Where are they now? Recent changes in the storage space

The storage space has been a very exciting space over recent years. There have been so many new start-ups and new innovations, that it becomes difficult to keep track sometimes. More recently, there has been a lot of news around mergers, acquisitions, shutdowns and IPOs in the storage industry. It got me thinking about a lot of the changes we have seen over the past number of years in the storage market. Just for my own interest, I went back over many of my blogs, and the various conversations I had with people at various VMworld events and VMUG meetings,…

vSphere 6.0 HA and Component Protection with vMSC

I had a query recently about changes to vSphere 6.0, especially when it comes to vSphere HA and Component Protection (VMCP) with vMSC, vSphere Metro Storage Cluster. The question is very straight forward – do all the same advanced setting recommendations for PDL and APD apply to vMSC on vSphere 6.0 as they did for vSphere 5.5? Or do we have some new recommendations now around PDL and APD for vMSC with the introduction of VMCP in vSphere 6.0?

vSphere 6.0 Storage Features Part 7: VAAI XCOPY improvements

The more astute of you who have already moved to vSphere 6.0, and like looking at CLI outputs, may have observed some new columns/fields in the PSA claimrules when you run the following command: # esxcli storage core claimrule list –claimrule-class=VAAI The new fields are as follows (slide right to view full output): XCOPY Use Array XCOPY Use XCOPY Max Reported Values  Multiple Segments  Transfer Size ————— —————–  ————– false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                  false                  0 false                  …

VMworld 2014 – Storage News Part 1

Yesterday was my first day at VMworld 2014. As usual with this event, there are simply so many interesting announcements that it is hard to keep track. However, for me, there were a few things which stood out in the storage space worth calling out. These are specifically VMware focused products and features. I know that many of our partners have also made announcements in the storage space, but for today I concentrated solely on VMware. There are the two that really caught my attention.

EMC XtremIO revisited – a chat with Vinay Gaonkar

On a recent trip to VMware in Palo Alto, I found some time to visit with a good pal of mine, Vinay Gaonkar, who is now the Product Manager for XtremIO over at EMC. Vinay used to be a storage PM at VMware (he worked on the initial phases of VVols), and we worked together on a number of storage items in various vSphere releases. It’s been almost 2 years since I last spoke to the XtremIO folks (VMworld 2012 in fact, when the product still had not become generally available), so I thought that this would be a good…

EMC World 2014 Highlights (abridged)

Although I didn’t attend EMC World this year, there were a lot of interesting announcements. I managed to catch up with Matt Cowger (who sorts of sits between both the EMC & VMware camps) and ran through some of the main highlights from this year’s conference. There has been a lot written about EMC World already (and I mean a lot) so I’m going to try to keep the highlights to a minimum, and provide links to where you can read more.

VC Ops Adapters – Storage and Brocade SAN

I’ve been doing a bit of work over the past number of weeks on the adapters for vCenter Operations  (vC OPs) with my old pal Paudie. We are working on vCenter Operations 5.8 and using a vSphere 5.5U1 environment. Since we have a Brocade Fibre Channel switch and an EMC VNX array in our lab, I wanted to get the Management Pack for Storage Devices (MPSD) and the Brocade SAN Analytics Management Pack deployed, and see what information we could glean from those extension packs. When we completed the configuration, we were able to go into the vC OPs customs…