Reviews

I ran into that funny problem where if you have so many wireless devices you’re overloading your tiny wireless router that you’ve had for 5 years. After looking around a bit I settled on the AC3200 Triband Router from Linksys. I wanted something that would be really powerful to handle all of my devices and something with a cool factor. The device arrived and had some simple instructions to configure it. Connect to the default SSID via a wireless device and open up your web browser to myrouter.local to get connected. The setup had a “Quick Setup” mode to get everything running quickly but I found that the quick setup would not work for my environment. The quick setup expects that you’ve connected your Wireless Router directly to a cable modem and in my case I’m connected to a layer three switch behind an ASA firewall. After resetting the router and doing the manual setup though, everything was good. ...

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?” ...

I just bought two new 27 inch (yeah, they’re large) monitors for my home office thanks to a suggestion from Satyam Vaghani over twitter of course. He pointed me towards the QNIX QX2710 monitor and I was first surprised with the price. At less than $350 I had to give it a shot. I mean really, who wouldn’t want two 27 inch monitors on their desk? The Good The resolution was something I was really looking at. I selected the 2560 X 1440 resolution so that I didn’t feel like I needed to buy a new monitor in a year or two because something cooler came out. I’d say at this point in time, a 1920 X 1080 resolution is fairly standard. Also, with it being a much larger monitor than I’ve been accustomed to, the resolution needs to increase as well to provide a clear picture. ...

The Array I know what you’re thinking, show me the product! What does it look like, how big is it. 4U storage shelf 2U Storage Controller (dual controllers) CIFSNFSiSCSI 48TB or 96 TB with additional 2.4TB or 4.8 TB SSD Homemade RAID that allows for 2 disk failures on the same storage pool Recovery Something out of the norm with DataGravity’s array is that they use a completely separate set of disks for snapshots. Disks are automatically assigned to different pools are nothing is required from the Administrator to set this up. This diverges from what the rest of the industry is typically does. There are two schools of thought here though: ...

 I got a chance to get a first hand look at Asigra at the Tech Field Day Extra sessions on the Monday of VMworld 2014. I went into the sessions thinking that his was just another backup company, but found that they have a very robust suite of backups and they’ve been around for a very long time. Asigra handles, Cloud Platform apps such as Office365, Salesforce, Google, storage array integration, vSphere snapshot integration, file level backups and the list went on. ...

When my Cisco 3750 finally died, I was bummed out but looking for a replacement. No sense in crying about my loss, or trying to decide IF I’m going to replace my switch since, my whole lab would be kind of useless without it. My requirements for a new switch were pretty simple. Layer 3 Routing Capabilities 24 Gigabit Ports or better Cheap The HP v1910-24G (JE006A) seemed to meet my requirements so I ordered it from Amazon when I saw that it was under $300. I needed to get it in my lab fast, so I quickly made the purchase but I’ll admit I was skeptical. Timothy Carr eased my mind a bit when he tweeted me. ...

I recently purchased the HP 9470m EliteBook and wanted to give it a quick review. The Good The laptop has a pretty slim design as you would expect from an EliteBook. Be aware however that this is not as slim as a Mac b ook Air, or the Samsung Series 9 laptops. The good news though is that you don’t need to use a dongle just to plug in an Ethernet cable. The same goes for having a VGA output which I often use for presentations. It can be a pain to hunt down a dongle to connect to a wired network, or a projector so I give this Elitebook points for that. ...

CloudPhysics continually surprises me with their innovation when providing cards for simulation purposes. I’ve posted a couple of times already about how I really like their AWS pricing calculator (they also have vCHS as well). Having a good idea about how much your existing environment will cost if you make modifications is a pretty big win for a CIO. While I was at GestaltIT’s Virtualization Field Day 3, two weeks ago, Irfan Ahmed showed us a new card that would simulate how much SSD Cache you should buy based on your current workloads. ...

Last week I attended the Virtualization Field Day 3 put on by the amazing staff at GestaltIT. One of the sessions was hosted by the folks at Atlantis Computing and they were giving us an overview of their Atlantis USX product. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given. Atlantis USX Overview Before we get to the crux of the issue, a quick refresher on what Atlantis USX does. The USX product will utilize existing SAN, NAS and DAS and combine it with a server ram to do caching. The value proposition is that Atlantis USX can carve out RAM to be used as either a whole datastore (SUPER FAST) or combine it with existing storage and have it act as a cache. Keeping the cache so close to the processor without having to go across a bus or HBA, which can add additional latency, can be an important addition to a performance strapped storage solution. ...

One of the companies I was most interested in seeing at the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day 3, was CloudPhysics. I was already a little familiar with the company because I’d written a post on my experience in the lab. While my original post was obviously good, you can’t really get a more passionate and knowledgeable explanation of the solution than from the Co-founder and CTO Irfan Ahmad. The presentations can be found online. ...