Recently, a number of marketing campaigns have seemed to be inventing complexity to try to give products the appearance of having some sort of competitive advantage. The invented complexity involves real-world items that many folks just do not use, or even care about, in order to make products look like something different. We have spoken about in-kernel vs. VSA in …
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David and Goliath
I, like most in the modern IT industry, have spent most of my working life installing, configuring, and maintaining Microsoft products, ranging from Active Directory and Exchange through Terminal Services and MSSQL Server. Most of these products have had extra layers of third-party software on top (Citrix MetaFrame, anyone?) or blended in to make them …
Goodbye to a Founding Father: Andy Grove, 1938–2016
On March 21, 2016, we lost Andy Grove, a founding father of our industry. Andy was a first-generation Hungarian immigrant who became employee number one at Intel. After earning his PhD at Berkeley, he worked with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore at Fairchild Semiconductor until Moore and Noyce co-founded Intel; Grove joined them there on the day of Intel’s incorporation.
Getting to Green: Monitoring Your Cloud
Recently, we upgraded our cloud environment. This raises the question, “What is wrong with the environment after an upgrade?” As tools improve, we get new warnings, messages, and analytics. This often leads to a decision to ensure that after the upgrade, all monitoring, alerts, and other diagnostics show green across the board. Is this required, desirable, and …
In Cloud, Cost Is Everything
The use of the cloud is not governed by technology so much as it is governed by cost: the cost of on-premises management, support, expertise, and environment vs. the cost of cloud services and outsourced expertise, management, etc. The cost differential must be high enough in the short term to allow it to become valid …
VSA Resources: Smoking Gun or Red Herring?
In a previous article, I wrote that customers don’t care whether a hyperconverged solution uses a VSA or runs the storage cluster in-kernel. I stand by that assertion. One of the comments pointed out that I had missed an area of discussion: that of the resource requirements of the VSA itself. I still don’t think …
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