IT Infrastructure

IT has been rapidly transforming in order to be more responsive to the business. Macroeconomic events and global competition has forced organizations to more aggressively leverage technology for competitive advantage. New architectures like server and storage virtualization (web- and service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based applications) have been deployed, along with automation and orchestration tools, to enable organizations to accelerate time to market with new services.

This ESG Lab review documents hands-on testing of the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) Anywhere solution with a focus on ease of use, security, and efficient deployment.

As well as outlining the upside that exists for Oracle in storage, and commenting about its recent analyst event, this blog entry includes video interviews with two Oracle storage execs - Phil Bullinger (ZFS storage) and Jim Cates (tape automation).

Many organizations that use solid-state storage attribute their initial adoption of the technology to performance challenges. In fact, previously conducted ESG research revealed that the majority of early solid-state storage users cited the alleviation of I/O bottlenecks caused by server virtualization as an initial adoption driver. However, as solid-state storage continues to mature, its relationship with server virtualization can further be used to gauge the technology’s increasing horizontal applicability.

The emergence of software-defined networking (SDN) over the past year signals a significant change in network design.

Software-defined everything.  SFE.  The latest craze in marketing mayhem.

There, of course, is some legitimacy to the phrase - but doesn't software already "define" everything in our IT world?  Doesn't software provide the execution sets that tell our "stuff" what we want it to do?  Therefore, isn't everything really already software-defined in many ways?

With about 15,000 registered for Interop 2013, the Mandalay Bay resort and casino was bustling with activity last week. The spring Interop show tends to be jam packed with vendors and attendees and this year did not disappoint. As you might expect, the topic of software-defined networking dominated the show floor, as well as many of the keynotes and sessions. What you might not have expected, therefore, was that a big honking physical network switch would take Best of Show honors.

This year EMCWorld was a little earlier in the month of May than usual. This was better logistically for me and I’m sure many others. It doesn’t muddle up Memorial Day like it has in the past, plus the weather was spectacular – at least at night when we had time to go outside and enjoy the town a little. That said, EMCWorld was as exhausting as ever with too many people to see, keynotes to listen to, demos, videos, dinners, etc.

Intralinks recently announced its new collaboration platform Intralinks VIA.  Traditionally focused in secure deal rooms for M&A in regulated industries, Intralinks is the most recent vendor making the shift to include OFS in its briefcase of offerings– and why not?  In Intralinks' case it makes perfect sense. 

Get a quick insight on what my ESG colleagues and I took away as our first impressions from EMC World last week, in easy-to-consume video format.

Arista announces significant upgrades for its flagship 7500 core data center switch heading into the Interop show in Las Vegas this week. Not merely content to double its capabilities, Arista’s first major upgrade since its inception triples capabilities. While SDN has been all the buzz, Arista wants to remind organizations that hardware still matters and cloud scale environments will certainly take notice.

They say April showers bring May flowers, but for those in the tech industry, we know spring shows bring lots of new vendor product and solution announcements. And this year is no different. From a network perspective, it has already been a very busy year with numerous announcements coming at pretty frequent intervals. Just last week, leading into Interop, HP announced a significant upgrade to its FlexFabric solutions portfolio for data center networking, solutions that HP claims can drastically reduce network provisioning times and provide greater levels of automation.

So you’re going to fix all your company’s virtualization woes with your new architecture. You’re going to be the IT hero. The parts for the new solution show up on your loading dock and you start putting the pieces together, only to find out that the NIC cards you ordered don’t support a required protocol. Or worse yet, the expensive network gear you already ordered is missing a critical feature your users depend on. You persevere, scaling back your design, and exchanging components. It never seems to be an even exchange, but at least you are still within budget.

Infrastructure Deployment for 100 Virtual Machines

This ESG Lab Validation report documents hands-on testing of the EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure with Brocade networking for supporting 100 virtual machines (VMs). The report is focused on ease of use, performance, and high-availability networking.