Rick Gouin

Author: Rick Gouin

New PowerStore in the Lab!

· Rick Gouin

As I mentioned here, we were beta testers for the Dell PowerStore all-flash storage array.  We tested everything from initial imaging of the array as either a Model T or Model X all the way to importing external storage arrays.  We really enjoyed having the opportunity to get our hands on the gear early, and appreciated getting ahead of the release so we were ready to answer customer questions on day 1.  Eventually, they made us give that beta array back to them (the nerve!)  and we were all sad to see it go. The empty rack space was taunting […]

Dell PowerStore Part 2!

· Rick Gouin

In the last segment, we went over PowerStore hardware. This time, we are going to dig into some more of the features, functionality, and capabilities of this newest midrange all flash storage array from Dell. The Basics: RAIDPowerStore supports RAID 5, and you can choose from one of two different stripe widths. 4+1 or 8+1. Thats it! Hope you weren’t thinking about using double parity on those 15TB flash drives. This old school RAID underpinning will have an impact on how you scale the system going forward, so its an important point. These RAID groups are managed as a pool […]

Dell PowerStore Released!

· Rick Gouin

Dell officially announces, releases, and launches their new midrange storage product today. You may have heard rumors about this platform under its code name midrange.next. Today, the product is released as PowerStore, so lets take a minute and talk details! I was happy to participate in the beta program several months ago, so I’ve already gotten up close and personal with the array. Lets start at the top, because there is a lot to unpack here. First, there are 2 distinct versions, the PowerStore X and the PowerStore T. Within each of these are separate models. I’ll get into what […]

Link Personal AWS Certs to Company APN account

· Rick Gouin
AWS Logo

To be an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, there are requirements for people at your company to have various certifications. The higher the level of partnership, the more certifications you need. As a result, your company will always want to make sure they are aware of any AWS certifications you have. I have AWS certifications that were earned under my personal AWS Training and Certification account. I would like my company to benefit from these certifications from an AWS partner network (APN) perspective. So how do I link personal certifications into my company APN profile? I actually searched around and […]

Dell EMC SC Series Veeam Plugin Now Available!

· Rick Gouin
veeam logo

This has to be one of the most commonly requested integrations for SC. It seems like every time I talk about SC with a customer, they ask about Veeam integration. After what seems like a very long wait, the SC Storage Integration for Veeam is finally available! What this plugin does is orchestrate the SC snapshot engine so you can leverage the space efficient snapshots built into SC as part of your backup strategy. This enables the direct-SAN backup method within Veeam, essentially offloading some of your storage tasks to the SC array itself. There are some requirements:– SCOS 7.4.2 […]

Why Upgrade?

· Rick Gouin

Lets take a look at a few real life situations that could have been avoided by staying up to date. All names, places, dates, and some details have been changed to protect the embarrassed.

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 […]

Storage Center 7.3 (Compellent)

· Rick Gouin

Storage Center (Compellent) Operating System version 7.3 became generally available last month.  Its been rolling through the various stages of release all summer, and I now have some customers on it.  There are so many improvements in this release that I had to take a moment to talk about it.  This release probably should have been a 7.5, its one of the biggest updates we’ve seen in a while. So whats new?  Lets look at a few of the biggest updates: The Web GUI is back!  And its not Java anymore!  A while ago, Dell did away with the old […]

Nutanix AOS 5.9 in a Nutshell

· Rick Gouin

AOS 5.9 is now available.  This comes about 3 months after AOS 5.8 was released back in July.  Its worth noting that this is the release that adds support for VMware 6.7.  If you are currently running AOS 5.5 or better, you can upgrade straight to AOS 5.9.  If you are on AOS 5.1 or earlier, you may be looking at a multi-step upgrade.  Don’t worry though, it will all be handled via One Click Upgrades in Prism. I think the biggest enhancement in this release is some additional functionality and flexibility in software based encryption that was introduced back […]

Dell EMC Takes Aim at Low End Storage

· Rick Gouin

I’ve been involved in solutions for a few customers recently where they opted to not buy part of the solution, instead choosing to go with a less expensive storage option for data that they perceived to not merit the cost of higher end storage solutions.  QNAP, Synology, and similar providers have been quietly meeting this low end storage need for some time now, while larger providers like Dell EMC only had some aged offerings in their portfolio.  The PowerEdge ME4 is designed to meet this need by bringing some pretty high end features down market at a low price point. […]