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.
Why Upgrade?
New Storage Dense Dell R740xd2 Could Be Great for HCI!
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)
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
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
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. […]