This whole thing started 2 years ago when a friend told me to try a service that delivered all of the ingredients to make a great home-cooked meal. Seemed like a great idea; food arrives with everything you need to cook a start to finish meal. All you are required…
Agility has found its way into the IT sales lexicon, and is used to describe everything from unattended installs to flexible purchases. I’ve started tuning it out unless there are practical examples provided, so this article will focus on usable, quantifiable agility. What is agility? One source defines it as…
This is probably the oldest concept that was applied to virtualization, but everyone knows that buying in bulk yields better prices. In the retail space we’ve seen companies like Costco and Amazon emerge, and the prices are great because they’re pooling their purchases together to get a lower price, and…
Consolidation was the number one reason most companies virtualized. Reducing the number of managed assets reduced costs significantly. The operational overhead of running a datacenter with 200K servers was insane. Before virtualization, most enterprise servers ran at 5% utilization as a byproduct of traditional sizing. What do I need today,…
Abstraction is defined as the process of considering something independently of its associations, attributes, or concrete accompaniments. To put it another way, it is the process of stepping away from the trees so you can see the forest. My introduction to virtualization came when working for a middleware startup. To…
We’ve heard the hype about software defined storage for years. Software Defined Storage (SDS) is historically about provisioning and management, but new products like Dell EMC’s ScaleIO, Elastic Cloud Storage, and VMware’s vSAN have taken it to the next level – using appliances, application servers and direct attached storage to create a scalable…