Introduction: In general, I’m not a huge fan of hyper converged infrastructure. To me, its more “hype” than substance at the moment. It was born out of web scale infrastructure like Google, Facebook, etc. and IMO, that is still the area where it’s better suited. The only enterprise layer where I see HCI being a good...
Introduction: These are just some random things that I would love to see implemented by Nimble Storage in their solution. I don’t actually expect most of this stuff to happen in a year, but it would be interesting to see how many do. Some are more realistic than others of course, but part of the fun in this is asking...
Introduction: I hate dealing with tapes, pretty much every aspect of them. The tracking of them is a PITA, having to physically manage them is a PITA, dealing with tape library issues is a PITA, dealing with tape encryption is a PITA, running out of tapes is a PITA, dealing with legal hold for tapes is a PITA, and I...
Sometimes the WSUS console, just doesn’t give you the info you need, or it doesn’t provide it in a format you want. This query is for one of those examples. This query can be used in multiple ways to show the update status of a computer, computers or computer in a computer target. For me, I wanted to see the update...
This is a simple query you can use map your computers to their various targets in a nice easy to export table. I’d love to say the script is sexier than that, but its really not. You can find the sql query here. There is only one section worth mentioning because it can change the way a computer is mapped to a computer...
Quick Powershell post for those of you that may on occasion want to retrieve data out of a SQL table via Powershell. I didn’t personally do most of the heavy lifting in this, I simply took some work that various folks out there did and put it into a repeatable function instead. Firstly, head over to here to my GitHub...
If you haven’t seen by now, VMware plans to dump the c# client in the next release. Article is here for your review. I was the first one to comment, and maybe its just a coincidence, but it seems like I got a small fire started. If you have any strong feeling either way, maybe its worth posting your view in their...
The Problem: For years as an admin I’ve had to deal with SQL. At a former employer, our SQL environment / databases were small, and backup licensing was based on agents, not capacity. Fast forward to my current employer, we have a fairly decent sized SQL environment (60 – 70 servers), our backup’s are large ,...
In general I have to say I’m not a fan of VAR’s for many reasons. Most of which because I find little “Value Add” in having them resell technology that would probably be cheaper if I wasn’t stuck going through them. However, there’s always an exception to the rule, and after a recent mess up I wanted throw a shout out...
I was scanning through my LinkedIn feed the other day and stumbled across an interesting picture / chart showing common mistakes that interview candidates make posted by a former colleague. To basically summarize, it was a culmination of physical characteristics (slouching, not smiling, clothing not too trendy, but not...
Disclaimer: This is unsolicited feedback. These are my own opinions and not those of my employer. Terminology: I know I’ve been lacking this in some of my other blogs posts, so here’s a stab at trying to make sure you have a rough idea of what certain words mean. LM: Acronym I user for LogicMonitor Collector: Its a...
Disclaimer: These are my opinions, these are not facts. Take them with a grain of salt, and use your own judgement. These are also my personal views, not those of my employer. Also, no one is paying me for this, no one asked me to write this. It’s not un-biased, but its also not a hired review. Introduction: As you...
Introduction: Just so we’re all being honest here, I’m not going to sit here and lie about how I’m not biased and I’m looking at both sides 100% objectively. I mean I’m going to try to, but I have a slant towards on prem, and a lot of that is based on my experience and research with IaaS solutions as they exist now....
Building off my last function Get-ECSPhysicalDiskToLogicalDiskMapping: which took a windows physical disk and mapped it to a windows logical disk, this function will take a VMware virtual disk and map it to a windows logical disk. This function has the following dependencies and assumptions: It depends on my windows...
I figured it was about time to knock out something a little technical for a change, and I figured I’d start with this little function, which is part of a larger script that I’ll talk more about later. There may be a time where you need to find the relationship between a physical disk drive and your logical drive. In my...
Disclaimer: I’m not getting paid for this review, nor have I been asked to do this by anyone. These views are my own, and not my employers, and they’re opinions not facts . Intro: To begin with, as you can tell, I’ve been running Nimble Storage for a few years at this point, and I felt like it was time to provide a...
No one likes admitting they’re wrong, and I’m certainly no different. Being a mature person means being able to admit you’re wrong, even if it means doing it publicly, and that is what I’m about to do. I’ve been writing this series slowly over the past few months, and during that time, I’ve noticed an increasing number...
Just wanted to post this quick, and I may have time to do a more through post later, but this will do for now. In our backup solution, we had to join together two solutions, CommVault and Veeam. Veeeam backed up the data to disk and CommVault backed the data up to tape. The problem with this solution is the systems...
The pro and the con of a software defined storage is that its not a turn key solution. Not only do you have the power to customize your solution, you also have no choice but to design your solution. With Storage Spaces, we figured most of this stuff out before selecting it as our new backup storage solution. At the...
Of all the types of storage we looked at, this was the one type that I kept coming back to. It was a storage technology that I had the most personal experience with, and having just finished implementing my companies first SAN, I was pretty well versed in what was out on the market. There were other reasons as well....
Anyone who’s heard the word “cloud” as it pertains to technology knows its a fairly nebulous term. About the only thing people seem to grasp is that its means “not in my datacenter or home”. When we talk about “cloud storage” the term is still fuzzy, but at least we know it has something to do with storage. For this...
While evaluating EMC’s DataDomain solution, our EMC rep suggested we also take a look at their Isilon product. Not being a person to turn down a chance to check out new technology I happily obliged. Before we get into my thoughts on Isilon, let’s go over a simplistic overview of what scale out storage is, and what...
Deduplication and backup kind of go hand in hand, so we couldn’t evaluate backup storage and not check out this segment. We had two primary goals for a deduplication appliance. Reduce racks space while enabling us to store more data. As you know in part 1, we had a lot of rack space being consumed. While we weren’t...
When VMware first announced vSAN, the premiss of the solution was just pure awesomeness. After all, VMware has the best hypervisor (fact, not opinion), they’re in the process of honing what I think will be a Cisco butt kicking software defined network solution. Basically vSAN was the only missing piece to building a...
In part 1, I went over our legacy backup storage solution, and why it needed to change. This section, I’m going to outline what we were looking for in our next storage refresh. Also, just to give you a little more context, while evaluating storage, were also looking at new backup solutions. CommVault, Veeam, EMC...