FCoE: “Soft” FCoE Integration

by dave on July 2, 2009


There appears to be quite the interesting discussion going on over at Scott Lowe’s blog regarding FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) as its relationship to the data center, VMware, and, pretty much everything else. I love watching people put their thoughts to eletronic ink (via the comments section) but recently, I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations around FCoE that focus on different approaches to FCoE within the data center.

It all started with a phone call…
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Emulex E3S: Fitment

by dave on June 30, 2009


In my first article on the Emulex E3S Gateway, I simply relayed a high-level look at the device as well as a sample diagram of how integration would look within a very simplistic block-based environment. Overall, it appears that the concept of a hardware “gateway” to the cloud is very well accepted as a mechanism for enterprise cloud integration but, it’s not without its fitment issues. In this particular post, I’m going to attempt to answer and evaluate why this approach is appropriate and where integration points could be somewhat sticky.

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Moving from Block to Cloud: Emulex E3S

by dave on June 18, 2009


It’s not often that I get excited about technology within the storage space. There are notables, of course, mostly that take my love for high bandwidth interconnects (e.g. Infiniband, Rapid I/O) and mash them up with high-speed storage (EFDs, Fusion-IO). That being said, when it comes to the cloud, I’m absolutely estatic when off-the-shelf components can be utilized to get your data from the realm of block-based storage into the cloud-esque realm of object-based storage. Today, we’ll do a quick high level overview of one such technology gives you the freedom of moving from block to cloud (and back).

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Dell and VMware: A match made in heaven

June 3, 2009

Cool new toy just landed in my lab for a production VMware vSphere implementation.  This one is going to one of our internal groups that has a moderate load Microsoft SQL implementation. I’ve included a slideshow below so that you can see some of the absolutely fantastic features this Dell R610 (and even it’s bigger [...]

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Where Community Begins

May 21, 2009

Nothing tends to solidify a community more than a cause that hits each of us at our base element: our physical being.  In this case, we’ve seen a massive explosion of support within the storage community with folks from NetApp, HDS, HP, IBM, and EMC (amongst many) coming to the aid of Nick Glasgow who [...]

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