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I got a chance to take a quick peak at the vCloud Air beta during the Early Access Program and wanted to share some of the experience. I found the solution very simple to use and straight forward, even without needing to look at any install guides or user manuals. The interfaces were very intuitive. Right off the bat, you get to select your virtual Private Cloud region and then create some virtual machines from pre-defined templates. The templates are based on bare bones operating systems templates such as CentOS, Windows 2012 etc and depending on the type of template you choose, a different pricing methodology will be applied. Let’s face it, open source OS’s are free and Windows isn’t. Gotta pay the bills right? ...

I had one of those serious first world problems where I was intermittently getting poor wireless connectivity from my upstairs bedroom at night. My wireless router is downstairs in my office on the opposite side of the house, and my neighbors’ wireless was also causing some interference. So I was about to get out my chainsaw to start taking out a wall and part of my upstairs floor, when I thought “Maybe a wireless extender would work for me?” ...

Pure Storage presented at Storage Field Day 6 and I had the opportunity to visit their Headquarters for a second time to discuss their technology. I’ve written about “Pure” before after they presented at Virtualizaton Field Day 3 back in February but it was based more around their " Forever Flash" services. This time I was more interested in their architecture and found that their company name “Pure Storage” may be a bit misleading. Everyone knows that they produce arrays that are all SSD and provide tons of IOPS and low latency, blah blah blah. These arrays are far from being just a device full of fast storage. There is a lot of know how based on SSD architecture that has been put into this array to get more out of it than just fast drives. ...

When I saw the Virtual SAN solution from VMware my first thought was that a small office might really love this solution because it eliminated the requirement for a Storage Area Network (SAN) for small offices. Often I would see some small remote offices that have a requirement for a few servers and a bit of highly available storage but this was cost prohibitive for a variety of reasons. Remote offices would need power, cooling and some sort of staff (possibly remote staff) to manage all of these services as well as paying for a shared storage device. Remote office SAN’s are typically a waste since some of these offices really have a very minimal storage footprint, such as less than 5 TB of disk space. It would seem like a waste to by a highly available SAN to house 2TB of data, am I right? ...

So you just bought VMware Virtual SAN and have stood up your site with some ESXi hosts. When all of a sudden you realize that Virtual SAN is block based and you really needed file based storage. OH NO! What could we do to resolve this situation? I appears as though Nexenta was looking out for this situation and developed a product called Nexenta Connect for VMware Virtual SAN and they presented it during Storage Field Day 6 ...

During Storage Field Day 6, I was fortunate enough to get presentation from Andrew Warfield from CohoData about a variety of things. I’ll say a variety mainly because my head is still swimming from all of the concepts that Andy was trying convey. If you don’t believe me, watch the videos and decide for yourself. WARNING!!! BE PREPARED TO PUT YOUR THINKING CAP ON! One of the concepts Andy was talking about was the idea that going forward, all arrays should be hybrid arrays. Immediately, my mind wondered what some of the “All Flash” array vendors would say about this, but he went on to explain this premise in more detail. ...

It’s hard to get too excited about a monitoring system, especially one that’s main focus is to notify a hardware vendor of a problem. However, Nimble Storage has an impressive phone home solution called InfoSight that they are leveraging for more than just fault notifications and opening tickets on failed hardware. This solution is being used for a variety of analytical purposes to both improve their product as well as improve the customer’s experience with their array purchase. ...

I’ve seen front-end storage systems before and never really been too impressed with them. My primary thoughts about a front-end storage system was this, “My storage array already has a front-end, why do I want to put another layer of abstraction in front of it.” Obviously, there is still a use case for having a single namespace to hide the underlying systems, which might be neat so that a company could use multiple arrays of different types or even vendors and have a single place to go to access that storage. For the most part, I still think that this is a luxury that many companies can’t justify since some extra time spent by the infrastructure team will do the job. ...

During a recent install, I got stuck on an issue (or so I thought) assigning an SSL Certificate to some of the vRealize Automation Appliances. I went through all of the installation procedures and the appliance stated “SSL Certificate Installed Successfully”, but when I went to the appliance, the certificate still showed the default VMware certificate. You can see when I go to the appliance, I was getting a warning on the SSL Certificate. ...