Just Be Better...: Archive

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Varrow Madness, 2000 nickels or a Kindle Touch...

Look, every great marketing ploy has a gimmick. This is no different. Although the difference here is this is a gimmick with in a gimmick. Varrow Madness being centered around March Madness, mine being centered around 2000 nickels and a Kindle Touch. So here is what I propose.. You - Customer, Partner, Competitor - when registering for Varrow Madness make sure to add my name, Joe “Boom...

Feb 20th

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EMC VPLEX - Riding the back of a Giant

Over the past week I had the pleasure of attending VPLEX training in Milford MA at one of EMC’s training facilities. Obviously one of the benefits of attending these classes as a partner is the depth of information you receive. Certainly much more than the customer training. In most cases there is a nice mix of EMC internals and partners that naturally draws...

Feb 2nd

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VMware Partner Exchange 2012: Locked and Loaded

On Feb. 13-16, VMware PEX 2012 will be on its way in Las Vegas. This being my first experience with PEX, I really have no expectations beyond lower technical intensity. Although based simply on the names of some of the presenters I am sure there will be enough technical filler to satisfy my thirst. My intentions for the conference are to focus 50% on product (ie vCOPs, Chargeback, Service...

Jan 25th

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EMC Technical Advisory: EMC282741: CLARiiON and...

There has been a technical advisory floating around that deserves a little more attention. First released I believe in December, the advisory focuses on SSD soft media issues. If you have a CX, VNX or NS with SSD drives in any configuration please take heed to this information below. Although remote, it needs to be addressed as soon as possible. So please reach out to the EMC support line to get...

Jan 24th

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Dec 30th

EMC FAST: Whether to File and/or Block Tier

Storage performance needs in today’s data center can change on a moment’s notice. Data that once needed the backing of a freight train today may only need the performance of a vespa tomorrow. Having the ability to react to the ever changing needs of one’s data in an automated fashion allows efficiencies never before seen in EMC’s midrange product line. Generally as...

Dec 28th

Battle Ponderings: A Year in Review 2011

Once a year I attempt to recall the happenings (here to) of the last 12 months specifically in the VAR space. If I had an inkling of smarts I would start this post Jan 1st and work forward, contributing as the events occur. But more times than not my inner laggard wins the race pushing me to the end of year countdown to complete. Suffice it to say, its been quite a year from our partners...

Dec 27th

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Nov 29th

Nov 8th

The Dynamism of Feedback Loops

Feedback loops are as follows according to a recent post on Wired.com called “Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops”.. “..[Feedback Loops] Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors” Furthermore, there are 4 distinct stages that encompass a loop… Data...

Oct 12th

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Oct 11th

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Oct 6th

EMC VNX Volumes, A lay of the land

Every wonder what volumes make up a VNX Filesystem? Let’s consider our Friendly EMC definitions below, with commentary..the graphic is a picturesque view of all these volumes in motion, absent the disk volumes which underpin the storage pool… disk volume On a VNX for file, a physical storage unit as exported from the storage system. All other volume types are created from disk volumes. – the VNX...

Oct 5th

A matter of Interpretation: The SRM "Never" Clause

A Colleague of mine drew me to a small note about Microsoft Domain Controllers in the current SRM 5 documentation. Here is the statement from the document, original here (page 25) “VMware recommends that you never use SRM to protect Active Directory domain controllers. Active Directory provides its own replication technology and restore mode, and these technologies can be used to handle disaster...

Sep 26th

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In Memorium..

God bless the souls of the Sept 11 tragedy. My heart goes out to everyone that was lost on that day 10 years ago. Although my loss was by different means the emotion of the day is somewhat amplified. My pops, Brian H Kelly (1950-2006), was taken just five years ago on September 11th. It wasn’t by murderous religious extremists but by Cancer. I lost my hero that day, as did thousands of husbands,...

Sep 11th

Rhythmic Tantra: VMworld 2011 Days – The Fizzle

So I like to start things. Character Flaw? I don’t think so, but when it comes to blogging its a bit, shall we say..undesirable? “The fizzle” accurately describes my petering out when it comes to completing my day to day coverage of VMworld. You know what happens…yeah that! So instead I’m going to capture a quick list of notables from the most exciting “world”...

Sep 7th

Rhythmic Tantra: VMworld 2011 Days – The...

Day 1 was finally here. Only a year in the making. And although my 24 was compressed with sessions, customer meetups and other fun, I felt good. After breakfast and chatter with Nash and Miller I began my day with a simple session… VSP3868: VMWare vStorage Best Practices w/ Kenneth Kemp and Nathan Bahls. Delivered by two Global Support Services experts, these guys have seen and done it all in...

Aug 31st

Rhythmic Tantra: VMworld 2011 Days – The Buildup

As always the build up to such a large event like VMworld can be just as intense as the event it’s self. If you were an east coast attendee this year like me, the buildup I speak of is our own hag, Hurricane Irene. With the threat of a cancelled flight on Friday, I immediately went into Plan B op’s…lets have some fun… Scouring the internet with craft brew at my side I quickly found some options...

Aug 30th

Customer Profile: A tale of two das.AllowNetworks

Customer Profile: posts are meant to draw attention to some of the exciting and every changing environments brought forth by our customers. It highlights specific technologies and configurations that were used to solve business problems. Of course to protect or customers identity their names are absent from the post. There are those customer environments every now and then (although becoming more...

Aug 19th

Watch

Great video by VMware’s Michael White on Site Recovery Manager 5. What a marvel this product is. Incredible list of features and fixes as part of the release. Hat’s off to the SRM Product Development Team…

Aug 17th

Happy World: VMware SDRS or Auto-Tier?

Interesting article from Duncan Epping around SDRS and Auto-tiering solutions this past week. The original article is noted here, SDRS and Auto-Tiering solutions – The Injector. For those that haven’t beefed up on SDRS, the acronym is short for Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler. Like its kin DRS, which allows automated CPU and Memory balancing across your VMware Cluster, SDRS does the same...

Aug 8th

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Aug 4th

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Jul 29th

vSphere 5: Storage Chum Chum

Despite all the hubbub out of licensing, the release of vSphere 5 introduced quite the laundry list of exciting storage features. Albeit most are under the “Policy based DC Automation” SKU known as Enterprise Plus. Regardless, with each of these additions comes more options of which we will be tasked with making sense of. As of every new release your duty bag of design options has expanded, so...

Jul 25th

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Jul 12th

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Sweet poughkeepsie, VMware vExpert 2011 rolling..

Although I am no where close to being a foo-fighters fan you have to love the meaning in “times like these”.. It’s times like these you learn to live again It’s times like these you give and give again It’s times like these you learn to love again It’s times like these time and time again And its in times like these...

Jul 1st

Jun 30th

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Jun 30th

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Of Substance and attainment: Experiences with...

So I have long been curious about what VMware vCloud Director provides beyond a rev’d up Lab Manager instance with a lot more nerd knobs. And quite frankly I can’t answer definitively as I am still on that Journey. What I can report on is the product install its self is not for the faint of heart. Now sure, anyone of us could plow through it without question but it most certainly is not a 10 min...

Jun 17th

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Jun 14th

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May 20th

Project Lightning - No Astraphobia here..

EMC never disappoints. Just when I think I have their strategy pinned, its trajectory changes. Take for instance Project Lightning. First introduced last week at EMC 2011, Project Lightning is in essence PCIe host based FLASH cards. The general idea is to bring the data closer to the compute (server), ultimately reducing latency in the process. Now certainly this isn’t a new epiphany dreamed up by...

May 16th

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Multi-Region Availability, SPoF, and the Temporary...

By now you have heard of the next, in a series of, outages from AWS or Amazon Web Services. The havoc began at 1:41 am PST (4-21-2011) in their N. Virginia Availability Zone affecting their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. The outage took down numerous tenants such as Reddit, Quora, HootSuite and FourSquare (full list here, http://ec2disabled.com) And as of this writing is still 12+ hrs...

Apr 25th

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Apr 6th

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Mar 30th

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Watch

I want a physical machine. So funny yet so true, its so true..hence funny. Its ok to laugh we’ve been there…

Mar 30th

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Mar 24th

Vertical Clouds?

It’s a relatively new term to my ears, but the term “Vertical Clouds” has been around in some form or another for decades. And yes, vertical clouds are exactly what you think they would be. That is cloud type offerings that cater to particular businesses or verticals. Examples of vertical markets are: Technology, Retail, Healthcare, Education, Financial, etc. The real benefit to going with say a...

Mar 24th

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sandyeme asked: Hi ,
I am trying to install RP Splitter enabler but during installation it is giving a HA error messages. Actually all these host servers are dually connected but still they are showing in HA error message but also there some servers with single HBA. so only this servers should be shown in HA error but all servers are displayed in this error.
So it is ok to go ahead and install RP...

Mar 24th

Is it Security or Ignorance that's Slowing Cloud...

Take a look at some of these titles from over the last 3 to 5 years… Security concerns remain a hindrance to cloud adoption Privacy and Security Worries Still a Hindrance for Cloud Implementation Gartner: Seven cloud-computing security risks Is it that cloud adoption is forcing companies to look at their own security deficiencies (which in my estimate is quite large) or are Cloud Service Providers...

Mar 21st

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GarageBand is now available from iTunes for the...

Mar 12th

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Ode to Winning fueled by TigerBlood...

Varrow has been named to the inaugural CRN Tech Elite 250. The Tech Elite 250 serves as the industry’s definitive list of VARs with both deep technical expertise and premier certifications. Varrow has been recognized as a best- of-breed integrator who has invested in technical know-how and earned premier certifications in the areas of data centers for North American customers… ...

Mar 12th

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Mar 12th

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Mar 10th

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Hybrid Cloud Gateway’s: Your Avenue to...

It’s no surprise the biggest hindrance to cloud storage adoption is the lack of standards. Cloud storage provider’s talk via REST and SOAP API interfaces. Your data, however, is accessed via data center protocols, ie FC, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, FCoE. Bringing the two together is as foggy as the Scottish lochs. Ideally to leverage the power of cloud storage, your ingest point has to be in one of three...

Mar 9th

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Watch

What we can all learn from Teklinks, the evolution of managed services. Great talk by David Powell, VP of Managed Services for Teklinks, at the CRN XChange Americas event. As a customer, its important to understand what areas of your business are best served via a managed services approach, ie. cloud computing model. Does it make sense to follow a vendor who’s profitability model is based...

Feb 24th

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Believe: RecoverPoint 3.4 Released

As of yesterday RecoverPoint 3.4 was released to us believers. And even though its code is just under 1G in size its punch is quite far reaching. The biggest? Support for VNX (only, not VNXe). Which means, and is somewhat implied, that if you are a current RP customer you must upgrade to 3.4 to be able to replicate LUNs from a VNX array. Replication between two VNX’s, between a VNX and a...

Feb 18th

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How could you..

Today is the day! Well not really. But it is exactly one month from the largest event outside of a regional VMUG by a partner in the area. It’s Varrow Madness if you haven’t heard. Spun from the mind of a marketing genius, the event captures the excitement of college basketball coupled with the technological acceleration of our industry. Whether you’re Storage focused, Data Centered...

Feb 17th

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EMC Storage Pools: The good, the bad, the use...

Storage pools. What are they, do they solve all of your storage consumption and performance woes? Well some people tend to think they do. But let’s step back take a look at the facts and determine proper use case. I dare to say, that they operate a little differently than how most of us thought. Which in situations could be painful… So what is a storage pool? Ah good question. Let me...

Feb 3rd

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VPLEX and RecoverPoint: Upward and Onward

I tell you, I find these two products just fascinating. The combination of Disaster Avoidance and Disaster Recovery is truly unprecedented. Who would have thought, 10 years ago we would have been standing at a doorway that is open to so many possibilities. To think beyond a server or rack back then is now thinking beyond a physical data center. The level of abstraction available to us today...

Jan 31st

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