Wow, where has the time gone? It seems like it was just yesterday that I was dabbling with VMware GSX to give some extra workstations to application developers, that was over 7 years ago. Now I’m working for a Fortune 500 company doing what I love more than anything, talking about wickedly cool stuff!

2010 has been an amazing ride, probably the best year of my life and it’s just the beginning. Beautiful brand new home, a new job working for the best company with the best people in the industry, a new addition to the family (our puppy Chloe), good health and overall happiness.

The holiday season is a great time to reflect back and to be thankful for all that you have and have done. With that I’d like to thank Chad Sakac, Wade O’Harrow and Jeff Thomas for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime. I’d like to thank my beautiful partner Mandy for putting up with me and things we’ve dealt with this year (home-ownership, traveling for business and for just putting up with me :)). And finally I’d like to thank my readers, for continuing to visit the website and for sticking with me even though the amount of content has dwindled - I promise, one of my Resolutions for 2011 is to change my ways and get some more quality content online!

With that I feel I must follow in year-end blog tradition and post my thoughts on what’s to come in 2011.

• 2009 2010 2011 will be the year of Virtual Desktops (VDI)
• The way we think about networking will change (OTV, FCoE)
• The way we think about storage will change (Storage Pools, Auto Tiering, HUGE Cache footprints)
• The way we deploy virtualization will change (Vblock)
• Mixed workload deployment (Private and Public Cloud)

Those are some high level thoughts and frankly I could dive deeply into each one of those things, but to some things up I’ll try to make it really simple. Things are going to get really easy for administrators and end-users alike and things are going to get real dynamic. We’re moving back to the mainframe days, there will be datacenter administrators that manage our virtual infrastructures which consists of compute, storage and network. Each one of these pieces inherently will simplify as well (flat converged networks, automated tiered storage and web portals for public consumption just to name a few). However, we will not leverage this internal (private) cloud for everything, some things can sit out in the external (public) cloud in an effort to be more elastic and cost effective. Then at the end of this is end-user accessibility (or mobility), in terms of VDI we’ll see the adoption of many different end-points (thin, thick, mobile, tablet, etc) giving access to a centralize desktop from anywhere. Because in the end the world is full of consumers who want what they want, when they want.

So there you have it, simple consumption, simple administration, simple design and even simplicity in deployment through complete stack offerings like the Vblock. Hopefully I’ll get some time to deep dive into each one of these things individually as they really are all amazing technologies.

With that I’m going to shut ‘er down for a few days and enjoy the holidays. May you and your family have a happy and healthy holiday and New Year!

Posted under Good Reading

Today Scott Lowe wrote a post on his blog explaining how Cisco UCS lacks Northbound FCoE connectivity, explained here;

I’m about halfway through the first day of Unified Computing System (UCS) training in San Jose, CA, and I’ve learned of what I think is a fairly significant limitation. The issue centers around what Cisco refers to as “northbound” traffic and how Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is handled with northbound traffic.

Recall that a central part of UCS is the UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect. The 6100 series fabric interconnect has connectivity in two directions:

• Southbound connectivity is connectivity aimed back at the fabric extenders in the blade chassis themselves.
• Northbound connectivity is connectivity headed outside the UCS to other systems and networks.

All southbound traffic is 10Gbps Ethernet with FCoE. Northbound traffic can be 10Gbps Ethernet or Fibre Channel, but not FCoE. Based on the information I’ve been given (and if I’m incorrect please let me know in the comments), you cannot directly connect an FCoE-enabled storage array to a UCS. Even if your storage array has native FCoE interfaces, you can’t plug them into the UCS 6100 series fabric interconnects because that’s considered northbound traffic and you can’t use FCoE with northbound traffic.

I have a feeling customers who have purchased storage arrays with FCoE interfaces with the intention of hooking the arrays up directly to a UCS are going to be a bit upset when this information becomes more widely known.

If I’m working from incorrect or incomplete information, please feel free to speak up in the comments.

At first I was extremely shocked to hear this, this is pretty big news and I would be upset as a customer if I wasn’t able to directly attach my FCoE-enabled storage array directly to the UCS Fabric Interconnect.

After doing some research of my own I found the following;

Read More…

Posted under Good Reading, Storage