Reflections on VMworld 2012

“The Clone Wars” or “The Battle of Five [Platform] Armies”

Do you remember the Mac vs PC platform wars? Novell vs Microsoft? Token ring vs TCP/IP? iPhone vs Android? Java vs .NET (vs C#)? Betamax vs VHS?

Reflections on VMworld 2012

Learning to love uncertainty

Historically storage administration was a relatively straightforward endeavor. You could empirically measure how much capacity you needed, project anticipated growth, and plan accordingly. Likewise you could measure an application's existing IO requirements, extrapolate based on planned growth, and feel comfortable that you probably got the sizing right. Sure sometimes it felt more like art than science, but at the end of the day you could point to an Excel spreadsheet and some fudge factor you used to do your math.

Learning to love uncertainty

Decoding WWIDs (or how to tell what's what)

The difficulty of determining exactly which storage is presented is a common refrain in organizations where the storage and server teams are separate. At best this is an inconvenience (which LUN are you talking about?) while at worst it can be catastrophic (you put a file system on what!?).

Decoding WWIDs (or how to tell what's what)

Replicating a multipathed Linux boot device

One of our customers currently replicates an Oracle database that runs on top of RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.6 using HDS' TrueCopy product. While the system has been in place for awhile the replication is relatively new.

Replicating a multipathed Linux boot device