The great thing about running a Mom & Pop store is the familiarity of everyone who comes to the store. Mom and pop know everything that’s on the shelves, and also know all of the customers and their needs for every visit. Mom and pop have what’s referred to as transparency into their market....

Veeam Monitor http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring.html Product datasheet available here. Veeam Monitor also has two versions - a free (yes FREE!) version with full monitoring capabilities, but it does not include capacity planning. The non-free version is $250/socket. This tool also runs on top...

Someone recently asked me why backups continue to fail on a nightly basis. His contention was that, with all the technology advances of the past 10 years, backup failures should be a thing of the past. That got me thinking – what are the reasons for backup failures…? The most obvious and common causes...

So going green seems to me a relatively new label to old data center problems / considerations. Power consumption, air conditioning, floor space, rack density. Outside the data center, green means things like low emissions, ride your bike to work, clean energy, reduce your carbon footprint, recycle,...

Quest vFoglight http://www.vizioncore.com/products/vFoglight You can get their product brief PDF here. vFoglight is priced per CPU, with two versions. SE is $499/socket, Pro is $699/socket. There is also a vEssentials package where you can pick your three favorite vizioncore products (hello vRanger Pro!),...

A while back I wrote a white paper for GlassHouse - Five tips for a green data center it read. Practical tips was its objective. Since that time almost every vendor has jumped on the green wagon. Of course every vendor has their own claim to getting there. Some claim that SATA drives spin slower and...

A common theme running through IT organizations across virtually every industry these days is finding ways to do more with less. This puts many storage groups between a rock and a hard place: facing increasing pressure to reign in storage spending while fighting back the continuing floodwaters of seemingly...

The past few days I have been setting up some evaluations of various tools used to monitor a VMware View implementation. I thought I’d share what I’ve seen so far. These are not full technical reviews of the products, in fact I’ve linked to quite a bit of external content that I’ve...

Online storage has been available for quite a while. Aren’t picture album sharing websites a data type specific archive? Organizing online pictures into albums, couldn’t that be a form of tagging data for discovery? The answer… Ah no, but you could make the case that it’s an example of archive...

I was recently involved with a customer who had outsourced their IT operations. This outsourcing provider in turn moved the storage management/operations piece to a team based in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Never mind that the distance, time zone and cultural differences made it a challenge to get any...