Storage Short Take #5 – Happy New Year!

In Storage, Technology by J Michel Metz5 Comments

Welcome to 2019! I hope that you had a safe and festive one. It’s only been 2 weeks since the last Storage Short Take and – hopefully – you didn’t need or care about Data Center Storage during that time! Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean a lot of stuff didn’t happen, or isn’t going on. So, without further ado…

Quick Take: Why Not the User-Defined Data Center?

In Storage, Technology by J Michel MetzLeave a Comment

I’ve been struggling with names (or rather, the act of naming) recently. As I get more and more involved into the aspect of Data Centers and Programmability, trying to become more familiar in a world that remains considerably alien to me, I begin to struggle with some of the rather buzzword-laden (but ultimately vague) nomenclature: Software-Defined Networks Software-Defined Storage Software-Defined …

FCoE: The Birth of the SLAM Admin

In Storage, Technology by J Michel Metz7 Comments

We have LAN admins. We have Server admins. We have Storage admins. Each with its own culture and methods of doing things. Perhaps the biggest issue surrounding convergence is the need to converge people’s skillsets. I propose that teams that are going to be working together start seeing themselves as a joint SLAM (Storage and Local Area Management) admin, part …

FCoE vs. iSCSI: The Cagefight! – Flexibility

In Storage, Technology by J Michel Metz8 Comments

This is the second in a series of posts designed to address some of the questions I’ve posed with respect to FCoE vs. iSCSI, in an attempt to take a detached view towards the pros and cons of each technology as it relates to measuring up in the data center. In this post, we will examine the question of whether iSCSI …

Cable Reduction Makes FCoE a Good Thing™

In Storage, Technology by J Michel MetzLeave a Comment

EMC storage guru Dave Graham did a quick video of the cable clutter in his lab. Great visual as to why cable consolidation and convergence is needed. Why FCoE Is a Good Thing… — This is a tongue in cheek video that I took in one of my labs showing why, for no other reason but fabric reduction, that CEE/DCE/FCoE …

Brocade and Cisco agree on FCoE detail

In Storage, Technology by J Michel Metz1 Comment

In the not-so-Wild West of FCoE standards negotiation, the two big switch juggernauts – Cisco and Brocade – agreed to a compromise that will affect the way that traffic moves across networks. The good news is that this was a major obstacle to making FCoE have a chance at becoming a valid contender for networking in the data center. So …