Monthly Archives: May 2015

Interesting announcement from IBM on Storwize/SVC software

Howdy,

If you are a user of the IBM San Volume Controller and/or the Storwize you should really checkout this announcement.

What I found most interesting was HyperSwap – now you can present a single volume from two different storage controllers which use metro mirror for a two way replication (although I do not have any more details on this). This is something like the Active-Active function in EMC’s Metro VPLEX installations. Cool stuff!

Bgrds,
FOG

Testing Windows 10

Howdy,

I recently started using a “old” (4 year old) desktop tower to play Diablo 3 in co-op with my son. Last weekend I dug it up and installed Windows 10 on a spare 256GB SSD I had.

Damn! I must say they have actually out-done what they did when going from XP to Vista (I have to mention, I am probably one of the ten people in the world who actually liked Windows Vista:)). Everything is so smooth, even on hardware this old.

The new start menu is what the start menu should have been in Windows 8.1. However, after using Windows 10 I guess I have to forgive them….can’t wait until I can deploy this on my work laptop.

I have yet to use the browser they ship with it though….my Chrome habit is not something I see my self getting away from anytime soon!

Anyway….I must say, if you have a extra machine lying around (or some resources to run a VM), I suggest that you go grab the Windows 10 and give it a test run.

Bgrds,
FOG

Yet another hardware refresh project comes (and goes!)

Howdy all,

I just finished a plan for redesigning/rebuilding one of the environments at work.

It is truly amazing how much time goes in designing, getting specifications, reading up on technical material, talking to industry experts and getting quotes from our server vendor.

There are more then 6 months since I started this planning and design phase with my colleagues. Our vendor has probably lost count of how many quotes I have requested due to this and I am amazed they actually still pick up the phone when I call them 🙂

What I am getting at is that often when we, the technical staff, start on a redesign projects small or large we are quite often stuck thinking about how awesome the newest CPU chips are or how fast some new memory tech is. When working on hardware refresh projects we are often replacing hardware that is three generations behind the new stuff. Speed is most often not the issue. Everything today revolves around software. We have to design around software, be it licenses or some other software flaw (or feature!).

After going through yet another project like this one might wonder – while we still have on-premise servers, would it be better to just “rent” hardware resources?

A thought for us all….

Bgrds,
FOG