VMware Release vSphere 4.1: Vendors Rush to Support VAAI?
Today VMware announced the release of vSphere 4.1, the next generation of their ever evolving hypervisor. To be honest it would be hard to miss this announcement judging by the flurry of “first to...
View ArticleOpinion: Netapp & vSphere 4.1 – Where’s the Beef?
Yesterday’s announcements on vSphere 4.1 was amazing in a number of respects. Firstly the blogging community were falling over themselves to make announcements on the new release. I expect there was...
View ArticleNetapp: The Inflexibility of Flexvols
I’ve just been reading up on Data ONTAP 8.0 as part of some ongoing work I’m doing. You may be aware that version 8.0 of the filer operating system brings two major features; 64-bit support and the...
View ArticleVAAI – Not Just for Virtualisation?
Last month we saw the announcement of vSphere 4.1 and the support of new storage features centred around VAAI, the vSphere API for Array Integration. This introduced a number of array offload features...
View ArticleRandom VAAI Thoughts
I’ve just posted about the SCSI support that enables VAAI features over on my storage blog. Writing that post got me thinking about the wider aspects of VAAI or at least the reasons for why VAAI is...
View ArticleHitachi Bloggers Day 2011 – Part I
As previously mentioned, last week I attended the second HDS/Hitachi Bloggers’ Day, this year located at Sefton Park in the UK. Setting the event on this side of The Pond (rather than requiring me to...
View ArticleVAAI – Offloading or Maintaining Control?
During last week’s HP Discover 2011 event, Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) raised a very interesting point regarding the way VMware potentially intend to control the storage space through VMFS and the...
View ArticleVAAI Posturing
With yet another HDS/VAAI post coming out from Scott Lowe (here), the irrelevant debate continues as to who is in and who is out of VMware’s inner circle of trusted storage vendors. Previously my...
View ArticleVAAI Follow Up – VMware Recommend Disabling Thin Reclaim
Last week VMware issued this advisory on their knowledge base, recommending the disabling of VAAI Thin Provisioning reclaim in ESXi 5.0. Apparently it seems to be causing “poor performance’ during...
View ArticleFurther Thoughts on VVOLS (Updated)
Following on from my first post on VVOLs, I did a little research on the two technology previews that had been presented at this and last year’s VMworld – sessions INF-STO2223 & VSP3205...
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