Archie Hendryx

This last fortnight there's been a cacophony of hyperbole and at times marketing fluff from vendors and analysts with regards to Reference Architectures and Converged Infrastructures. As IBM launched PureSystems, NetApp & Cisco decided it was also a good time to reiterate their strong partnership with FlexPod. In the midst of this, EMC decided to release their new and rather salaciously titled VSPEX. From the remnants and ashes of all these new product names and fancy launch conferences, the resultant war blogs and Twitterati battles ensued. As I poignantly watched on from the trenches in an almost Siegfried Sassoon moment, it was quickly becoming evident that there was now an even more ambiguous understanding of what distinguishes a Converged Infrastructure from a Reference Architecture, what it's relation was with the Private Cloud and more importantly whether you... (more)

Storage According to the VMware Admin: SDRS, SIOC, VASA & Storage vMotion

SystemAdmins were generally the early embracers and end users of VMware ESX as they immediately recognized the benefits of virtualization. Having been bogged down with the pains of running physical servers such as downtime for maintenance, patching and upgrades, they were the natural adopters of the bare metal hypervisor. The once Windows 2003 system admin was soon configuring virtual networks and VLANs as well as carving up Storage datastores, quickly empowering them as the master of this new domain that was revolutionizing the datacenter. As the industry matured in its understa... (more)

Cisco's UCS - The Prime Choice for Cloud and Big Data Servers?

Back in March 2009, when Cisco announced the launch of their UCS platform and subsequent intention to enter the world of server hardware, eyebrows were raised including my own. There was never any disputing that the platform would be adopted by some customers, certainly after seeing how Cisco successfully gatecrashed the SAN market and initially knocked Brocade off their FC perch. We’d all witnessed how Cisco used its IP datacenter clout and ability to propose deals that packaged both SAN MDS and IP switches with a consequent single point of support to quickly take a lead in a ne... (more)

Cloudy Concepts: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, MaaS, CaaS & XaaS

Generally IT folk, whether in Storage, Virtualization, Change Management or Project Management love the use of acronyms and synonyms to express key concepts amongst each other. What other industry would allow an individual to spurt a line such as "Have SOX seen the BCP and CAB approval for our VDC's DR SAN and will this then be added to the CMDB by CoB today?" without immediately flinching or bringing in a logopaedics specialist for help. More often than not, IT folk have also used these synonyms and acronyms as smokescreens to prevent outsiders from realizing "well this IT stuff... (more)

vSphere's Virtual CPUs - Avoiding the vCPU to pCPU ratio trap

2011 was a year where despite the economic constraintseverything Big was seemingly good; Big Data, Big Clouds, Big VMs etc. Caught inthe industry’s lust for this excess, 2011 was also the year I lost count of howmany overprovisioned resources to ‘Big’ Production VMs I witnessed. More oftenthan not this was a typical reaction from System Admins trying to alleviatetheir fears of potential performance problems to important VMs. It was the yearwhere I began to hear justifications such as “yes we are overprovisioning ourproduction VMs..but apart from the cost savings, overallocating... (more)