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.
After months of beta testing boasting 12,000+ beta testers, VMware has finally thrown its hat into the hyperconverged virtualization space with the GA release of VMware vSphere 5.5 Update 1. Among numerous bug fixes to vSphere, this release contains the GA code for VMware VSAN. VSAN is a shared-nothing clustered storage technology embedded in the …
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Back in mid-2011, Dell acquired RNA Networks, a small startup out of Portland, Oregon. At the time Dell purchased it, RNA had a product, MVX, that employed three different ways to pool memory across multiple servers in order to accelerate workloads. One was a way to pool memory as a storage cache in order to …
The board of Calxeda, the company trying to bring low-power ARM CPUs to the server market, has voted to cease operations in the wake of a failed round of financing. This is completely unsurprising to me, for a few different reasons. Virtualization is more suited to the needs of IT Calxeda’s view of the world …
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A few weeks ago I had a chance to speak at length with Andres Rodriguez, the incredibly passionate founder and CEO of Nasuni. Nasuni is a highly innovative storage company providing storage infrastructure backed by the cloud. I’ve been writing a lot about caching and flash in virtual infrastructures, and went into the conversation thinking …
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I’ve written in the near past about a number of different products that are helping enterprises use flash as a cache to accelerate their traditional storage workloads. One product that is helping to push the whole market forward, if only by raising awareness of the options in this space, is VMware’s own vSphere Flash …
Most storage vendors are happy to just add flash to their existing product lines, often using it as cache, or as a storage tier handled transparently within the array. Few vendors take the opportunity to rethink the way storage works, though, from the basics of performance to how it meshes with the idea of public & private clouds. Coho Data, coming out of stealth mode with their first product, the DataStream, does just that.
