Rick Gouin

Category: Servers

New Storage Dense Dell R740xd2 Could Be Great for HCI!

· Rick Gouin

This thing is awesome.  Dell just launched the Dell Poweredge R740xd2, which is essentially a 3.5″ drive version of the Poweredge R740xd.  Those of us who work with Dell servers know the R740 and R740XD as the 2 socket, 2U workhorse servers that power many of our HCI and virtualization environments.  The R740xd2 takes that theory and extends it to cram 26 x 3.5″ drives into a single 2U chassis.  It does this by having 2 layers of 3.5″ drives loaded into the front of the box, where the first layer can slide out to reveal the 2nd.  The spec […]

New Dell Poweredge MX Series

· Rick Gouin

  Dell Technologies World this year was a combination of the former Dell World and EMC World events that has come about from the joined companies.  This year, I think one of the most important and exciting announcements to come out of the show was a sneak preview of the new blade chassis, the Poweredge MX 7000. Fast forward about 4 months and that blade chassis is now officially released. This new blade enclosure is the replacement for the aging M1000e chassis, which has served well for a long time.  Its not aimed at the FX2 or VRTX markets, so […]

The three snazziest announcements from Dell Technologies World

· Rick Gouin

Dell Technologies World is in full swing in Las Vegas this week.  There are so many new products and features being announced that it can be hard to keep track of them all.  I’ve sifted through all this stuff and come up with a few of the biggest things to come out at this years show.   PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000 This refresh to the VMAX product line represents the next generation of the enterprise class storage array, complete with all new names for things to keep you on your toes.  We are calling the running code “PowerMax OS” […]

How to Install Crashplan on Your Headless NAS

· Rick Gouin

One of the most popular articles of all time on this blog has been an article on how to get CrashPlan running on a headless server.  Crashplan changed some things in how this needs to be done, so my old article was no longer correct.  I went through the process and updated this blog, so as of today, this process is working correctly. Many of you run a NAS of some sort at home.  Crashplan is a great choice to backup these devices, but its not terribly intuitive to do so, and it’s technically not supported to use Crashplan in […]

Running Nutanix CE on the Lenovo TS140

· Rick Gouin

I’ve been meaning to setup a box running Nutanix CE for a while.  I’m not going to use it for my “production” services at home, because I don’t need 3 nodes, and 1 node doesn’t provide me with any fault tolerance.  That said, I thought I might be able to use it for customer demos, presentations, and lab type activities.  I especially want somewhere to play around with AHV. I have an IBM TS140 hanging around, which I talked a bit about here.  I decided to try and get CE up and running on that system.  There are just a […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2016 Announcements

· Rick Gouin

I’m on the plane on my way home from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Las Vegas.  This years conference certainly lived up to the high standard set last year in Miami, and should be top of your list for future years.  Last year the big news was that Nutanix was going to make its own hypervisor, it was a huge announcement.  There were other things as well, but AHV took the cake.  This year, there were so many announcements, that I’m having a hard time remembering them all!  Maybe none of them were quite as big as AHV, but they […]

Nutanix Acropolis File Services – .NEXT 2016

· Rick Gouin

Last year at .NEXT 2015 in Miami, Nutanix announced scale out NAS services which was for Acropolis only.  In version 4.7, which was announced at .NEXT 2016 in Las Vegas, this feature will be available on AHV and ESXi.  Its pretty cool.  Check out the official feature page here. Here is the basic idea.  You can deploy scale out file services straight from Prism (the Nutanix UI) without creating any front end VMs or rolling out any images.  What happens is you create a file server via the Prism interface (see below).  You can create multiple separate file server environments. […]

Nutanix Acropolis Block Services – .NEXT 2016

· Rick Gouin

Day 2 of the 2016 Nutanix .NEXT conference at the Wynn in Las Vegas. This morning brought out a couple interesting announcements, as well as the delivery of some features that were announced last year in Miami. Acropolis Block Services is the most interesting one to me.  I expect some fun conversations around this in the months to come.  This is an extension to the in-cluster iSCSI services previously released that was primarily targeted to address some specific workloads.  The way it works now is that the cluster will get a Data Services IP (DS-IP) which will be a cluster […]

Comparing the IBM TS140 to the Dell T110 II

· Rick Gouin

I have both servers running in my home lab right now, and thought a brief comparison of the 2 servers might be interesting to some folks who are shopping for their own home lab components. In terms of acquisition cost, the servers will be fairly comparable.  At times, you can find great deals on either one. As you can see, the Dell Poweredge T110 II is physically larger than the IBM Thinkserver TS140.  The Dell stands a few inches taller and is perhaps 1 inch deeper.  I have them installed on a shelf in a standard 19″ rack.  Both units […]