Rick Gouin

Website Overhaul

· Rick Gouin

I had to update my website today.  I’m definitely a function over form person, and I don’t care much for frontend development.  I thought the old design was fine, but I was running an abandoned theme that was no longer being updated.  While I was looking around to see if anyone still supported my old theme, I came across this site which showed what must be some of the few remaining sites using it.  2 of their 12 sample sites were me – not a good sign! Why did I have to upgrade? I run my own webserver in AWS […]

Perform Data Conversions in Windows Calculator

· Rick Gouin
calculator

I don’t know about you, but in my line of work, we frequently have to convert between various data measurements.  Whether this is storage capacity or network throughput, we convert between TB, TiB, GB, GiB, and others every day.  If you visit my calculators page, you’ll even find a converter I wrote available there.  Believe it or not, I actually used that converter sometimes… until today, when I was shown this tip: Windows Calculator can do these conversions right out of the box! First, what are we talking about? Ever notice how if you buy a 1 TB hard drive, […]

PowerStore 3.0 Updated!

· Rick Gouin

At Dell Tech World 2022 this week Dell announced the upcoming release of PowerStore 3.0 which includes new controller and expansion shelf hardware as well as some serious software updates.  We were part of the PowerStore OS 3.0 Beta Program and installed the beta software in our lab.     Hardware It seems like yesterday, but PowerStore was released over 2 years ago in May of 2020.  You can read all about the hardware specs for that release here.  The exception to this is the PowerStore 500T, which was only released about a year ago.  That leaves us with a […]

Dell SC End of Life

· Rick Gouin

Dell SC, perhaps better known as Compellent, has finally had its end of life formally announced.  I feel like many people have been watching for this since the acquisition of EMC was announced in 2015.  At that time, Dell suddenly found itself with numerous overlapping storage platforms and product teams.  Jeff Clarke, COO at Dell, explained it well here: “It was to the point where you had fierce supporters of a brand or a product inside the organization and we were not necessarily stepping back and looking at market needs, customer needs and technology trends. My view 15 months ago, […]

Hardening Dell Storage Center (SC) – Compellent

· Rick Gouin

Over the last year or so, I’ve helped multiple companies recover from ransomware events utilizing snapshots on their storage arrays.  In several of these instances, the customer’s backups were compromised along with their production environment.  A storage array can be a nice part of a recovery strategy, as they seem to be targeted less frequently than other parts of your data-center. If you want to help make sure that your storage array is there for you when you need it, however, you need to make sure it is as secure as possible.  Most of these steps are applicable to any […]