* Posts by baspax

136 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2017

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What's next for VMware? Long-term Virtzilla-watchers predict Broadcom's moves

baspax

what are you smoking?

A 3 node i3en meral cluster (3x 768 GB RAM and 140TiB usable NVMe disk space) is $5,950 for a week. If a 3 node i3 metal is enough for you, it’s $3,000 for a week.

This includes all software licenses, incl NSX.

'Worst' AWS service ever? Cloud giant introduces Redis-compatible MemoryDB – to mixed response

baspax

Random Twitter figure?

Corey Quinn is founder of the Duckbill Group and basically singlehandedly invented the term Cloud Economics. Also, a quite funny fellow.

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

baspax

Professional kit vs non-professional kit

Untwist your panties everyone.

And you Simon? Seriously? You can do better.

Their consumer gear continues to accept all drives. It is their enterprise gear that requires specific drives with optimized firmware.

Do you really suggest that in the storage industry, which is the most fucked up competitive industry in IT since forever, nobody came up with the idea to use unmodified off the shelf components and make it work successfully? That somehow this bunch of cutthroats collectively agreed to keep this secret from the public?

Why don't you all join Qanon, they make more sense.

baspax

Re: From an enterprise end user's point of view...

And that's exactly how it is and how it should be.

ElReg has devolved into a neverending search for outrage. The same people foaming at the mouth now will be the first one to whip a vendor for not "having better quality standards" and "better testing and validation of components".

Cisco intros desktop switches, one with USB-C to power your laptop

baspax

Re: Future-proofing needs a better crystal ball

Beautiful.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

baspax

Re: Validated environments...

one would assume two things:

* a critical system like that runs on licensed RHEL, not CentOS.

* don't use CentOS/Stream but use RHEL, SuSE, or any other distro

VMware has the strategy and culture to thrive after CEO Pat Gelsinger's exit to Intel

baspax

Great article

But Nicira did not become NSX, at least not for a long time. It collected dust because, like at NetApp, the not-invented-here people prevailed and decided they knew everything about networking. I mean, what’s so difficult about it, right? Result was NSX-V with the probably worst routing this side of Linksys. Only when it became apparent that they couldn’t win against an arrogant and asleep at the wheel Cisco it was all hands on deck and dust off ole Nicira and brand it as NSX-T.

Which kinda works but is as good as you’d expect 10 year old tech to be.

Pretty much the same story as with VSAN. You’d think they would have send a few pizzas and six packs to the storage gurus at EMC for a braindump and maybe mentoring or whatnot. But hey, how complicated can this storage thing be, right? The result was VSAN which after a decade is still a PoS that’s only being saved by general availability of NAND.

And don’t get me started on vRealize Automation ...

Luke Skywalker used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16 on Tatooine. But Star Wars: Squadrons misses the mark

baspax

Re: The LucasArts originals had the formula perfectly balanced...

You might want to check out Elite Dangerous then.

baspax

Bought it and returned in less than an hour

The first thing that struck me was the terrible graphics. Are we talking about the same game? Squadrons appears five years older than Battlefront II! And let's not get into the abysmal load times and bugs (I have a Samsung EVO Pro NVMe m.2, so it's not my disk!).

Dell slathers on factor XPS 13 to reveal new shiny with... ooh... a 0.1 inch bigger screen

baspax

Re: Can I get that in London double decker buses?

The real life difference seems to be substantial:

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_1600/t6nqfhq1btycftwbcrlv.jpg

Here is the Gizmodo article comparing the old with the new XPS13

https://gizmodo.com/the-newest-dell-xps-13-is-a-tiny-laptop-that-promises-i-1840773443

Thanks, Brexit. Tesla boss Elon Musk reveals Berlin as location for Euro Gigafactory

baspax

What a shocker, right?

German Government ...

* recognizes social and economic upheaval of closing massive coal mining industry

* has a good think what to do about it

* creates plan to attract to attract high tech renewable energy jobs by

** building electric charging infrastructure

** increasing demand for electric vehicles by pumping subsidies into market (lower prices, higher demand)

** creating incentives for renewable tech companies to relocate and/or invest

And then suddenly, to everyones suprise, it works! And all the "conservative" and "market driven" commenters go off the deep end.

This, my friends, is called Industrial Policy and the Germans are eating your lunch and drinking your milkshake. Enjoy Brexit.

HPE unveils Primera storage tech, vows 100% availability – anyone fancy breaking, er, putting that to the test?

baspax

Re: So its a 3PAR with added infosight, which they'd aleady done.

No his credibility can not be argued. You can refute his points but you did not.

Better late than never: Cisco's software-defined networking platform ACI finally lands on AWS

baspax

Re: If you need ACI in AWS or Azure, you're just doing it wrong

Two "small" HX systems are not 1.6m you dolt

Pure Storage swallows Swedish filer biz for its, er, purely file storage software

baspax

It is but very limited in protocols (NFS and s3) and meant for data throughput and not serving a gazillion users on half a million different clients.

Weird HyperFlex but OK: Cisco hops into bed with Schneider over edgy data centre designs

baspax

Picture Please?

It looks actually quite cute and useful.

"Schneider and Cisco showed a 12U micro data center in Andover, installed in a Schneider CX casing, with shock-mountings, sound insulation and a wood fascia, making it suitable for use in carpeted office environments, blending with office furniture."

DON'T TELL ME YOU DON'T ONE UNDER YOUR DESK! Because I do.

Check this out

https://www.techcentral.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/APC_Cisco-HyperFlex-350x350.jpg

It sounds like a new train line, but no: Compute Express Link is PCIe 5.0 server CPU-accelerator glue from Intel and pals

baspax

I was told ...

software only is the only way to go. What's up with all these FPGAs and GPUs.

I wonder if those SIlicon Valley douchebros are all full of it

Nutanix 'let chaos reign', groans CEO as shares tumble more than 20% amid dismal forecast

baspax

Seriously? So their huge cluster sizes are just patchwork of smaller ones?

Haha The Future of Enterprise Cloud!

baspax

Software only is over-rotated.

Well now you node: They're not known for speed, but Ceph storage systems can fly

baspax

6ms+ w NVMe

The only way to achieve such abysmal write latency is to have the world’s slowest data protection algos.

Are they sending the acks via pigeon carrier?

Nice one, former Cisco staff: Switchzilla is absolutely coining it

baspax

Re: Good for Cisco

What a complete bullshit story.

Where in the world does a signed purchase order and invoice change its value? FOREX fluctuations are completely irrelevant to you buying from Cisco or Arista or Juniper, that's something your procurement guys and the CFO worry about.

You sign PO, that price gets invoiced according to T&C after merchandise ships, then you pay with 30 days or whatever your payment terms are. Alternatively, you have some sort of financing in place to spread the payments over time.

And LOL A BEEEEEELLION DOLLARS

Bwahahahahaha

Yeah right.

You've been served: Market rakes in $22bn, Dell does rather well – IDC

baspax

Re: I don’t get it

I should have looked at the entire table. Yikes! The whole market grew by 50%. Well played Dell, nice execution.

baspax

I don’t get it

What’s up with Dell and these WILDLY fluctuating numbers? Same with HP. Dell’s server biz grew 50% in one year? Do you really believe this?

Wasn’t it HPE who had massive changes in storage and server sales lately?

Is this just accounting and reporting shenanigans?

HiveIO claims latest HCI software 'eliminates' complexity... Isn't that the whole point of HCI?

baspax

So why wouldn’t I just use Turbonomic?

Supermicro breathes in, shimmies a PB of Intel flash into one rack unit

baspax

No RAID for NVMe

NVMe has no SAS stack and hence no RAID. You have a bunch of individual devices which are very very fast. Usual limitation is 10 per servers due to lack of PCIe lanes.

I need to take a closer look at this box and see how they upped the number of available lanes for a 2 socket system, if they didn’t it will be a world of pain.

This box needs a fast SDS layer to control all those individual devices, VSAN and Nutanix for example.

Future is bright for NVMe-over-Fabrics with TCP and Ethernet, say Solarflare, Lightbits

baspax

Re: NVMe/TCP is on the fast track for standardization

Fair enough. The issue is with who carries the burden of support and code maintenance. Is it *you* writing and maintaining drivers for Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, Vmware, KVM, etc. (in all their glorious versions and patch levels) permutated with all possible array models and versions, or is it those vendors writing and maintaining their code to adhere to this standard. The difference is monumental.

And yes, it’s true, TCP is everywhere. But NVMe’s biggest advantage is getting rid of the SAS stack. Why would I introduce the even crappier TCP stack unless it’s just for tier 2 and 3 but why use NVMe at all then?

baspax

Right. I am totally going to install a KERNEL EXTENSION from some small outfit. Into all my tier 0 and tier 1 app servers, change management will wave this trough no problemo.

LOL

And then, instead of a standards based architecture (RoCE) which is actively supported and maintened by all my vendors Oracle, Red Hat, Msft, Vmware, Dell, Pure, and Cisco I would have to rely on these guys to maintain code and drivers in a stable and timely fashion for all mentioned above. Yeah right.

Ex-Intel exec Diane Bryant exits Google cloud

baspax

I am confused

I want to up vote it but I don't want encourage more such comments

Disk firmware can kill a whole cluster how exactly? Cisco explains

baspax

Re: Who else?

Reason for custom firmware, or rather validated and certified firmware, is interoperability. No-one really cares if your desktop PC goes on the fritz and you lose your photo collection.

If that happens to a corporation someone will be held liable, including public egg on face.

What I find more interesting lately is that apparently Cisco is really testing the crap out of their component suppliers and finding all these bugs. Someone mentioned below that this is an Intel bug, so not only kudos to Cisco for finding it but more importantly, shouldn't Dell and HPE with their much larger server orgs be the one who catch it?

All is swell at Dell: Look, first storage share gain since closing EMC deal

baspax

I have a stupid question

Why is this 41% leap being reported without asking the obvious question? Why and how?

What happened last year? And what changed this year?

NAND I... will always love you, says Micron as it emits 7.68TB QLC SSD

baspax

Journaling for write leveling

This will be very helpful for HCI vendors with journaling filesystems because they can level writes for the persistent storage tier. We can also expect storage array vendors to take full advantage of it after they have tuned their write caching/de-staging a bit.

Cisco cancels all YouTube ads, then conceals cancellation

baspax

Stupid

What's the point of this article? Is this some sort of fncked up gotcha journalism? What exactly is being concealed? It was done relatively quietly without big press release or false virtue signaling, then someone thought the wording could be better and changed it.

What exactly are you implying?

Cisco took the high road and did the right thing. Instead of reinforcing good behavior, and I think we can all freely admit this is exactly what should be done to force Google to finally police the cesspit that is YouTube, you guys are egging on the first major company to dare do this. Are you out of your mind?

I am appalled by your behavior. You should be ashamed of yourself, Mr Sharwood. Have you no decency?

Highway to the auto-zone: Cisco is catching up to Brocade in Fibre Channel speed race

baspax

Re: Buying Cisco gear for FC...

Bullshit.

Brocade ALWAYS sucked with directors, switches were kinda ok.

Brocade never had FC director leadership. McData had. Once Cisco grabbed leadership Brocade bought McData only to kill the tech and keep DCX.

Cisco FC biz is way bigger than Brocade.

baspax

MDS Diagnostics

MDS Diagnostics is Virtual Instruments, OEMed into Cisco MDS switches. Doesn't require TAP and SAN rover which is a huge deal.

We ran a massive array of VI instrumentation across all our VMAX arrays and it's a storage admins dream. We could pin point individual FC frames and IO, correlate with DB IO, determine application performance on the SAN in real time. Cache hits, cache misses, we could identify misconfigured RAID sets just by looking at FC frame statistics. Ridiculously good stuff.

If I understand correctly it's now available in all 16 and 32G MDS switches.

HPE shines in IDC Converged Systems tracker, Cisco does not

baspax

Re: HP shining but

You can extrapolate that. Take all external storage revenue numbers plus all blades revenue across all vendors and you have a pretty accurate number for all server plus SAN implementations.

If you've got $1m+ to blow on AI, meet Pure, Nvidia's AIRI fairy: A hyperconverged beast

baspax

Re: similar to HP?

The HP box has PCIe which is a huge bottleneck whereas the DXG1 has NVlink

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/nvlink/

You bet your DRaaS: Infinidat squeezes out new backup, array and cloud compute products

baspax

Axxana

It's cool tech but never got any traction. It's one of those thing everyone loves to take a meeting about, listen to the pitch and imagine its implementation, but when it comes to allocating a budget, it's the first thing to be dropped from a BOM.

To Infinity Storage... and beyond! Cloudian gobbles Italian minnow

baspax

This is good.

Most object storage products lack robust file services. Either functionality or scalability or availability, or all of them at once.

A robust object/S3 with robust and well integrated SMB/NFS ... at a good price? A boy can dream!

We three kings of Dell EMC are; bigging up storage we traverse AFA

baspax

Re: The problem is implementation

What is scale out to you is pretty much useless because what you describe is a single namespace with individual controller pairs, a federation.

NetApp has no scale out besides SolidFire. That on the other hand is superb.

baspax

Re: The problem is implementation

"NetApp on the other, who finally figured out how to get scale-out clustering and all-flash working"

Oh man, this statement really bends the truth lol

First, it took NetApp only FOURTEEN YEARS to get Spinnaker finally working. Congrats, I guess?

Second, "working". Working it does but scale out it is not. It's a federation, not scale-out.

baspax

Re: With EMC leadership team effectively out, storage is just a commodity for Dell

VSAN has terrible performance and ease of use only goes so far.

Vmware better rewrite it fundamentally. Which they probably are, they aren't stupid.

Hyperconverger Nutanix gobbles Netsil

baspax

Re: Better research please

No dog in this fight but $500m in the bank? Not really. I was looking to buy some stock for long term investment and am following their fundamentals for quite a while.

It’s $500m line of credit to cover negative cashflow and get disbursed quarterly. Unfortunately, their financial health is atrocious and unsutainablr. The company is profitable only if stock payments and liabilities magically disappear, which they won’t and can’t. This is the same problem SnapChat had and has, GAAP accounting always catches up with you. Uber they are not.

I really like how much they disrupt the status quo and speed up innovation even if I disagree with the style due to my advanced age. But at the same time I feel there is an almost cultlike following which ignores reality and facts. This won’t end well.

baspax

Re: WTF

NewRelic is good but geared towards cloud born apps which were designed and written by the same developers. Perfect for greenfield/startups. It breaks down fast in multisilo and multiplatform/provider environments.

Cisco to trial direct online sales

baspax

Re: The resellers will hate it.

"We have more than enough CPU to run things inefficiently and not care about it if it means we can cut a network admin."

That's a surefire way to have a massive network outage.

SDN does not make network admins obsolete, it only means that admins require more architectural skills than before when flying by the seat of your pants was kind of ok.

Server sales dead? No sir, not in Q4

baspax

Look at those Inspur guys. Can we please get more info on them?

Dell results: Well done, ice cream for everyone! Er, not you, storage

baspax

Re: Servers and VMware up Storage down

No one is denying that NetApp and others are growing. Also there is definitely decline in VMAX and XtremIO. But ponder this:

VSAN/VxRail teams are cannibalizing Unity by snatching up VNX refreshes. NetApp does not have this problem yet but might once SolidFire HCI starts replacing FAS.

As of time of that IDC report, HPE hadn't pushed SimpliVity into their 3Par, EVA, Nimble, and MSA base yet but I am hearing changes in compensation structure are driving such behavior.

I agree in all points except we will see continued growth in others. I am convinced we will see the same erosion EMC is being in other vendors installed base because of lower revenue HCI solutions replacing legacy SAN/NAS.

Tintri finally opens wide, bites restructuring bullet

baspax

Re: Huh?

Must be a typo because component prices have been going up.

Nutanix shrugs off loss, rivals, buys another firm

baspax

Re: And your point is?

Where do you get those numbers?

Pure now a billion-dollar revenue biz as Dell EMC, HPE take eyes off prize

baspax

Impressive

This is actually quite impressive, who would have thought?

For what it's worth, the chatter I am hearing (from Pure reps and SEs as well as channel) is that they are -very- successful in healthcare. The Pure SEs are also bragging about a large number of VxRail VDI implementations which they fixed by adding a FlashArray.

Executing the DIMM sidestep: Movements in High Bandwidth Memory

baspax

That should take care of some of the Spectre/Meltdown performance problems.

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