My new mobile lab

 Posted on March 29, 2016  |  Erik

Mobile lab I’ve always tried to have a decent home lab setup and have been happily using various mixes of HP Microservers, Intel NUCs, Mac Minis and various white box systems. Of course, each of these systems have their particularities and limitations notably in terms of memory, number of NICs, size, power, etc. But a few things keep happening and quite often the home lab ends up running bits and pieces of my home “production” network, so I’m finally going all in on a new lab setup. [Read More]

Hyperconvergence webinar

 Posted on June 12, 2015  |  Erik

A quick news update. I’ll be cohosting a SimpliVity sponsored webinar (in French) on the state of the Hyperconvergence marketplace, based on the analysis of the survey done by ActualTech Media. We’ll be going a little further in the analysis specific to EMEA as this is addressed to the French market.

Register here.

Reserve the date: July 1st at 10AM CEST. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Can't register vSphere Replication appliance

 Posted on March 20, 2015  |  Erik

I ran into an interesting problem the other day when deploying vSphere Replication where the Appliance couldn’t register the service with vCenter. It turns out to be a combination of factors about the network configuration that can produce this problem. The problem is most likely to occur if you are using the vCSA. As far as I can tell, the sequence of events for registering with vCenter is the following: [Read More]

Edition issues

 Posted on March 13, 2015  |  Erik

Edition issues I’ve been standing on the sidelines of discussions surrounding the Apple Edition Watch and the pricing, listening to points varying from the tech world’s point of view where value is derived uniquely from functionality, and their total incomprehension of markets that function differently, to the luxury watch world where value is derived from craftsmanship and the cost in person-hours, to the concepts from the fashion world surrounding things like Veblen goods and learning a lot. [Read More]

Back to backups (yet again)

 Posted on March 3, 2015  |  Erik

In the world of information technology, nothing is static and lasts forever, especially best practices. I’ve been pointing out to clients for a while now that backups need to be rethought in terms of the “jobs to be done” philosophy and no longer thought of as “the thing that happens overnight when files are copied to tapes”. Historically, backups served two purposes : Being able to go back in time and retrieve data that is no longer available [Read More]

The Cellular Hub

 Posted on September 30, 2014  |  Erik

There has been an upsurge in articles and discussions around the wearable market in recent weeks after the Apple Watch announcement. Some of the best thinking has come from Ben Thompson over at Stratechery, and John Gruber at Daring Fireball but I wonder if we are all parsing this through the restrictive lens of what we know and are familiar with. One thought is that the Apple Watch, a device that must be tethered to an iPhone, will perhaps be capable of becoming a fully autonomous device including native 3G, GPS etc. [Read More]

Understanding the impact of scale-out storage

 Posted on August 14, 2014  |  Erik

Scale-out has the ability to change everything In the software-only space solutions like Datacore and Nexenta are really quite good (I have used and deployed both) and I still recommend them for customers that need some of their unique features, but they share a fundamental limitation in that they are based on a traditional scale-up architecture model. The result is that there is still a fair bit of manual housekeeping involved in maintaining, migrating and growing the overall environment. [Read More]

Understanding the value of software in storage

 Posted on August 7, 2014  |  Erik

It’s all about the software In today’s storage world, the reality is that the actual storage component and the surrounding hardware is all commodity based (with a few exceptions). A storage system is composed of disks, disk cases, communications links, processors, memory and networking. Fundamentally, the disks are the same ones you can buy from Amazon, NewEgg et al. The only major observable difference is that enterprise storage drives tend to be equipped with SAS or NL-SAS which offers a more advanced command set and a more robust architecture permitting dual path connections as compared to SATA. [Read More]

Telus rebuttal

 Posted on July 10, 2014  |  Erik

An interesting article from Telus, partially debunking an article by Michael Geist concerning an OECD report on cellular service in Canada. It’s a good mix of information, some of which is entirely pertinent, other bits less so which I’m going to try and add a little bit more context from the point of view of a Canadian who has lived in the US and France and travelled for work in England and western Europe. [Read More]