Category: SAN

  • What does your infrastructure analytics really tell you?

    There is no mistaking the value of data visualization combined with analytics.  Data visualization can help make sense of the abstract or information not easily conveyed by numbers.  Data analytics excels at taking discrete data points that make no sense on their own, into findings that have context, and relevance.  The two together can present…

  • Understanding block sizes in a virtualized environment

    Cracking the mysteries of the Data Center is a bit like space exploration. You think you understand what everything is, and how it all works together, but struggle to understand where fact and speculation intersect. The topic of block sizes, as they relate to storage infrastructures is one such mystery. The term being familiar to…

  • My vSphere Home Lab. 2016 edition

    Here we go again. I had no intention of writing a follow-up to my "Home Lab 2015 edition" post last year, as I didn’t foresee any changes to the lab in the coming year that would be interesting enough to write about.  So much for predicting the future. Sometimes Home Lab environments tend to border…

  • Working set sizes in the Data Center

    There is no shortage of mysteries in the data center. These stealthy influencers can undermine performance and consistency of your environment, while remaining elusive to identify, quantify, and control. Virtualization helped expose some of this information, as it provided an ideal control plane for visibility. But it does not, and cannot properly expose all data…

  • Understanding PernixData FVP’s clustered read caching functionality

    When PernixData debuted FVP back in August 2013, for me there was one innovation in particular that stood out above the rest.  The ability to accelerate writes (known as “Write Back” caching) on the server side, and do so in a fault tolerant way.  Leverage fast media on the server side to drive microsecond write…

  • Dogs, Rush hour traffic, and the history of storage I/O benchmarking–Part 1

    Evaluating performance of x86 based servers and workstations has had a history of deficiency. Twenty years ago, Administrators who tested system performance usually did little more than run a simple CPU benchmark to see how much faster a 50MHz system was than a 25 MHz system. Rarely did testing go beyond this. Nostalgia aside, it…

  • Interpreting Performance Metrics in PernixData FVP

    In the simplest of terms, performance charts and graphs are nothing more than lines with pretty colors.  They exist to provide insight and enable smart decision making.  Yet, accurate interpretation is a skill often trivialized, or worse, completely overlooked.  Depending on how well the data is presented, performance graphs can amaze or confuse, with hardly…

  • Your Intel NUC Home Lab questions answered

    With my recent post on what’s currently running in my vSphere Home Lab, I received a number of questions about one particular part of the lab; that being my Management Cluster built with Intel NUCs. So here is a quick compilation of those questions (with answers) I’ve had around this topic. Why did you go…

  • My vSphere Home Lab. 2015 edition

    The vSphere Home Lab. For some, it is a tool for learning. For others it is a hobby. And for the rest of us, it is a weird addiction rationalized as one of the first two reasons. Home Labs come in all shapes and sizes, and there really is no right or wrong way to…

  • Applying Innovation in the Workplace

    Those of us in this IT industry need not be reminded that IT is as much of a consumer of solutions as it is a provider of services.  Advancing technologies attempt to provide services that are faster, more resilient, and feature rich. Sometimes advancement brings unintended consequences while simultaneously creating even more room to innovate.…