Hardware

A glimpse of IOFabric’s dashboard Trevor Pott recently introduced me to some of the fine folks at IOFabric and suggested that I have chat with them. Going into the call, I didn’t know a heck of a lot about their flagship product, Vicinity. I did a bit of research and gathered that Vicinity allows you to use existing storage and manage it via one interface. It turns out that is only part of the picture. Note that this is not any sort of sponsored post, and I was not compensated in any way to write this, but rather it is a cool product that I thought I would share. Also, writing helps me understand and digest information. ...

The first stop for us at Tech Field Day 12 was Cohesity’s office, where we had a nice breakfast waiting for us (along with a great delegate gift consisting of a multi-end USB cable, a notebook, a portable battery, and a Polaroid Snap camera). Soon after settling in, we got straight down to business. I had previously written a ’ primer’ regarding Cohesity, and I saw them present recently at the Toronto VMUG, but I still wasn’t fully familiar with the brand or their offering. Cohesity markets itself as secondary storage, a market that its founder, Mohit Aron, felt was being underserved. Without repeating everything from my previous post, the common use-cases for secondary storage include data sets such as backup targets, cold data, and test / dev. ...

Igneous Systems recently presented at Tech Field Day 12, and honestly, I was quite looking forward to learning more about them. All I really knew going into the presentation was that they provided ‘cloud storage, on premises’. Once we started picking into the details, things definitely got interesting, along with some mind-crippling moments when trying to digest what was presented. A Quick Overview Igneous’ stance is that data is growing at a tremendous rate. Things such as IoT sensors, media (4K video for example), and just raw data (think bio-medical or mineral data), chew up lots of space. In fact, one of the delegates I was talking to mentioned that he goes through petabytes a year! So, the problem is very real, even though it may not be common. ...

I’ve been using FreeNAS for many, many years. I believe I started back in the .6 beta days, which if memory serves would have been somewhere around 2009ish? Over that time, I have had a handful of machines doing the work - three if I’m not missing anything. Power-related issues killed the first two (PSU / board death on one, and blown capacitors on another). I then scraped together some ‘old’ hardware at the time and built what is now my ‘current’ FreeNAS box. It is comprised of a whopping Pentium Dual-Core E6500 CPU and 4 GB of RAM. The real kicker is that it is running on a single 1.5 TB SATA drive. ...

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a ‘cozy’ conference call hosted by Tintri. I say cozy because excluding Tintri staff, there were less than 10 of us customers and users who were invited. The purpose was to give us a demo of some of Tintri’s recently announced products and features, and the small size definitely gave it a nice touch. There was also no shortage of talent on the presentation end to take us through these new additions. ...

I have been spending some time over the last little bit trying to put together a new repository for my Veeam backups. Finding a simple set of recommendations hasn’t been easy, though, largely due to the fact that every environment is different. Despite there being no simple ’this is what you should use for every install’, I took the effort to review a lot of material and put some notes together. A lot of the details were from VeeamOn videos, the Veeam forum, or from their various Veeam eBooks. After going through all of that, I think I have come up with a good solution that fits my environment. ...