Bob Plankers is an IT generalist with direct knowledge in many areas, such as storage, networking, virtualization, security, system admistration, and data center operations. He has 17 years of experience in IT, is a three-time VMware vExpert and blogger, and serves as the virtualization & cloud architect for a major Midwestern university.
The Dell PowerEdge FX2 is a 2U rackmount blade chassis with a common infrastructure allowing servers and storage to share power, cooling, network switching, and chassis management. When it was announced last fall, there were two options: the FC630 two-socket, half-width Xeon blade, and the FM120x4, an Intel Atom–based microserver option. Dell quietly started shipping …
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In part one of this article, I lamented the state of our enterprise storage arrays and talked about the features we absolutely need on any new arrays bought this year. Why the lament? Because this is 2015, and we’re tired of the 1995 technology we’ve been using. When you send out your RFPs this year, …
Continue reading “Six Features You Absolutely Need on Your Storage in 2015, Part 2”
It’s 2015, but you would think it was 1995 based on what we’re still using in our data centers for enterprise storage. We still have gobs and gobs of spinning disks, sucking power and boring us to death while they find our data. Convergence is largely unconverged—we still have separate Fibre Channel and IP data …
Continue reading “Six Features You Absolutely Need on Your Storage in 2015”
Every VMworld conference is different, with a different tone and pace to it. At this year’s VMworld US, it felt like everything was evolutionary and very little was revolutionary. Icing that cake, VMware broke the decade-old trend of new vSphere announcements. Sure, the keynotes mentioned the next version, mostly by talking about some of the …
Every year, VMware has new product and strategy announcements that steal the show at VMworld, so vendors tend to make their own announcements in the two weeks leading up to the conference. This year is no different, with nearly all vendors in the virtualization space announcing and readying their latest wares for the 25,000+ people …
VMware has joined the ranks of the hyperconverged, announcing VMware EVO:RAIL, a solution built on its vSphere foundation coupled with VMware VSAN. Readers here know that the converged infrastructure available for years now solves some problems in IT, but frankly, most of those problems are political. The guts of converged infrastructures are largely business as …
