and High Performance validated on Hyper-V
Posted Jul 19, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Cisco Live Q&A – EMC vSpecialists Tee Glasgow, Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer & Nick Weaver
Posted Jul 18, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Cisco Live : Blogger Techminute with NetApp on Flexpod Solutions
Posted Jul 14, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Cisco Live Q&A – Natalie Lambert of Citrix on Desktop Virtualization Trends, Obstacles, and Opportunities
Posted Jul 14, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Cisco Live chat with J Metz of Cisco on FCoE & Putting the Cart Behind the Horse
Posted Jul 13, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Cisco Live chat with Abhinav Joshi of Cisco & Wade Holmes of VMware
Posted Jul 13, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Real-World Clouds Built on Cisco and NetApp
Posted Jul 12, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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VMware to Announce the Next Generation of their Cloud Infrastructure Offerings
Posted Jul 11, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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@Forbsy - I think it's fair to say that you are asking for some clarity from NetApp around our Backup & Restore strategy. Let me know if I have misunderstood your point.
SnapProtect (CommVault OEM) allows NetApp to offer an enterprise B&R solution which includes integration into our native data protection technologies like Snapshots, SnapMirror, & SnapVault for storage, application, virtual infrastructure, backup, and compliance administrators.
Our existing set of B&R applications tend to only address the needs of each the administrative groups. SnapProtect allows our customers to deliver the capacity, bandwidth, and time savings of our IDP technologies in a manner that is coordinated across multiple management domains and can be extended with our partners DR automation tools.
I want to apologize here, as I meant to address these discussion in a blog post or two in June and unfortunately got pulled away. I'll get back on this shortly.
Thanks for sharing your feedback.
Vaughn
Introducing NetApp SnapProtect Backup
Over the past 5 years, server virtualization has changed the data center forever and these changes have had a far-reaching impact on data center architectures and operations. One of the areas often discussed as having been affected, is the ever increasing shared storage footprint. I’d suggest to...
@Pedro - We are woking on an official release targeted for the fall. Those pesky NDAs prevent me from sharing the details here.
If you need to address a misaligned ESXI environment today you should first upgrade to data Ontap 8.0.1. This release includes logic to better better handle the impact of misaligned workloads. After the upgrade you could consider a number of steps to actually align the VMDKs...
Wait for the MBRAlign releasee that supports ESXi
Running MBRAlign from an ESX host
Using a 3rd party alignment tool
Install MBRAlign in a Linux VM (btw - this model screams - its fast)
NetApp Releases VSC 2.1 vCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere
NetApp has released the Virtual Storage Console 2.1 (VSC); our VMware vCenter plug-in. Behind the scenes the VSC is actually a framework from a number of sub-plug-ins (VSC, Rapid Cloning Utility and SMVI) delivered in a single installation. We created this sub-plug-in architecture as a way to en...
@Fletcher - I don't have intimate knowledge around the data you are seeing with nfsstat, but I'd suggest you have an application in your VM that is creating a number of writes that are less than 4KB in size.
If what I suggest is accurate there's no need to be concerned, as it is normal behavior for the application.
I know you're well aware of misalignment, but please allow me to restate for those who may not be... What we want to avoid is having misaligned I/O for hundreds or thousands of VMs on an array. The inefficiency in I/O transfers due to a large mass of misaligned VMs will stress the array and lead to the eventual need to upgrade hardware.
Let me know if the small writes is or is not the case. I'd be happy to engage others to continue the conversation if needed.
Vaughn
NetApp Releases VSC 2.1 vCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere
NetApp has released the Virtual Storage Console 2.1 (VSC); our VMware vCenter plug-in. Behind the scenes the VSC is actually a framework from a number of sub-plug-ins (VSC, Rapid Cloning Utility and SMVI) delivered in a single installation. We created this sub-plug-in architecture as a way to en...
@Fletcher - I don't have intimate knowledge around the data you are seeing with nfsstat, but I'd suggest you have an application in your VM that is creating a number of writes that are less than 4KB in size.
If what I suggest is accurate there's no need to be concerned, as it is normal behavior for the application.
I know you're well aware of misalignment, but please allow me to restate for those who may not be... What we want to avoid is having misaligned I/O for hundreds or thousands of VMs on an array. The inefficiency in I/O transfers due to a large mass of misaligned VMs will stress the array and lead to the eventual need to upgrade hardware.
Let me know if the small writes is or is not the case. I'd be happy to engage others to continue the conversation if needed.
Vaughn
Current Status, An Update, and a Look to the Future of Alignment
It has been one year to the date since the last time I authored a post on the topic of partition alignment. I think its fair to state this issue has gained awareness over the last year thanks to posts from a number of industry experts such as Duncan Epping, Aaron Delp, and Chad Sakac just to na...
Cisco Live chat with Andy Sholomon of Cisco
Posted Jul 8, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Thank You VMware for the vExpert Award
Posted Jul 8, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Will Vivek Kundra’s Departure Impact Federal Cloud Computing Initiatives?
Posted Jun 22, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Simple Versus Complicated - Verified
Posted Jun 10, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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Storage for Desktops - Simple Versus Complicated
Posted Jun 8, 2011 at The Virtual Storage Guy
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