Around The Block Blog
Liem Nguyen
Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage
Posts
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — February 22, 2011
Today Compellent shareholders approved the merger with Dell, which means Compellent Fluid Data is joining Dell’s lineup of innovative, award-winning storage products. We’re thrilled to be a part of a great company that shares the same passion for intelligent storage and its role in the enterprise.
Dell is the world’s best at listening to customers and injecting this feedback into everything they do, whether it’s in product development or product support. Dell has also shown a strong commitment to its channel community, which is a big deal for a channel-driven company like us. For Compellent customers, partners and employees, there’s a lot to be excited about today and for the future.
Phil Soran shares in this blog post his excitement for the acquisition and the positive changes for our customers, partners and employees. One of those big changes is that we’re going to combine our C-Drive event with the Dell EqualLogic User Conference and create a new, bigger Dell Storage Forum. Scott Horst, our VP of marketing, explains the reasons why it just made a lot of sense to unite these great conferences. Heck, I feel like we just won the Super Bowl, because we’re going to Disney World!
When the news broke that Dell was planning to acquire Compellent, our customers and partners let us know they were excited about the huge opportunity for the company and our community. We’re grateful for their loyalty and commitment, and it’s an honor to share blog posts from customers and partners who took the time to voice their support for the merger, such as:
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Greg Folsom, Vice President and Information Technology Director, Arnold Worldwide
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Eric Nied, Information Technology Director, Radiology Ltd.
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Luke Bergeron, Technical Writer, Alliance Technologies
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Sonia St. Charles, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Davenport Group
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Mike Kelson, Technical Director, Atlanta Technology
So many customers and partners wanted to weigh in that we collected their comments and we'll post additional blogs over the next couple weeks, so please check back soon.
And, finally, if I may get a little personal here, I’m also very excited about joining the Dell team. Actually I’m re-joining Dell. I spent 9 great years in various technical and corporate communications roles prior to coming to Compellent and I get a kick out of knowing my old badge number is waiting for me. When I started at Dell in 1998, the company was 20,000 strong. Now it has about 100,000 employees. Make that 100,600 employees.
Here are some links for more information—I’ll update with more links as we go along:
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — February 14, 2011
Thanks to all who joined us on Feb. 2 for #SANchat on IT Resolutions for 2011. And of course, many thanks to our guest moderator Howard Marks (@deepstoragenet), who shared his observations based on some of the real-world testing and consulting he’s done.
We provided a general overview of topics discussed and some highlights below for your reading pleasure.
The Technology and Some Highlights
Network Convergence: Howard jumped right in to discuss network convergence. In his opinion, FCoE is not ready, but many disagreed. We had some fun exchanges on where FCoE technology is headed in 2011. I knew going into this that FCoE would generate some strong opinions and the SANchatters didn’t disappoint:
- @DeepStorageNet: Much as I love the idea of converged networking I think for 2011 FCoE is still hot air
- @stu: @DeepStorageNet all due respect, your FCoE message is old. embedded in Cisco, HP, IBM solutions. Baked Inside so nobody cares
- @rootwyrm: @DeepStorageNet Do you think we're going to see more top-of-rack FC-FC Edge/Core in heavy FC environments, esp. w/FC16 coming soon?
- @DeepStorageNet: I see a lot of features coming in DC Ethernet (DCB, Per VM security, TRILL) and don't want to upgrade my core w/o them.
- @iSCSIKing: @DeepStorageNet Do you see DCB being adopted faster than FCoE, since FCoE requires DCB? #sanchat
- @DeepStorageNet: @iSCSIKing We are seeing DCB switches from vendors that don't have FCoE now and customers buying them
Data Deduplication: After a long discussion on FCoE, we jumped to data deduplication. Howard felt strongly that data deduplication is only useful if it’s deployed cost effectively, and others agreed.
- @DeepStorageNet: Data Reduction can have a huge impact on costs but you have to really think through where and how to put it to use
- @DeepStorageNet: Truth is the biggest impact of dedupe is frequently not the local backup but that it shrinks the data enough to replicate
- @rootwyrm: @DeepStorageNet So what about folks using Tivoli Storage Manager, who don't do full weeklies and typ. see poor dedupe performance there?
Solid State Drives: After dedupe, we moved to SSDs and Howard felt solid state storage and automation go together very well (and apparently chicken and waffles is tasty…). Howard also encourages folks to undergo some spring cleaning and throw out your outdated IT wares.
- @DeepStorageNet: Now for what's hot: NFS for VMs, More Solid State Storage and automation
- @DeepStorageNet: NFS is a bit easier. iSCSI has practical limits on number of VMs/datastore and datastore size that NFS doesn’t.
- @DeepStorageNet: The solid state storage and automation go together like chicken and waffles
- @DeepStorageNet: Making solid state work: Tough question as it requires matching workloads to solutions. Low hanging fruit is the small dataset
Howard said that NFS is easier to use than iSCSI for VMs, but there is another point to consider. While there are minor scaling issues with VMFS, more and more storage vendors are supporting VAAI for hardware-assisted locking. (Compellent is hard at work on our VAAI.) We feel this implementation will level the playing field, meaning NFS will cease to have scaling advantages. Coupled with the fact that the vSphere Client Plug-in can automatically configure iSCSI, iSCSI can be considered just as easy (if not easier) than NFS. There’s going to be some different viewpoints depending on the vendor or protocol camp you’re in. As always, end users should triple check the math on vendor claims and weigh the benefits of multi-protocol functionality.
The Tweeps
Here is a list of some technology friends that participated in our chat, feel free to give them a follow:
We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday, March 2 for our next #SANchat. Have ideas for what our next chat should focus on? Feel free to share them with @LiemNguyen or @DellCompellent.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — February 02, 2011
It’s that time again for our monthly #SANchat! We trust everyone had a happy and safe New Year and have set some realistic IT resolutions for 2011. Please join us today, Feb. 2, from 3-4:30 pm CT to chat with our guest moderator Howard Marks. Howard, @DeepStorageNet, has written about the storage industry since 1987, has tested dozens of storage and networking products over the years and knows a thing or two about technology trends that get hot only to become nothing more than hot air. Howard also blogs for InformationWeek and Network Computing and runs the IT site DeepStorage.net.
In December, you may have followed along with Stephen Foskett’s “11 Trends for 2011” chat and this month we want to discuss these trends further. Howard will offer his opinions on where IT departments will see the greatest opportunities to reduce costs and increase efficiencies as the year rolls along. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts and what you plan to do in the coming year! What tech products are you going to be most excited about this year? As budgets rebound, what issues do you think you’ll need to work through to implement your next IT project? What storage pains will you be facing this year and what will you do about it?
To join in #SANchat, we recommend using the TweetChat platform; you can also get additional information on the SANchat series by visiting wthashtag.com/sanchat or our previous blog post on the topic. We look forward to having you join the conversation about the 2011 Trends!