blogs.rupturedmonkey.com

Well I have arrived. Checkin at registration was very nice at 0700 this morning. There was no wait and was able to walk right into the breakfast area. After breakfast I went to our booth (booth #101) to finish the setup and run through our demo to make sure no one broke anything while testing [...]

I had an opportunity to sit in a day long meeting with EMC and a customer last week. We did a walkthrough of the customers current environment and how we can simplify the overall environment to enable the customer to move to a more nimble, simplistic architecture. The customer has been an EMC customer for [...]

Alex Barrett of Tech Target just published the article. It’s definitely worth a read. Linkage

I posted a tweet yesterday about a migration and upgrade I was doing and received a couple replies asking to let them know how everything goes. I decided to create a blog post for everyone to read rather than replying in 140 character tweets. =) Background: This customer has a very simple SMB setup as [...]

If you’re like me you can never have too much documentation on hand when troubleshooting a problem. When I was a Windows guy I used a handy little script written by the guys/gals over at xtravirt.com that would automatically go out to vmware.com and download all of the latest documentation for me. Here is a [...]

A while ago I posted an article demystifying the relationship between HP and Hitachi – in particular the Engineering Agreement that HP have in relation to the StorageWorks XP line of arrays.  So…. as a follow-on I thought I’d do something similar, this time on the relationship between HDS and Hitachi. To help with this [...]

The following is reposted from my new blog site http://blog.nigelpoulton.com  As a result, comments are disabled on this site, but feel free to visit my new site and leave a comment. Thanks to Snig for allowing me to post here for a short transition period… One of the key technologies or principles in Rack Area [...]

The following is reposted from my new blog site http://blog.nigelpoulton.com  As a result, comments are disabled on this site, but feel free to visit my new site and leave a comment. Thanks to Snig for allowing me to post here for a short transition period… Ever heard of a Rack Area Network? The term, as [...]

It is a sad, but happy day for me. Nigel, one of the first bloggers here on rupturedmonkey.com is moving on. And it’s about time! He has created his own blog over at http://blog.nigelpoulton.com. His posts over there will be deep dives into technology products that he is working with. We have copied all of [...]

If you ever want to get up the nose of an HP bod, a sure-fire way is to tell them that the XP is just an OEM’d HDS array.

UPDATED 19/11/09 minor corrections/clarifications in purple: OK, if you don’t already know Xsigo Systems, and what they do, then you are seriously missing out!  

Im very fortunate to be one of the people invited to the first ever GestaltIT Tech Field Day and its going to be great.  This is a short post but I think worthwhile so please read on What the H*!! is this GestaltIT Tech Field Day thing?The crux of the event is this – taking [...]

While at SNW Europe I had the opportunity to visit the Arista Networks booth with my video camera in hand, and the guys on booth duty were good enough to allow me to shoot some footage while we talked about their products. Enjoy the video and then feel free to comment on my thoughts below [...]

Here are some tech related photos I took at the recent SNW Europe in Frankfurt Germany. In my opinion the show was a real success with over 1,500 attendees, of which over 1,100 were end users and reseller delegates and the remainder made up of general riff-raff such as vendors, press and the likes…. One [...]

The below video is something I shot yesterday while at Storage Networking Europe in Frankfurt Germany.  In the video, William Lloyd Scull Senior Network Architect at BLADE Network Technologies, demos a feature of the IBM BladeCenter Virtual Fabric (comprised of Emulex OneConnect UCNA, BLADE Network Technologies Blade Switches and IBM BladeCenter hardware). In the video [...]

Today I attended the Emulex launch of their OnceConnect Universal Converged Network Adapter (UCNA) at SNW Europe, and I liked what I saw. Most will know by now that Im all for converged Ethernet unified fabrics.  Still, Im well aware that some of the vendor offerings are very “Generation 1” and have that version 1.0 [...]

Wherever you look these days there’s no shortage of talk about FCoE.  However, sometimes I think a little too much attention is given to FCoE and people sometimes overlook the underlying DCB/CEE Enhanced Ethernet – In my opinion, this where much of the real work and enabling is happening.  So lets spend a couple of [...]

My current series of posts on FCoE and CEE have generated a lot of questions and feedback via the comments section and on Twitter.  In this post I will attempt to address some of the questions and misunderstandings – especially around encapsulation and framing efficiency…… I received a comment on the site today from a [...]

Last week at HP Tech Day in Colorado Springs, invitees were given a guided tour of the impressive HP StoprageWorks EVA tast lab.  Initially we were told "no cameras", but after being so impressed with the tour and facility, I badgered HP and they reversed their original decision and decided to allow the cameras in.  [...]

One of the rumours doing the rounds today is that Brocade are apparently up for sale or at least considering the possibility – I stress at the moment of writing this that it is pure speculation.  Clearly rumours like this must be taken with a bucket of salt and are often either blatantly untrue and [...]