That Was the Year That Was: 2016

After the end of a year, we often pause and reflect to celebrate our successes and to try and gain closure for our failures and tragedies. For many, 2016 has been a horrible year. I am not going to talk about politics, as that is far too contentious, but the world seems a little darker today than …

Will 2016 Be the Year of VDI — Sorry, EUC?

Who or what is EUC? In an industry plagued by TLAs (three-letter acronyms), EUC, or end-user computing, is the new nomenclature for VDI, or virtual desktop infrastructure. This is not just the emperor’s new clothes, but a redefinition of the paradigm of adopting a more inclusive view of the software, hardware, and processes that shore up …

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.

Dell Fluid Cache for SAN

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 …