What Next for x86 Hardware Industry: The Death of the Blade Format?

The rise of server-based flash caching and other technologies like local performant storage pools, whether virtual storage appliances like the HP StoreVirtual VSA or VMware’s VSAN, marks a possible return to the days of the pizza box server in data centers across the world.

VSAN Pricing Comparison

Last week, VMware released vSphere 5.5 Update 1. You can find the release notes here, and the links to the download are here. Why is this such a milestone? It finally marks the release of VMware’s long-awaited entry into the world of software-defined storage, the VSAN (Virtual Storage Area Network). But before we move on …

Dell and Red Hat Collaboration, Part 2

It has been around a decade since Dell and Red Hat’s collaboration, when they helped launch Red Hat Linux into the mainstream. Now, they have gotten back together to collaborate on an enterprise-grade version of OpenStack, based on the Havana version. This announcement recently followed another announcement from Red Hat that they would be bundling …

Utopian Disaster Recovery

Recently at Dell World, I was part of a conversation about what would be utopian disaster recovery and where we are today in the state of the industry. But where we are today is transforming, with a new name that encompasses many technologies. We are now using the term “data protection” (DP) to mean much …