Browsing Posts in vDesign

Reading Time: 3 minutesToday I’ve taken the VCAP5-DCD beta exam (I’ve already written about the invitation at this beta). This time I was lucky enough to find a testing center near home and avoid the issues of the VCAP4-DCD beta exam (see the entire story). For general considerations, like the cost of this kind of exams, the (long) wait period, the selection criteria, … se my though about VMware beta exams. About the exam itself it is really challenging: time seems really a lot (225 minutes + 30 minutes of extra-time for  non english native) and question seems […]

Reading Time: 2 minutesSome days after the recent acquisition of AppAssure, Dell has announced new models of EqualLogic storage and the new generation of PowerEdge servers. For the EqualLogic the announce was “obvious”: after the new models with 1 Gbps connectivity (PS6100 and PS4100 storages), announced on August 2011, the 10 Gbps models (PS6110 and PS4110) were just the next step. For more information see the post on the The Register and on the Dell Community. More interesting the announce of the new PowerEdge generarion (a logical move after the HP announce of his new generation): the G12 […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesDell announced the acquisition of AppAssure, a global technology leader in back-up and recovery software that protects a company’s entire application infrastructure (for more info see the company web site). The acquisition of AppAssure’s product portfolio, R&D, patent portfolio, and sales and servicing functions add data protection and recovery IP to Dell’s storage solutions offerings. Data protection and recovery is a $3.6 billion business segment projected to grow 7% per year. Some interesting aspects of AppAssure backup solutions is that they are multi-hypervisor (actually only VMware and Hyper-V), can handle also physical systems as well […]

Reading Time: 2 minutesAs written in the previous post related to the upgrade to vSphere 5, the old VCB framework can still be used also with latest version, but is a not supported configuration (I’ve made the test only with a Windows Server 2008 R2 for the VCB proxy, but I suppose that works also with previous OS). Of course the SAN transport mode could not work (or not if you use VMFS5), but the NBD works as on the old vSphere 4.x. The only issue that I get (but honestly I’ve make only few tests) is on […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe Dell EqualLogic team has officially announced the release of Host Integration Tools for Microsoft (HIT/Microsoft) v4.0, now available for download. The EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for Microsoft (HIT/Microsoft) tightly integrate the EqualLogic PS Series arrays with Microsoft host operating platform and host applications enabling consistent data protection (using snapshots and replicas), performance optimization (with a specific multipath module) and streamlined management and operation (for example to help to connect a host or to initialize an array). I’ve see HIT/Microsoft 4.0 during the last Dell Storage Forum and also during the beta period and it’s […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesOne curios thing of both ExaGrid and Dell DR4000 solutions (but also other solutions) is that they lack of a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) feature and only work as a network share (with CIFS or NFS). In both cases the reason was not technical (but I think that the main reason is still just a way to reduce cost and complexity) but marketing/strategy (customers just don’t ask at this feature). But moving from a backup to tape (B2T) to a backup to disk (B2D) solution does not necessary mean move to backup to file (over […]

LTO Tapes

Reading Time: 3 minutesSeveral new solutions seem demonstrate that backup destination is moving from tape to disk. It isn’t really a new trend of last year (for example see this paper from Lisa 2006, or Microsoft that has removed the tape support in his OS included backup solution starting from Windows Vista), but now more products are pointing to the disk solution. The Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium (whose member include Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Quantum) has officially released specifications for the LTO Generation 5 with around 1,5 TB of native capacity and a throughput of 140MBps (uncompressed)… and […]

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