VDM 30 in 30 Wow - November 30th has arrived, which marks the last day of the Virtual Design Master 30 in 30 challenge. So, how did I do? Well, I managed to get a post out each and every day. I did try to keep them mainly on topic, and I aimed to hit at least 500 words per post, but I also made sure I was not just adding words to the post in order to make the sentences, and thus the word count for the post longer (see what I did there?). ...
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. ...
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to take the Veeam Certified Engineer video-on-demand course, which was actually a better delivery mechanism that I had expected. After I completed the course, I did a bunch of studying to sit the VMCE exam, but I failed :( The good news is that it made passing the exam all that much better when I did re-sit it. Failing did offer have some benefits, though. First off, I was able to get a taste for the exam, specifically the wording. The best way I can describe it is to say that it is written for technical correctness, not for ease of reading. The questions can be fairly hard to interpret at times, and this is a common piece of feedback that I have heard from other test takers. ...
When I first looked at the lineup for Tech Field Day 12 (which was before I was asked to join), I was excited to see the list of companies. Some of them I know reasonably well, while there were a few on there that I had never heard of. DriveScale was one of them. When I wrote my ’ primer’ post about them, it was a bit challenging as there is not a ton of information out there about them, but that also makes it fun. Having a bit of background on the presenting companies is great, but it is also engaging to learn about them during these presentations, in most cases from their founders or lead engineers. ...
Earlier this week I held the Q4 meeting for the SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) in Mississauga, and thus far the feedback has been great. This time around, we had Mid-Range and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise sponsor the event, as well as some great giveaways (iPad Minis and a speaker). We kicked things off with a great high-level overview from Garth Reid of where Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is heading. One point that was made clear is that they are striving to work with organizations to not only make sure they can find storage solutions that fit but that those data sets are properly protected. ...
Recently, when I attended the Toronto vForum, I found myself hanging around the Veeam booth … a lot. I know quite a few of the local folks, so I enjoy chatting with them. They also work with me on my Veeam User Group, so sometimes the conversation steers that way too. But, I also have a passion for helping people. Given that I usually have some form of Veeam swag on, it isn’t uncommon for me to get questions from folks who assume I’m an Systems Engineer. I am always very quick to point out that I don’t work for Veeam, and I find that usually changes the tone of a conversation. Folks like hearing from customers, the good and the bad. I’ll usually try and loop an SE is as well since a) it’s not my booth and b) they will have different experiences and potentially different suggestions. ...
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post covering Tintri’s recently announced synchronous replication. At the time, I was also given a walkthrough of another upcoming feature: snapshot replication to S3 data stores. This is another big feature that I was glad to see previewed at VMWorld, and even more excited to see an in-depth demo of. For a quick bit of background, S3 is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service which is an object storage system. Although S3 was designed by Amazon, there are many providers out there that offer S3-compliant data stores. This is definitely an emerging market, and the fact that you can have cloud-capable data stores in your datacenters has it’s own curiosities. All of that, however, is beyond the scope of this post - I just wanted to point out that AWS is not the only S3 provider. ...
I recently posted about the process I took to get data from an old FreeNAS to a new one. Truth be told, that process did work (and reasonably well), but I ended up tweaking things a bit more … actually a lot more. I won’t go into details about it, as it isn’t really relevant, but as I was mucking about, I found myself running a handful of commands over and over. ...
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. ...