VMware Site Recovery Manager Integration

 Posted on June 10, 2008  |  Erik

I’ve been going over the Site Recovery Manager documentation and there seems to be one missing piece: an easy to find directory of the Site Recovery Adapter (SRA) themselves. The SRA is a component provided by the storage supplier and is responsible for managing the dialogue with the SAN storage for everything concerning the snapshot management and LUN presentation. The VMware compatibility matrix is fairly comprehensive, but nowhere is listed a site where you can download the SRAs for each supported storage bay. [Read More]

Conflicting demands

 Posted on June 9, 2008  |  Erik

On a side note to all of my nattering about the WWDC Keynote coming up in a few moments, I thought that I’d point out to those of you that are reading from anglophone countries that this event coincides with the Euro 2008 France-Romania game (The first French game). The tension is high on all fronts as I’m underneath a TV in the café while waiting for the next train and all eyes in front of me are glued to the game in progress as I mull over the latest info coming in from and NetNewsWire. [Read More]

Musings on the App Store (pre-keynote)

 Posted on June 9, 2008  |  Erik

Sometime later today, Steve will be unveiling the best and worst kept secret coming out of Apple this year with the second generation iPhone. I was in the midst of preparing an outline of my ideas and comments on the keynote to fill in as I follow the keynote and starting thinking about the App Store in light of some of the other rumours that have been floating around. As I was typing, I started thinking that the name “App Store” is an intentional shortening that evokes both “Application” and “Apple”. [Read More]

Enterprise storage - modern solutions

 Posted on June 6, 2008  |  Erik

Continued from The conundrum of enterprise storage There are a number of ways to ease the problems that have been created by the disparity of surface vs IO. One way is to transform your IO workload into something that is more sequential and less random. Currently, the best example that I’ve found of this solution are the products made by Datacore (SANMelody and SANSymphony). They interpose themselves between the storage and the servers and behave like native storage to the servers. [Read More]

Gary Krakow is obviously on crack

 Posted on June 6, 2008  |  Erik

Gary Krakow Says Apple Needs to License BlackBerry or Windows Mobile: " Hard to believe this isn’t a joke. (Fake Steve is wrong about Krakow’s employer, though — he hasn’t worked for MSNBC for a few months, and is now employed by TheStreet.com) ‘★’ (Via Daring Fireball.) Wow. Here’s a great example of someone who doesn’t know how computers work. Licensing an OS wholesale is the silliest thing that Apple could do to the iPhone. [Read More]

The conundrum of enterprise storage

 Posted on June 6, 2008  |  Erik

This is a subject that I’ve been spending a lot of time with lately. I’ve been reaching out through the intertubes a lot trying to get a decent feel of where things are going and what will be the viable solutions going forward. Fundamentally, I am being confronted with a couple of issues mostly with regards to coping with issues surrounding consolidation via virtualisation and the conflicting limitations of disk capacity vs IO latency. [Read More]

Re: Windows 7 Touch Screen - If There's One Thing I Can't Stand...

 Posted on June 2, 2008  |  Erik

If There’s One Thing I Can’t Stand…: “Microsoft has been touting Windows 7 at the AllThingsD conference. Steve Wildstrom was there. The main feature? A multi-touch interface, similar to that of the iPhone, and also Microsoft’s own Surface technology. (See the video below, courtesy YouTube.) So its Windows, but Windows that lets you manipulate files and objects directly on the screen by touching them as alternative to the mouse. I can see this making sense in the world of tablet computing, where Microsoft has made some inroads. [Read More]

iPhone 2 home stretch

 Posted on May 26, 2008  |  Erik

We’re getting into the home stretch waiting on the next generation of the iPhone, due (according to most sources) June 9, at the WWDC keynote. I’ve noticed that this version is generating as much, if not more, real interest in my colleagues and clients. While the initial model garnered a lot of interest, it was not associated with immediate purchases, most people here in France were waiting on the 3G version. [Read More]

iPhone vs UMPC : Do You Have That Portable in a Midsize?

 Posted on May 23, 2008  |  Erik

Do You Have That Portable in a Midsize? - New York Times: “This portable world is now neatly broken into gadgets that fit comfortably in your pocket and devices that snuggle equally comfortably on your lap. Is there room for a third category? Perhaps a new class of consumer gadgets that fits somewhere between hand-held and laptop?” (Via New York Times.) Having watched and played with various different computers in the alternate form factors, I think the options come down to this: [Read More]

Microsoft Virtualisation Q&A

 Posted on May 23, 2008  |  Erik

Q&A: Microsoft’s virtualization chief assesses the competition, licensing and security - Network World Lots of interesting stuff in here - and a few things that bear examination and questioning. > “The prevailing belief among observers is that Microsoft is way behind VMware. What do you say to the WSV-bashers? At a high level, I disagree. Server virtualization is still a developing market and technology. Since, to a great degree, the utilization of virtualization has been in relatively confined areas, typically in large enterprises or infrastructure products like [VMware’s] ESX Server, Microsoft will be able to have a much broader approach and make virtualization available to a wider swath of the industry. [Read More]