Rick Gouin

Author: Rick Gouin

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 […]

Whats new in SCOS 7.0?

· Rick Gouin

Dell recently announced the release of SCOS 7.0.  SCOS is the Storage Center Operating System, which is the software that runs Dells SC storage line, including the SCv2000, SC4020, SC8000, and SC9000, with more to come soon.  These are the products that were formerly known as Compellent.  Check out the announcement from Alan Atkinson (GM of Dell Storage) here.  So whats new?  There are a few things in this release that long time Compellent users have been anticipating for quite some time.  Lets chat about a few. Dedupe.  The Compellent line already does compression, and we see pretty good returns […]

Notes on EMC Unity

· Rick Gouin

EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas just wrapped up a couple hours ago, and I thought I would share my thoughts on the Unity product line that was officially announced here. What it is: Unity is the next evolution of EMC’s midrange storage array.  It would fall into the traditional dual controller storage array category, and is an improvement on the existing VNX line.  The VNX and Unity will co-exist for a while, but Unity is positioned as the eventual replacement for VNX. Lets get into the details. First is the packaging.  Unity was built with 3 different deliveries in […]

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 […]

New Dell SC9000 – Revolutionary or Evolutionary?

· Rick Gouin

Dell released the Dell SC9000 at Dell World 2015 in Austin TX this week. The SC9000 is the new high end Compellent controller, a space currently occupied by the SC8000. Much of the messaging I’ve consistently heard around the new Dell SC9000, however, is that it is not a replacement for the SC8000.  In fact, the SC8000 will continue to be available side by side with the SC9000 for quite some time. The new SC9000 has a lot of improvements over the previous controller from a hardware perspective, but it is really a discrete offering?  Or is it really just […]

Use Powershell to Edit MP3 Tags

· Rick Gouin

Here is a bit of a change from the usual datacenter type posts. A nameless friend of mine recently plugged her Ipod into a different PC that was set to auto-sync. It appeared to erase all of her MP3s from her Ipod without prompting or intervention.  I am not familiar with iTunes, iPods, or any Apple products, but a quick search suggested this was a common occurrence.  There are even a few software packages out there to recover the information, as the files don’t actually get deleted.  It seems just some meta data gets removed.  After running one such software […]

Compellent SCv2000 Series

· Rick Gouin

Dell announced the SCv2000 series storage arrays back in May of 2015.  I’m a bit late to the party here, but I wanted to wait until I had actually had the opportunity to integrate several of these systems into customer environments. These systems start at about $10k via the Dell website, so there has been a lot of interest in this one. I’ve read a few articles suggesting that the SCv2000 series is aimed to replace the Equallogic product line, but after spending some time with the product and its pricing, I think it is more directly targeting certain portions […]

Generic Compellent Replay and Mounting Script

· Rick Gouin

I feel like I’ve had to write and re-write this script repeatedly as I’ve needed it for various customers and tasks.  Today I figured I would post it in case anyone else will find it useful. This script is similar to the Push2Tape script that comes as a sample with the Compellent Powershell Command Set.  The difference is that the Push2Tape script doesn’t take a new replay.  It grabs the most recently taken replay.  The idea is that you control when the replay gets taken using the replay scheduling facility on the Compellent.  This is preferable in most cases, because […]