How did the development of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) come about? Did someone decide that storage networking and storage arrays were too complex? Did a server vendor look at SANs and decide to do things differently? As far as I’m aware, it didn’t happen either way. Future HCI vendors looked at the challenges of running a virtualized data …
Continue reading “Hyperconverged Isn’t the End Game: Simplification Is”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “VSA Resources: Smoking Gun or Red Herring?”
Working on the edges of marketing is interesting. As a technical person, I sometimes find that marketing people do strange things. I find it particularly funny when marketing departments from competing vendors have public arguments that are irrelevant to their customers. I see that going on now between some of the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors. These …
Continue reading “In-Kernel vs. VSA: The Phony War of Hyperconverged Marketing”
On February 10, 2016, VMware announced VSAN v6.2. This is the forth generation of its flagship software-defined storage (SDS) product to be released. At the time of the release, VMware announced that it has more than 3,000 customers running the products; that is quite a number.
We often talk about utility computing in the cloud, but it can be on-premises too. I like to think of utility from the point of view of the consumer. By concentrating on what the customer experience looks like, we get to avoid pedantic discussions of what is a commodity and what is a cloud. Electricity supply is the usual …
