VMware’s Roadmap, Hybrid, Is the Future

It has been almost five years since VMware laid out its vision based on the ideology behind the software-defined data center (SDDC). This announcement came during one of the keynote addresses during the VMworld 2013 conference in San Francisco, California. Since that time, VMware has been working diligently to make its vision a reality while helping to shape the definition of what a twenty-first-century data center is and will be moving forward.

When IT Comes Apart: A Case of Failure

What do you do when everything fails—not just typical application failure, but failure of more than one subsystem all at once? Recently, I had such a failure. The air-conditioning plant failed, and the new 10G switch failed, causing a loop that brought down the entire storage network. Then, the storage redundancy failed due to a …

Hyperconverged Design: Limit CPU Consumption by Limiting Storage Performance

I am intrigued by the design decisions that are made as products are developed. I find it amazing how often problems are solved in completely different ways in different products. Sometimes these decisions show up when you are not expecting them. I encountered one such example at a vBrownBag TechTalk presentation at the OpenStack Summit in …

Inventing Complexity

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 …