The Virtual Storage Guy

This article originally appears in Tech OnTap – If you enjoy it, please consider subscribing to Tech OnTap.   NetApp recently published an update to our storage best practices for VMware® that highlights the new capabilities of VMware vSphere® 5 and NetApp® Data ONTAP® 8. This updated technical report (TR) covers a number of new capabilities [...]

Last year I made my first attempt at predicting what I thought would transpire with storage technologies and their use, integration, and trends related to server virtualization and cloud computing in 2011. I found sharing my views quiet enjoyable; however half the fun in making a prediction is following up to review them for accuracy. [...]

I recently watched the movie, My Cousin Vinny, a rather light-hearted and funny story that stars Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei in a comedic tale about the challenges facing an inexperienced, loud-mouthed lawyer from New York who defends two college students accused of murder in rural Alabama. There’s a scene in the movie that reminded me [...]

I’d like to share with you a nice post from Glenn Sizemore, a VMware vExpert and a technical expert in our Microsoft Business Unit. He’s one of the many talented folks designing Hyper-V on NetApp solutions and architectures to run virtualized instances of Microsoft applications on Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix, etc. Glen authored a nice post [...]

NetApp has released the Virtual Storage Console 2.1 (VSC); our VMware vCenter plug-in. Behind the scenes the VSC is actually a framework from a number of sub-plug-ins (VSC, Rapid Cloning Utility and SMVI) delivered in a single installation. We created this sub-plug-in architecture as a way to enable new plug-ins without having to create multiple [...]

Over the past 5 years, server virtualization has changed the data center forever and these changes have had a far-reaching impact on data center architectures and operations. One of the areas often discussed as having been affected, is the ever increasing shared storage footprint. I’d suggest to you, that in my customer engagements storage costs [...]