The Virtual Storage Guy

There are a number of factors fueling the need for greater adoption of desktop virtualization within every organization. The obvious is the consumerization of mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones, Kindle Fires, Samsung Galaxys, etc. The proliferation of these devices has built a level of demand that requires the enterprise datacenter to enable the end [...]

Last September Cisco and Citrix announced the first desktop virtualization Cisco Validated Design (CVD) to help customers implement standard, repeatable architectures for XenDesktop with NetApp storage. Many saw this as an indicator that desktop virtualization was (finally!) reaching a tipping point, a perception strengthened with Cisco’s November launch of its Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) vision [...]

One day after sharing with you my customer engagement where we discussed provisioning ‘Storage for Desktops – Simple VersusComplicated‘ I was informed of a post from another storage vendor that verified my premise. While my post discussed 500 desktops with VMware View and the latter covered 1,000 with Citrix XenDesktop, the information I shared relating [...]

I’ve had some great meetings with a number of customers this week and in one of them they were very interested in understanding NetApp’s value proposition with VMware View. They were specifically interested in understanding how NetApp could deliver high levels of storage I/O from a dense, and cost-effective, storage footprint. As a point of [...]

Last week I presented our portfolio of desktop virtualization solutions to a group of Cisco engineers and account managers. These solutions are built on FlexPod and include desktop virtualization technologies from VMware and Citrix, include automated configuration instructions, and each is certified as a Cisco Validated Design (CVD). In short, we are working together to [...]

Last week NetApp rocked the industry with our most significant product launch ever. Cisco played a key role with the release of FlexPods, a validated, pre-designed, base configuration built on Cisco UCS and Nexus and NetApp FAS storage components designed to be elastic and to scale incrementally both up and out. This week our positions [...]